Is it grief or guilt that in death, we find grace we denied in life

When someone dies, do the living feel guilty of how they interacted with them? Do we feel bad about the kindness we withheld, the unresolved quarrels, and the good things we did not say when the person lived? 

We have honoured Raila Odinga in death. We have crowned him with our highest decoration at this year’s Mashujaa Day. President Ruto decorated him with Chief of the Golden Heart (CGH) of Kenya, First Class. Also honoured posthumously was Henry Chakava, a publishing icon in his time. Chakava published university professors. They enjoyed academic glory because of this. Yet, not a single Kenyan university thought it worthwhile to celebrate him with an honorary doctorate. But they crowned charlatans and sundry academic quacks, and dilettantes.

In death, both Raila and Chakava have enjoyed rare praise from President Ruto. The Swahili say, “Nizike ningali hai.” This is to say, “Bury me when I am still alive.” Do not wait for me to die before choking me with love and praise. Show me some love and respect today, not after I have left never to return. 

Yet, it is also true, as the same Swahili people say, “Hujafa hujaumbika.” You are never fully formed until death. We are in constant shaping and reshaping. The last word on whom we were can only be definitively said after we are gone. Is it perhaps premature to give us decorations that we could bring to shame with subsequent lowly conduct? Because of this, are national honours best reserved for our glorious departed? 

In any event, President Ruto’s decoration of Raila should stir some level of uncomfortable questioning in our collective conscience, as the Kenyan nation. Social correctness dictates that we should mute our judgement about the dead, and amplify our generosity. Governor Kahiga Mutahi, a naïve and blustery individual, is learning this lesson late in life. 

He does not know that flattery and exaggerated praise is a form of atonement for our sins against the dead while they lived. We cleanse ourselves and diminish our guilt through beautifying their memory. In the end, death rituals are about healing and closure with the departed. Everywhere in history, funerary praise is not meant for truth-telling. 

The stories told at funerals are narratives of virtue, love, struggle, courage, and defiance before calamities and adversities. We are even allowed to imagine narratives and sing songs that soften the loss. Yet, is it the loss of his life, or the opportunities we lost to be good to the dead? Is the kindness we show to the dead about them, or about us? 

While President Ruto should be praised for  decorating Raila with the CGH, it is awkward to remind him of the numerous times when he angrily told Kenyans that he would someday consign Raila to permanent rest in Bondo. That the man would not even know how he got to Bondo. Behold, it has come to pass. Raila is in permanent rest. In heaven and in Bondo. His soul was taken by God, and his body delivered by the Kenyan state, without him knowing how. 

We must praise Raila, like Joan of Arc. Joan is the patron saint of France. She is honoured as a defender of the French nation for her role in the siege of Orleans, in 1428. Raila is honoured for constitutional and democratic reform in Kenya, culminating in 2010.

Both have been praised in death, rather than in life. And neither could perform a miracle to return to us a living person.

As George Bernard Shaw famously says, “It is the memory and salvation that sanctify the cross, not the cross that sanctifies the memory.” So shall it be with Raila and his CGH. Yet, we must continue to praise him. We must continue to praise St. Joan, although we burned her to death, and we cannot unburn her through praise. 

Society is better for remembering its saintly martyrs, however. Yet, it would not remember them if they had not been martyred. To paraphrase Shaw, let executioners praise Raila. The princes of the Church and cunning counsellors, praise him. Foolish old men in their deathbeds praise him. The judges in the blindness and bondage of the law praise him. Tormentors and executioners praise him. 

The wicked out of hell praise him. And the unpretending also praise him, too. Let us all praise him, even if in orchestrated grief. Let us praise him, not to protect him, but to protect ourselves from guilt; from social censure, and from the terror of the finality that is death.