Coping with death of several relatives all at once

The funeral service for the Kibugi children and grandchild on June 22, 2016. PHOTO | FILE | NATION MEDIA GROUP

What you need to know:

  • An accident that happened at Kamukuywa along Kitale-Webuye road on Monday night claimed 19 lives and nine among those were from the same family.
  • Mr Kegode lost his wife Abigael and two children: Joseph Ingati who had just sat KCSE and Caroline Vihenda, a third-year student at Kenya Medical Training College in Nakuru.
  • His brother George Oguso also lost his wife Edna Nyaboke and their two children Ivy and Derrick.

Death is a painful experience for all who are bereaved. But the experience must be worse for those who lose several relatives at a go, often in accidents; how do they cope? A few who have gone through the experience spoke to Lifestyle

If you were in an Embassava bus heading towards Nairobi’s Pipeline Estate on Thursday evening and you saw a woman alight while trembling, know that she was not sick. Mrs Hannah Kibugi had just lost all her three children in a road crash 18 months earlier. She alighted because the matatu was moving too fast and she got scared.

Mrs Kibugi tells Lifestyle that she took an Uber taxi instead. “The driver were racing with another matatu. I told the conductor that the matatu was speeding and he replied, ‘ni saa ya jioni (it’s evening)’ and that they normally rush at this hour,” remembers the 45-year-old.

“It was so bad that I was shaking. In fact, when I alighted from the matatu, some people thought I was sick.” Ever since Mrs Kibugi lost her three children and a granddaughter on the Eastern Bypass when a lorry hit a car she was driving — leaving her as the only survivor — she has been left feeling nervous any time she's in a speeding vehicle.

“I like driving myself because I drive slowly. When I am driven, I normally alight because of speed. Anyone driving at 80kph to me is speeding and I shake and scream. So, I have been driving myself slowly as the trauma is still on,” she says.

Mrs Kibugi shared her story in a week when accidents across Kenya had snuffed the lives of close relatives. An accident that happened at Kamukuywa along Kitale-Webuye road on Monday night claimed 19 lives and nine among those were from the same family.

The matatu which rammed into a tractor ferrying sugarcane at Kamukuywa bridge on the Kitale-Webuye road on December 11, 2017. PHOTO | JARED NYATAYA | NATION MEDIA GROUP

It occurred when a matatu rammed a stalled sugarcane tractor. Five other vehicles were involved in the crash. Among the worst affected by the crash is Wycliffe Kegode, a resident of Mahanga village in Vihiga County.  

Mr Kegode lost his wife Abigael and two children: Joseph Ingati who had just sat KCSE and Caroline Vihenda, a third-year student at Kenya Medical Training College in Nakuru. He is now left with one child. Mr Kegode described the loss as disastrous to the family.

When Lifestyle visited the homestead on Thursday, a distressed Mr Kegode had a distant look on his face as he flipped though the family album. His brother George Oguso also lost his wife Edna Nyaboke and their two children Ivy and Derrick in the accident. Ivy and Derrick were in Forms One and Two respectively.

FORMER MP'S FAMILY

“It is disastrous losing nine people at a go. I am still in shock,” said Mr Kegode, in reference to the other relatives who died in the accident. I don’t know where to start from and where to end. It is painful,” said Mr Kegode, who works in Mombasa. “I am going through a hard time. I feel exhausted. Those who died are the people I lived with. We knew each other and we lived as one.”

The family’s ordeal evokes memories of some of the worst family tragedies to have befallen Kenya. One of them occurred on Mombasa Road in November 1978 and it involved the family of former Kamukunji MP George Gregory Wilson Nthenge.

At around 8.30 pm on that misty night, when his Peugeot car reached the Small World Country Club, a driver in front of him signalled him to overtake. But there was another lorry ferrying limestone coming from the opposite direction and they collided head-on.

“The collision was huge. I was rushed to Kenyatta National Hospital unconscious with three broken ribs,” he told Nation in 2014. Mr Nthenge lost his wife and their eight children. Only one child, Tony Mathembe, survived. He was then in Form Four at Parklands Secondary School in Nairobi.

He escaped with a broken hand and was unconscious for days after the incident. Mr Nthenge’s homestead is today dotted with graves of his loved ones, which have slabs on top. “When I die, my body will be lowered four feet deep and not the standard six. That is not my choice. Fate chose it for me when death snatched my first wife Emelda. I have decided to rest directly above her when my time comes,” he said in the 2014 interview.

Mr Nthenge’s tragedy aside, more recently there was the case of Mr Shekuwe Kahale, the ODM candidate for the Lamu East parliamentary seat in the August polls who came second to Shariff Athman Ali. Just days after the polls, Mr Kahale was travelling in a boat heading from Kizingitini to Lamu.

He was with his wife, their four children, his sister and her three children, his aunt and the boat’s coxswain when tragedy struck at around 10 am. Mr Kahale was the sole survivor in the boat tragedy and he recalled how he watched helplessly as children who had held onto him as he swam to safety released their grasp, out of exhaustion, and fell one by one into the Indian Ocean waters.

“I have been at the sea for years as a fisherman, so I tried having the children hold onto me as I swam to rescue my wife, sister and aunt, which proved difficult due to the weight. I was overwhelmed and could not do much to save them,” he told Nation in August from his hospital bed.

Then there is the mother who tragically lost all her three children in May this year. Ms Ebby Isachi, one of the two wives of Mr James Ratemo who was an MCA aspirant in Kapsoya ward, is slowly coming to terms with the death of the three children — Clifford Nyambane, 6, Taniy Nyamweya, 5, and Glen Ongaki, 3 — who were murdered after being kidnapped.

Mr Ratemo, who failed to clinch the seat he coveted in the August polls, said on Thursday that the pain caused by the loss is slowly easing, thanks to prayers from members of the Seventh Day Adventist church and support from family.

“We are continuing to catch up with everyday life. We are getting on well, though it is not easy,” Mr Ratemo told Lifestyle. He said his wife in November returned to her workplace at Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital and that the hospital management has been kind to her.

COPING MECHANISM

“They have told her that if she wishes to, she can have a rest before she returns to work,” he said. “At her workplace, she was given ample time. She’s not forced to work whenever she goes to work. It is catching up on well.”

But because of the loneliness, he has had to employ a house help for her and bring a relative over. “I have employed house helps for both my wives, even the one who doesn’t have kids. This is because sometimes she feels lonely. I even requested my aunt to send her daughter so there can be many of us in the household, which will make her feel like she has company,” Mr Ratemo said.

He noted that the family has also become more prayerful. “Nowadays the three of us gather and pray to God,” he said. For recovery to happen after such a tragedy, Mr Ratemo observed, a supernatural force has to be invoked. “Now you have children and if God decides to take all of them at the same time, you should take heart and pray to God and tell him that his will be done. Because he also has a plan for you,” he said.

Speaking of turning to God, Mrs Kibugi, the woman who cannot stand speeding matatus, has lately gone a notch higher in her preaching. She has been invited to various churches to share her experience to inspire people. “My calendar is always jammed by invitations to talk, preach, encourage many people. We pray together with people all the time,” she says.

“Everyone who sees me and remembers me is always touched by my presence. It becomes easy to preach to them and they break and surrender their lives to God,” adds Mrs Kibugi. The accident happened at 8.30 pm on May 15, 2016 when she was returning home after attending a nephew’s baptism ceremony in Banana, Kiambu County.

She was the one driving and her passengers were her daughters Josephine Njoki, 25, and Grace Njeri, 11, alongside her son, Mike Mutua, 9. Josephine was also with her daughter who had been named Hannah Wariara after her grandmother.

RESCUE THE CHILDREN

After taking a turn from Thika Road to the Eastern Bypass, she noticed an oncoming lorry doing zigzags on the road. She slowed down. The lorry was approaching them fast and she had no time to swerve. The lorry hit the car off the road and its windows were shattered on impact.

She remembers being thrown off the car on impact and though her memory is hazy, she recalls trying to move towards the car to try and rescue the children. “The worst tragedy was when I was told all the children have died; and then when I went to view the bodies in the mortuary. It was not a good thing but God held me tight,” she says.

The driver of the lorry was later identified as 35-year-old Tim Johnson Mumo.  Police accuse him of drink-driving as his blood alcohol content was found to be 0.85 points above the legal limit. He was charged at a Thika court with four counts of causing death by dangerous driving.

Now all of Mrs Kibugi’s children are under the sod and the ribs that she broke are recovering. Though she has healed, she admits that the trauma is not easy to overcome, which is why she cannot stand some traffic offences. Her husband, who was working in Qatar when the tragedy struck, has relocated to Kenya.

“He left his job and came to be with me. To date, he has not got a job and he still doesn’t want to go back because he wants to be with me. That’s very powerful and it makes you heal faster,” she said. Mrs Kibugi also thanks the rest of her family for helping her get over the tragedy.

“Every time, they were visiting me daily. Those that are far were always making journeys,” she says. To get rid of the dark memories, the family that lives in Ruai did away with the children’s personal items and even the sofas in the house.

“Whatever reminds you, you replace it. But it takes time because when you’re replacing immediately, you feel like you’re throwing away that person. But it takes time. I brought in friends who helped me do that. But the memory does not come back always,” she recalls.