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People mourn a departed relative at a funeral. However, the case is not the same for those in the Diaspora who often fail to travel owing to the absence of proper travelling documents

Sekai Nzenza On Wednesday
The day after we buried Rowesai, we all stayed the night with her mother. At dawn, Rowesai’s mother walked around her hut calling Rowesai: “Chimuka Rowesai. Kunze kwayedza. Maiwe kani vana vangu vapera! It’s daylight, rise Rowesai. Oh my mother! My children are dying,” she cried. Grief was eating her heart.

This was her third adult child to die in less than five years.

Everyone in all the villages in and across the river heard that voice.

We let her cry. Tears ease the anguish of sorrow. We felt the pain too.

After she was exhausted from wailing, Rowesai’s mother came back into the hut where we had all gathered during the night for Rowesai’s wake.

“When his father died, Rizini mourned him on the phone,” my cousin Piri said. She was still lying on the floor next to me.

“Musadaro! How does one mourn on the phone?” said someone.

“It happens. When a person is overseas and he cannot leave the country because his papers are not in order, he has to cry and cry for his father holding the mobile phone while talking to people back here burying his father, what could he do?” Some people laughed.

But they were not really laughing but that is the way we cope with the absurdity of situations.

I could see Rizini, sitting in his one room in London, having taken time off from the factory where he works, so he could mourn his mother on the phone. My niece Shami was at Rizini’s mother’s funeral because she is related to him on her maternal grandmother’s side.

Shami said she was the only one with a phone that could take small video clips and send them on Whatsapp to Rizini and instantly, Rizini could see his mothers’ face lying in her coffin, the relatives surrounding her.

“Show me the flowers you bought with the money I sent,” Rizini texted.

Shamiso took the flowers at various angles and apologised that there was no receipt where she got the flowers.

“Now show me everything that you have bought, from the coffin, the meat, vegetables, sugar, bread, milk, everything,” the texts said.

Shamiso did as she was told and Rizini took a picture of himself and his English girlfriend. They were both crying even though the girlfriend had never seen Rizini’s mother.

One day, she was hoping to marry Rizini and they would come and stay in the village for a few days. But it was all too late now because there was no one to come back for in the village.

The whole funeral was filmed and the video sent to London for Rizini to see and mourn his mother. When his father died 10 years ago, there was no video taken. But now, with new technology that is so cheap, people in the diaspora can mourn their loved ones watching visual pictures on the phone.

“It is not the same,” said my cousin Piri. “What kind of respect is that? So, does London become your home forever?”

The women agreed, others shook their heads and said it was not meant to be like that. But what can we do with our individual grief when our lives place us in such lonely situations? We bottle our grief the way English people do. They do not want to show emotion publicly. That is the way they mourn. Inside their hearts, they feel the pain and cry. But no tears are seen.

As fate would have it, Rizini died alone in London a few weeks ago.

People said Rizini had died of intense loneliness and grief. After the death of his mother, he was not the same anymore. People said he drank too much, broke up with his girlfriend and wanted to come back home.

But how could he come back without a British visa that would help him go back to London? If he came back here to stay, what would he do without a job, money, house or a car?

Maybe there was something else that bothered Rizini, apart from the grief of not seeing his parents’ graves. They say such illness and death are becoming more common in the Diaspora.

When I was in Australia, a friend of mine called Pepetua died alone.

Before migrating to Australia, Pepe had grown up in the village, surrounded by many people. She married and failed to have children. Then she divorced.

For the first 10 years while living in Australia, she missed Zimbabwe, the village and everyone.

Pepe came home once every two years. Then she started coming after every five years. When her husband left her, she stopped coming back completely. Almost 30 years after migrating to Australia, Pepe was alone.

Occasionally I visited her. My own life was busy, working and studying. Pepetua was alienated and lost.

Over the years, her siblings and other relatives back home in Zimbabwe died but Pepe could not come home.

She cried, mourned and grieved for home and its losses.

In the end, she became ill with depression and the doctors put her on anti depressants. Pepe had episodes when she became hyperactive and manic. She was restless and she said she heard voices. She laughed incessantly and was abusive. She refused to eat and sometimes she just sat on the one spot for a whole day without talking to anyone.Pepe had high blood pressure, headaches and was often drowsy and dizzy. Sometimes she shuffled when she walked and she had skin rushes everywhere. She had unusual and uncontrollable movements on her face, stuck out her tongue and smacked her lips when talking, chewing at nothing. Occasionally she jerked and twisted her whole body. When the episodes became more frequent she was hospitalized a couple of times.

One late afternoon Pepe’s former partner went to visit Pepe. He found her slumped on the couch. Pepe had been dead for two days.

The post-mortem said Pepe had a massive heart attack. Since Pepe no longer communicated with anyone back here, there was no-one to call and let know that Pepe was no more.

At Pepe’s funeral, her close friends were mainly the Maori people that she used to be friends with when her partner left her.

When I arrived to pay my condolences, there was a group of Maori people and other Anglo-Australian men drinking beer sitting around an open fire. In the corner was a bar-b-queue with sausages roasting.

A couple of women talked loudly and smoked in the far corner of the backyard. It was like standing in the middle of the Hells Angels gang. Some grunted hellos and others mumbled sorry. The women in the corner waved and kept their distance.

How was Pepe’s spirit going to be united with the ancestors in such a faraway place? This is the futility of life. Here was a woman who enjoyed the Western way of life – food, clothes, wine and cigarettes. She drank beer like there was no tomorrow. Even the marijuana that makes men happy or angry, she smoked that too. And now here she was, alone, dead and surrounded by strangers.

The funeral took place at the chapel of Eternal Rest within the cemetery grounds in Melbourne. It was a beautiful peaceful place with gardens, water features and even some wildlife. Pepe’s former partner chose a headstone lawn grave and a flowerbed. He said Pepe wanted to be buried and not cremated. We threw rose petals into the grave. Pepetua was dead. Never again to return to her village. We buried Pepe somewhere far away from her ancestral home. Her lone grave is right in the corner, close to the freeway in Melbourne, where nobody remembers her. She died of lonely grief.

When my sister Charity died three years ago, my mother mourned. She could not eat as she sat silently beside the coffin. The women comforted her by pointing to my health and that of my remaining sisters. But my mother could not be consoled. She remained in her own world and there was no voice coming out of her. Then the wives of her nephews came along, all dressed up the way Charity used to dress going to work at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Because Charity also had a farm and was very strict on the workers, some of the women dressed like they were the labourers and Charity was the master farmer, commanding them to pick tobacco, weed the grass, feed the chickens or take all the cattle out to the paddock. We all laughed because that is the way Charity used to behave. She had a deep voice like a man and one woman spoke just the way Charity would have spoken. My mother laughed in her grief. She remembered some of the funny episodes in Charity’s life as women sang, danced and performed the skits. My mother forgot her grief for a while and ate some food.

Life brings us many painful surprises. But our grief is easier to carry when it is shared. Hanging on alone to old grief just makes it grow until it smothers creativity, joy, and ability to connect with others. Back in the village, we still laugh even at funerals. The burden of grief is easier when carried with others.

l Dr Sekai Nzenza is a writer and an independent social critic.