14/11/2025
"When my father died, I did not cry. I wanted to, believe me, and I even tried; but the tears refused to come. It was as if something was holding them back tightly, something that up to now I cannot explain.
I just stood there, still, like a telephone pole, as I watched my mother wail the way women who had just lost their husbands in our village wailed.
“Nfudde nze! Bazze wange, onzise (I have died! My husband, you have killed me),” she moaned, bitterly, her voice cracking with grief.
My mother wept so loud that if you were a stranger passing by and you were told that someone had lost their spouse, you would not need to ask whose husband it was.
My siblings just couldn’t accept it either: “Daddy, Daddy, you cannot die. No, you cannot die. Wake up. Daddy! Wake up!” they pleaded, in desperation.
I saw them wail, and felt like tearing, but no drop came.
The village people gathered.
Some with hands on their heads. Some with a hand on their mouth. Some sobbing and shaking their heads. Some crying as they talked. Some looking on, with serious unsmiling faces. Dumbstruck. Overcome. Grieving.
Having seen all that, I knew I should cry, at least to be like everybody else. But I couldn’t no matter how much I tried.
The whole time I kept thinking about one thing only: my father’s shoes.
My father died when I was fifteen.
He had been sick for a while but we thought it was a normal sickness – where people get down, and then get back up. It wasn’t the case this time around.
One day in the morning, while I stood outside the clinic where he had been taken, someone came out and said my father had breathed his last.
I stood there, crushed and confused.
Really? My father is gone?
Gone – as in “gone”?
"
My Father's Shoes by Henry Muguluma - Full story available on ibuapublishing.com.
1. Visit Ibua website
2.On the menu, tap - The Journal
3. Tap - IBUA JOURNAL (Let me tell you how it felt: Essays on Grief)
4.Scroll down, tap - My Father's Shoes.
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