Dark Holes

She took the long route home that day. Just to think. Because the day she just had, threw her brick after heavy brick.

Her Dad got sick that day. Couldn't breathe properly. He'd been coughing and hacking like an old beat up engine for the past two weeks.

Then that morning, it took everything to get him to the dining table. He got tired every two steps and kept up a steady stream of wheezing noises throughout breakfast.

She took him to the same doctor who had prescribed him a cough syrup and received news that after 43 years of smoking, her dad got a funny lung disease they weren't sure about yet. They weren't even sure if the smoking caused it. But they ruled out cancer.

She didn't know it, but two years later, seated in a dimly lit gazebo at 7pm, this day was going to be, what she described to me as, one of the worst day of her life.

From taking her only living parent to hospital, she had an argument with her best friend after being hit by a Nduthi guy. Sore everywhere and with a sharp pain in her hips, she received a call from the hospital.

Her father was in the theatre, something was wrong with his heart and also, one of his lungs collapsed.

She rushed right back to hospital imagining a life without her father. Her mind torturing her with images of what she might go through.

 And no matter what she did, she couldn't stop imagining vivid scenarios of her telling her friends and extended family, her crying at his funeral, her getting rid of his things. Thinking it was an all time low, crying in an uber, she tried to think of something else.

Then she remembered the lost feeling she had when her twin passed away a few years back. The deep dark hole in her chest that dug itself when she got news that it was a bad combination of pills and alcohol her sister took to get high, that killed her. Cardiac arrest at 22.

"The uber driver must have thought I was crazy just sitting there and bawling my eyes out." She tells me.

"He was nice though, he gave me tissues, a bottle of water and all the sweets he kept for his customers. You remember when they used to do that?"

I smile and say yes, trying to think how she was smiling while taking me through òne of the darkest days of her life. Hell, even I felt like crying.

I ask her what happened next, and she says
"Well, I got there too late, he died on the table"

Just like that! I want to ask her what got her through but she continues talking.
The doctor told her the news and nothing she'd been imagining had come close to the pain she felt. She literally fell on the floor and cried. It was like someone was tearing at her heart with a blunt pencil.

The Hole she felt in her heart increased tenfold until she became nothing but the dark hole. She called her best friend, she didn't pick. Neither did her boyfriend or her neighbour or her work friends. About 11 people and none of them picked up.

She picked herself from the floor to go sit on a chair. After an hour of staring at a blue wall, the doctor told her to go home and rest, they would deal with everything the next day.

When she got home, after her walk, her best friend calls her back. Just when she thought she was invisible and alone in the world. She shared the news and her best friend came rushing over to be with her.

I ask her what got her through, she says
"Honestly, God. He really does comfort the mourning. He's healed my heart's wounds"

"You don't blame him, for taking your twin sister and your father? " I ask.

" I would, really, there were times that dark hole would just consume me and I would think it was all his fault but, He gave me peace." She pauses.

"Once, I remembered I prayed for Him to heal my Dad in that uber.In between my crying. And I realised He did, he took away the pain my dad was feeling. He healed him,  just not in the way I expected. I don't know if that makes sense"

I ask her if the hole in her chest went away completely. She tells me it stayed, it's smaller but it's still there and that's her way of missing them.

"I know what it feels to want to commit suicide, because my dad and sister, they were my tribe. And they died. But I'm still here, all by the grace of God.
He always, Always has provided for me.  And he has for you and for all those people who'll read my story and even those who won't. The question is, do you see that?" she says as she stands to signal the end of the conversation.

That day, I walked home, took the long route. Just to think.