The Drums of Death

I think this is something I have needed to talk about but never did yet. I find myself thinking here with you is my safe space. Here with you is where I feel I can say out everything I’ve held in without fear of judgement or being misunderstood. I am back after a long season of silence. Admittedly, when the idea to come back was brought to me, I had so many wonderful and mysterious things I wanted to share with you, but when I got to the laptop, I was suddenly very blank. I couldn’t think of anything worth the time it would take me to write it or the time it would take you to read it.

I owe you an unfiltered and raw glimpse of me. I need you to see me as completely uncovered and bare as possible. I have nursed and nurtured a fear of telling you about my experiences with death because it has defined so much of how I perceive life and spirituality. Don’t judge me, or maybe do; actually, I don’t care either way. My story, my lived experience.

Often times, I watch myself ignore feelings and warning signs. Most times, it is an intentional act to try to delay the inevitable. There is a voice that says that which I have not acknowledged is less real, less tangible, and less likely to occur than that which I have acknowledged. Looking back, that’s what this was. The earliest sign of my mom’s death was feeling homesick. Not the kind of homesick where you cry; the kind of homesick where there’s a hole in your stomach that doesn’t close. I graduated to what I believe to be the most devastating bout of insomnia I’ve ever experienced.

There’s a phrase I heard a bit when I was growing up; the phrase was “and then there was a deafening silence.” Do you have any idea how loud silence has to be to be deafening? In those days, my insomnia peaked. I would lay in bed and stare up at where the ceiling met the wall, wondering what time I’d fall asleep. The sun would come up and set back over the beautifully built estate homes. Eventually people would wind down, and kids would be tucked back in with kisses and the promise of angels watching over them, but I’d lay there staring at this point where the ceiling and the wall meet. I’d stare at it like I was waiting for some profound revelation about something. Eventually, it became increasingly difficult to maintain a steady meal plan.

I had this urge, this insatiable longing to go back home. Have you ever been sick but been unable to point out what is making you sick? In that week, I felt like the spirit that housed my body was not my own. My body felt foreign; it’s inability to function was paralyzing. I had this sense of quiet that wrapped around me like a wet blanket, thick, heavy, and cold. It’s important to point out that I was never in any pain; I just had this feeling of nothingness that was the heaviest thing I have ever had to carry. All I knew was that, in my core, I had this thing that just kept saying, Go home. To put it in devastating simplicity

Benginalento ethi yazin? Iya ekhaya uhlaleleni?

Dreams can be subconscious impressions made on our minds by things as the day goes by. Things we long for or are constantly exposed to. Then there are my dreams, which are sometimes neither. My dreams can be vivid visions of things yet to come. These things are, more often than not, good. Finally, after a week, I slept.

Except sleep doesn’t help when it’s the soul that’s tired; you just wake up just as tired as you were before. As for me, my soul was experiencing the most devastating emotions before my brain could understand. The first dream I had was awful. I dreamt of my uncle, who had at that point been dead for nine years. He stood in the living room, talking to my mom. Everybody ran out, but my mom stood there, chatting without a care in the world. If you’re black, particularly African, you know that dead people are seldom a sign of fortune.

The second night, just as I was about to fall asleep, I heard the drums of death. Loud African drums as they played loudly like there was a carnival outside. I remember being so annoyed and opening the curtains and the windows to try to locate the origin of the sound. I was fully awake when I heard the drums well after midnight, in an upmarket estate. The morning came, and I asked everyone in the house if they had heard them too, but nobody had heard a thing. I went home a few days later, and my mom was sick. Long story short, she got hospitalized a week later, on a Tuesday. I never got to say goodbye or that I love you. I took some paperwork to my dad, and when I came back, they had put her in that ward of death. She died early Saturday morning. I don’t think I ever told anyone how it felt that Tuesday. I felt robbed; I didn’t want to leave without seeing her, and I can’t explain it, but I just felt her slip away. I cried on the way home, and I cried a lot at night because somehow subconsciously I knew very well there would be no mommy after the hospital, I knew she would never make it out.

I have never attempted to describe that feeling to anyone, but I will try here and now. One thing about being spiritual that nobody warns you about is the intensity with which you feel things. There are no words that can describe death; I know people think of things like fear and pain. It doesn’t, honestly. In those three weeks, I felt death around me and carried it around like a back pack. At first, it feels uncomfortable, like holding your breath while waiting for the other shoe to drop. It feels like nothing, and nothing is the worst feeling in the world. When I felt my mom slip away from Tuesday until the day she died, I felt like I was holding her hand, and little by little it was slipping, and there was nothing I could do about it.

I heard those drums twice more in my life, later in November of the same year and again a month before my grandfather died. Both instances are incredible stories, for another time. They are not only the warning bells of death but also a beautiful parade of birth for wherever we go after death. Now I imagine those drums, similar to the screams of a birthing woman, as a representation of a rip in the veil between this world and the next. Perfect chaos and perfect peace all at once.

Stay Dandy!

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