A cheerful death announcement

We East Africans have plenty to learn from our Kenyan brothers and sisters, including, as I discovered early this week while in Nairobi for an assignment, how to write a cheerful death announcement, one that leaves a wry smile and not a tear in a reader’s eye. If you’re an avid reader of newspapers, there’s something you will notice loudly missing in Rwandan newspapers, the obituary pages! But the obituary pages are quite a big deal in the Kenyan press. In Daily Nation for instance, you will find several pages, with nice looking portrait photographs of good people gone and never to be seen again, gone to be with the lord in the next life. Having grown up in Uganda, with a civil servant dad, newspapers were a daily fixture on my menu, I remember running to welcome him from work every evening at 5pm with a target of grabbing from him a copy of New Vision and Daily Monitor. There too, I remember the obituary pages, they were my least favorite and would only read them when I was extremely bored and out of stuff to read or when a familiar name and face caught my attention. On average, a Daily Nation newspaper has about 60 pages and normally, the obituaries are between page 50 and 55, just before the sports pages. It was 11:17am on Wednesday, I had finished my last assignment in Nairobi and instead of ‘killing’ hours at the serene offices of TradeMark East Africa, I requested my chauffeur to take me to the Airport ahead of time for my flight with RwandAir at 4:30pm. With me was the day’s Daily Nation whose pages I loafed through with no specific focus for I had finished reading the national and business news so it was time to check out the other pages and that’s when I found the obituaries. In newspapers, every section has its own editors and designers and I must say the editors of Nation’s obituary pages are doing a commendable job making the death announcements less scary and nauseating for readers. You must be familiar with radio death announcements normally read shortly after the news bulletin, they are the most boring programming segment and only the senior folk, such as grannies often pay attention to them. My first job was as a news anchor with a radio station and I remember the guy who used to read the death announcements had this melancholy voice, just the type befitting of such a lugubrious assignment. Let’s face it, death is death and naturally, we should all be sad when life is snuffed out of a loved one but maybe sometimes all we need is to celebrate life, especially, when one dies after accomplishing great things in life. That’s something Daily Nation obituary editors seem to have pondered on and agreed that not all death announcements should be sad, some death announcements simply have to be cheerful and they have mastered the art of crafting nice titles and text to fit different scenarios. First the obituary pages are cunningly named ‘transition’ making it sound like these people have just moved on to another world but they’re otherwise fine there. ‘Celebrating a life well lived’ was the title to Mr. Gibson Mathenge’s death announcement on page 51 of Daily Nation on Tuesday. Mzee Mathenge, according to the announcement was born in 1924 and was 91 years old when he died last week. During his lifetime, he had fathered over ten children all of whom were listed, some dead, his wife too was dead and he was leaving behind 28 grandchildren and 10 great grandchildren. For such a man therefore, crying for his death would obviously be a shameful thing to do, the right thing to do, is to celebrate a legacy of a true African man, a great father, grandfather and great grandfather. I saw several other such death announcements and noticed that after reading them, I didn’t feel sad but rather somewhat jealous of their achievements. And these are people who have planned their last days on earth. Most of these announcements are placed by insurance companies where these people had insurance. The insurance firm announces your death; they take care of the funeral to ensure you depart with honour. I think if we can all live life well knowing that it has an expiry date, we would be less in shock when it finally comes; the only death to cry about is that which is forced such as accidents, murders and genocides. As for me, if I ever die at 89 as I hope to, please don’t cry, just write me a cheerful death announcement inviting all my friends to celebrate a life well lived.

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A cheerful death announcement