The guitar tunes that went silent

The distinct scent of freshly-mowed grass from the neighbor’s lawn across the fence filled the air that warm Saturday morning. Mom’s done having her breakfast and is lounging in the living room watching news on the BBC. I, on the other hand, am prepping to go run a few errands in town. I’ll be dashing out shortly. However, she would like to have a chat before I head out. I doubt I know what this is about, but, previously, mom has casually suggested this sort of thing several times without necessarily getting into specifics about the subject of the chat. I’m guessing it’s just the usual mom-son conversation. But, suddenly, this starts to feel a tad different. Like there’s an air of urgency to it!

My mother had been around for about two weeks or slightly more. The reason she was in Kampala was in preparation for a scheduled travel out of the country. Mom hadn’t been feeling too well for some months. In a short time, it became clear that the ailing healthcare system here couldn’t accommodate her fragile medical condition or facilitate her recovery. At that point, to the normal eye, mom still bore the demeanor of a healthy person. It was difficult to tell there was something eating her up. Perhaps the only physical sign was that the glimmer in her eyes whenever she smiled was slowly dimming. This day is the 16th of July 2022 and I’m about to hear some strange things from mom!

I take a seat right across from her. First thing she asks is to know what my relationship with my dad is currently like! Mom’s innately relational and cares to know about other people regardless of their posturing towards her. For reasons best known to them, she and dad went their separate ways decades ago. Even so, she still spoke well of him and regularly prayed for him.

My old man is a good guy, but over the years, a series of unfortunate events had resulted in our enthusiasm for each other to dwindle significantly. Moreover, without the mutual willful endeavor to reverse that, I honestly got emotionally exhausted in this perpetual one-sided effort to make things work. In instances such as these, I prefer to extricate myself from the engagement, pull back, and simply let the other party determine for themselves the nature of relationship they would like to have with me. That’s what I did.

Truth is, besides the hard fact that there’s no way this particular conversation was gonna catch momentum, mom probably already knew the answer to her question. So, anyway, she disengages and swiftly moves on to a different subject altogether.

Mom will be travelling the following week for specialized treatment and will be away for months. What I’m starting to sense from the tone of our chat is that maybe–just maybe–she reckons there’s an ounce of a chance she might not make it back! Possibly why she’s getting inclined to bring up such hot-button topics.

We move on to the subject of my birth. This is the main event of our chat! I was born pre-term, she says. This I already knew cos she had mentioned before. What I wasn’t aware of are the circumstances that had led to that. This is something that had always bothered me cos I imagined it had affected my physical development. I felt I would’ve been way smarter had I been delivered at full term. My mom goes ahead and narrates to me a number of chilling tales of avoidable external factors that caused her pregnancy (of me) to nearly get terminated! That stuff is too delicate to share here, but the long and short of it is that it’s a great miracle I was even born prematurely! It’s possible that I wouldn’t have been born at all!

Having arrived onto the scene at 7 months, I should’ve been delivered sometime in February the following year, rather than on 26th December. As a matter of fact, the premature delivery date had even been scheduled–I bet you’ve never heard of that! It was to be 25th December! When I eventually showed up, straightway I got admitted into an incubator where I was nursed for 4 weeks. Retrospectively, I had quite literally become the re-incarnation of the biblical tale of Rachel’s son of my sorrows. It’s for that near-tragic reason that mom apparently gave me some crazy name! It didn’t seem like the devil was done prowling yet, cos at the fragile age of four months, I suffered a fracture on my left arm under mysterious circumstances, at the hands of a caretaker. Much worse, the doctors didn’t handle my case well. So, later, my hand had to be broken again and the job re-done!

Listening to all this, I’m seated there absolutely startled and terrified at this surreal story; wondering to myself who exactly this person is that mom is telling me about, cos that’s definitely not me! For over 30 years, she had kept a secret of this magnitude to herself! In that moment, I feel like my brain is running at full speed processing all this information I’m receiving. But one thing is sticking out prominently—the names she had given me that were self-contradicting and diametrically opposed to each other in meaning!

“What were you thinking, mom?” I calmly pose to her the question that not once in my lifetime I thought I would ever ask my own mother. I’m genuinely asking to know about that weird name sequence that she said I bore for a couple of months after my birth. With tears already welling up in her eyes and streaming down her face, mom tells me she’s sorry! She said she didn’t really know the gravity of what she had done and that difficult circumstances had caused her to make such a horrible decision. Besides, she didn’t know the LORD back then—a thing that would’ve undoubtedly had a bearing on her choice. Thankfully, the name was ditched, and the alteration made before my first birthday.

In the late 80’s or there about, mom got to know Jesus as her personal LORD and Savior. Easily the best decision of her life! Having emerged from a broken marriage, she seemed to have gone all-in to get deeply rooted into this newly found relationship with the LORD. The influence that her faith beliefs had on us, her biological children, cannot be overstated! Mom’s love for her God and people grew greatly in measure; she became the embodiment of compassion, charity, selflessness and generosity. It’s on this path that her journey to the helm of a charity organization would soon be directed. In Soroti–a 5-hours’ drive East of Kampala–where she lived, she ran a childcare organization that took care of needy and vulnerable children. In her time working there, hundreds, perhaps thousands of souls went through her care.

While there, mom’s sphere of influence broadened, and her circle of friendships swelled exponentially. It may have been sometime in the 90’s that she met a lady called Kate, with whom she became great friends. Kate was a British lady that had been living in Soroti for some time. The level of her marked effect on my mother and the rest of us is almost unbelievable. Not only did Kate have a beautiful soul, but she was also musical. It’s in their regular interactions that Kate introduced mom to the guitar instrument and music as a whole. I’m not sure either of them had the slightest clue that the impact of their indulgences would be far-reaching!

The first time I ever held a guitar was in 1999 on one of my visits to Soroti to spend time with mom. It was a beautiful classical guitar that Kate had gifted mom. Apart from fiddling around, I couldn’t do a thing with it until 2005 when I purposely embarked on this musical journey. My brother, an Intensive Care Physician, had earlier learnt some basic guitar from mom, and so, he taught me what he had learnt. The rest is history! I’ve since developed and employed my guitar skills to serve and minister at church. Been at it for some 15years now! And this week, for the first time, I used mom’s classical guitar on the big stage!

Undeniably, one of the best gifts Kate ever gave was introducing the family to the world of music through mom. When I heard Kate was terminally ill in the UK and on her death bed some two years ago, that week I planned to record a tune on my guitar for her: not only to wish her well, but also as the littlest token of appreciation for her vitally important role in indirectly carving out my music path. Unfortunately, she died and never heard the tune, which would’ve been the first she ever heard me play.

Following the story of my birth and the near-tragic conditions that caused its prematurity, I began to think pensively about my existence. It was then that the quest to pursue my life purpose was re-ignited, cos all these occurrences re-affirmed that I didn’t just come onto this earth plane by some chance, but, rather, the justification for my life is sure and definite.

When mom returned home from treatment in August, last year, she didn’t live more than a few weeks before she passed on. A few days after her death, we stumbled upon a book of hers where, as it turned out, she usually jotted the prayers she made for us, her children. It was such a pleasant artefact to come across. With this knowledge, you now look back noticing how certain things re-aligned, and you just know that this one was most likely the result of mom’s prayers!

Over the weekend, I contemplatively thought about mom’s epic life story and how it’s virtually impossible to cover a decent fraction of it in a single blog post. However, this redaction hopefully serves to demonstrate that a mother’s role in defining her children’s purpose in life cannot be exaggerated! Whereas mom’s guitar tunes went silent in September 2022, the melodies of a life well-lived will undoubtedly sound for generations through her children, grandchildren and those after them.