When my auntie died, an acacia tree sprouted from her grave. Tall and strong as she had been. Fruitless as she had been. The tree trunk bent in the exact angle of her scoliosis-ridden spine. So I’m told.
I never had the chance to meet her. She died way before I was born. Everything I know about her I learnt from my father, who described her in the same way that he described the tree. Tall and strong. Which I guess is how you would describe most trees, but that didn’t stop seven-year-old me from wondering about all plants henceforth, searching for life in every tree that I came across, for the soul that they rooted from.
Unlike my peers growing up, I never climbed a tree, broke a branch, or picked fruit, out of fear of making someone else’s auntie mad. Such was my belief. A belief I still hold to this day. A belief that sparked an interest that became a lifelong obsession: graves and everything that grows from them.
In my teenage years, I would walk around cemeteries for hours, taking photos of graves and the vegetation they produced, stopping to document any that caught my eye: the concrete tomb of a former rich man, grey and ugly, not a blade of grass or a tiny leaf within sight, cold and lifeless as he had been. Or the recent headstone of a child taken too soon, the budding plants around his grave just like him: yet to flourish and fully grow.
Or the yellow daffodils twisting and clamouring over each other above my parents’ joint graves, their spirits still arguing even in death, still inseparable.
Or the unassuming, shallow grave of the pet cat that I had while growing up, buried in the backyard of my childhood home, now my own kids’ childhood home. A simple grave hidden in the furthest corner of our garden, under a cover of bushy grass, which I vouch is a very fitting representation of my late pet. The fat cat never really did much but lie about, silent, away from everyone else.
These are just some of the graves that haunt me with each passing day, as my vision starts blurring in my old age and I need glasses to focus my eyes through my camera lens as I go on my lonely walks through cemeteries, wondering about my own gravestone and what will sprout above my rotting body. Like every soul before me—all buried in their graves, unaware of their fates, thinking that they are dead, all while their spirits germinate above ground—my rotting body would fertilize the earth with all of my secrets and insecurities, echoes of myself for all to see.
I think I would like to be cremated. I don’t need my numerous failures to show up in the branches of a tree.
Timothy Rachuonyo is a Kenyan artist who has been writing for three years now, trying to craft a career for himself in the industry—a journey that has left him with many valuable lessons that he utilises in his craft as he continues working on becoming a full-time storyteller.
His Instagram is @timed_ent.
