When I traveled to southwest Kenya, I didn’t expect a reminder about grief. But that’s exactly what I found.
The children were joyful—radiant, really. Many spoke five languages by the time they were ten. They didn’t have closets full of clothes or backpacks full of gadgets, yet they carried themselves with a confidence that comes from knowing you belong to something larger. I watched them brush their teeth using a certain bush their elders had taught them about. Not a toothbrush or toothpaste in sight—just a practice passed down with reverence and care. (Their teeth were to be envied.)
And their behavior? It, too, was excellent. They never once touched my photography equipment despite showing a great deal of joy and curiosity in seeing themselves in the viewfinder. Over time I became comfortable leaving my belongings unprotected. (Again, I was in a remote, self-contained very rural villiage – not Nairobi).
If a boy wanted to become a chief he had to kill a lion single-handed (without a rifle or gun). Girls were to be confident, too. One day a girl of about eleven walked into our make-shift medical clinic alone with an eye so swolen her face was disfigured. (It had a wooden splinter embedded in it and it was infected). She brought herself to us. More speficially she walked alone for about 15 miles and smiled welcomingly when we spotted her. She displayed nothing but gratitude.
And then there were the elders. In their 40s, sometimes early 50s, they were considered old—not because they looked it, but because life was hard. The threat of death was never far. Disease from tainted water. Infections from small cuts. Drowning, famine, childbirth, animal attacks, even insect bites. There were no luxury buffers. No illusions of invincibility. Death was part of the landscape—immediate, intimate, and ever-present. They could not rely upon 911, Paratransit, nor even reach paved roads before taking an eleven hour journey over rocks and uneven terrain in some borrowed vehicle.
And yet, those same elders were not hidden away. They were protected. Consulted. They held wisdom because they had endured. They had buried children, siblings, spouses, livestock and still rose each day with the community’s questions on their lips: What should we do? How do we heal?
That stayed with me.
Because here, in the West, we tend to exile grief. We outsource death to professionals. We soften it, hide it, rename it, trye to “fix it.” We place our elders in facilities, medicate their sorrow, and treat mourning like a mental illness if it lingers too long.
But in Kenya, death wasn’t just an end—it was a ever-present threat. A drumbeat. A shadow you didn’t pretend wasn’t there. And so grief was never a private affliction—it was a communal responsibility. You wailed together. You lit fires. You told stories, and sang the names of the dead believing they still had ears to hear.
And I wonder: what have we lost in trading that for virtual funerals, brief eulogies, and an unspoken pressure to “move on”?
I think about my eight-year-old granddaughter. I think about the world she’s inheriting. A world with limitless information, but little wisdom and too few high profile people who role model integrity and humility. She’s in a culture where grief is often dealt with in solitude—online, behind closed doors, or not at all. Where children grow up knowing how to use a search engine, but not how to sit beside someone whose heart is broken from painful loss.
What Kenya reminded me is this: the best grief support system isn’t always a therapist or a book—though those have their place. Sometimes, the best support is a village that remembers, that is available, that is experienced. A child who knows “the old ways” will pass them on. The best grief support is being surrounded and protected by a community that doesn’t flinch when death comes near.
We don’t need to become someone else’s culture. But we can remember what we used to know: that death, when honored, deepens us. That elders, when respected, anchor us. And that grief, when shared, doesn’t drown us—it binds us to one another in the most human way possible.
We cannot undo all we’ve endured or witnessed. But we can choose to remember a little more bravely—and grieve a little more communally—from this moment on.
