22/06/2026
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In the year 2003, partly because of creeping health concerns and partly because I felt myself losing control, I quit alcohol cold turkey. After a weekend of particularly heavy drinking, I announced to my family that alcohol and I had parted ways for keeps after a partnership that stretched from 1975 to 2003. A week after I stopped taking alcohol, East African Breweries Limited, EABL put out a major advertising blitz for their Tusker Malt which had been my favorite tipple. My family would tease me that sales must have fallen drastically after I quit. The year 2017 ended tragically for the family when we lost Mbevi in December to the grim reaper by su***de. When I was diagnosed with cancer in October 2013 and after discharge from hospital, I had called a family meeting and I was very categorical that when I die, I was to be cremated in a private ceremony within 72 hours. My wife Margaret also expressed the same wish and it was a family understanding that it would be the way for all of us. When Mbevi died we therefore arranged for a private family cremation and a memorial service a couple of days later at Ridgeways Baptist Church our home church.
David Mbevi Kiundi was born on 15th April 1989, our second son and third child. He spent his first month or so in an incubator at the Aga Khan hospital under the care of Dr Florence Manguyu. He died on the afternoon of Thursday 7th December 2017 by su***de aged 28 years in what started as a normal day when he dropped me at the Thika superhighway to board a Matatu to town on some errands. He was very excited about his final solo flight to Magadi that was scheduled for the following day to qualify for his Private Pilot License. The previous Saturday we had entertained some friends at our farm in Kithendu near Matuu Yatta and had surplus meat from the goat we had slaughtered for them which we brought back with us to Nairobi. When I got back home at around 2pm, I found him in the kitchen yard and there was a lovely aroma of boiling goat meat emanating from a pot on a charcoal jiko. He jokingly told me, ‘You are not counted in the soup! It’s for me and mum’. He then went to his room as I joined his mum in the family room to wait for the meat to cook. That was the last time we saw him alive. After calling him with no response, we opened the door to his room with a spare key and found him already dead hanging from the window grill of the bathroom. David grew up a polite child who would go out of his way to help out when required. He was extremely friendly and would be the life of the party even from a young age. He was also quite the prankster and was one time suspended from St Mary’s School along with a couple of friends for playing a prank on a teacher. We then decided to transfer him to another school and we eventually settled on Kabojja secondary school on the outskirts of Kampala in Uganda. His mind was set on becoming a pilot and he was adamant on not going to A levels and he thereafter joined flying school at Wilson Airport as soon as his O level results were out.
Mbevi’s younger sister Grace had this to say about him: You can tell a lot about a person by how they treat animals and Mbevi treated all animals with respect. He was never cruel. That showed how wonderful a person he was. He was patient and kind with everyone that needed help or people that he met. This made many of the people that interacted with him like him. Two years after he died, a bike guy that used to carry him told me that they were friends and that he missed him. He taught me so much about everything because he was very smart. He was the best big brother, every time I moved into an apartment, he would help me move. He played jokes on me when we were bored and made me laugh with his wicked sense of humor. He bought me treats all the time too. I truly appreciated and loved him.
His elder sister Ndunge: During a family holiday trip to Zanzibar in December 1999, he carried his pet hamster along and it was a major attraction everywhere we went.
“The curtains were blowing in the gentle morning breeze.
Looking at the children, Death said quietly, “Cry, Heart, but never break. Let your tears of grief and sadness help begin new life.” Then he was gone.” ~ Glenn Ringtved “I been in sorrow’s kitchen and done licked out all the pots. Nobody knows the trouble I seen. Steal away to Jesus. I ain’t got long to stay here.” ~ Elizabeth Alexander
To the moments, I reach for my phone to tell you something silly, to the moments I hear a song or I read or watch something and think how much you would have enjoyed it. In those moments, and my darling they are endless and countless and vast, I think of you, I miss you. For the friends who stepped in and send me silly s**t, and watch movies with me, thank you for bringing parts of yourself; for taking up space in this forever gap. To understand that grieving isn’t linear, it’s wibbly woobly timey wimey. “Grief, when it comes, is nothing like We expect it to be. ... Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.” I didn’t know I needed Joan Didion. I didn’t know I needed Elizabeth Alexander, she of “Loss is not felt in the absence of love.” The loss is so large, multitudinous and we feel it, I feel it. “Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going” and we are. We are we are. That was a fast year that flew by, I am still focused on the spaces that are emptied of you. It’s memories now, no new ones. To anniversaries that I am not really counting…..but I am.
We’ve survived, we love you, we miss you. It’s all love. It will always be, love. A MEMORY
The thing about death of a loved one is that there are no new memories. Everything they were is saved in pictures in videos in your mind and heart, you don’t get any new ones. My memories of Mbevi no matter how painful I never ever want them to fade away. “I get a text from my brother asking if I have listened to the new Fally Ipupa album, I’m like dude nah, you know I like him but not like that. He insists like dude for real for real listen. Me, I go aight! And I proceed to forget this conversation happened. Weekend I go visit and he’s like yo that new fally Ipupa, I go damn I didn’t listen. So he puts a song in my telegram, I listen and an hour later we are blasting Fally. Weeks later I find out Fally is coming, I buy tickets immediately they go on sale. Call my brother (who hated concerts and being around a lot of people) but he agrees to go. And we go, and we have a blast (his smile shinin’) and it’s one more lovely memory of you, my love. Forever love.
In the family collections of photos, he is simply the most photographed with all of us. I say to his mother, “It is like he knew he had only 28 years to be with us and took maximum advantage”. And through the sadness, she agrees. A nonargumentative child, he would accept reasons given why his wishes could not be fulfilled. He would say that one of his best moments was when I took him and his siblings to Toy World at ABC Place, and told them to pick whatever they wanted. In my thoughts about Mbevi, this quote by Lillian Eichler always pops up in my mind:
The Pendulum of Life swings everlasting to the tune of life-death, life-death… ad infinitum. While the arc of life swings with the pendulum across time, and plays and eats and reproduces his own kind. He divides the gift of life into little cubes called years, and each cube is a bit of a lifetime cut from the whole. Then comes death and the long silence.
