I made a few calls. The family was still some distance away.
The guard at the gate had already told me it was a quiet day. One burial. Two memorials. I could have sat in the car and scrolled. Instead I got out and started walking among the graves. I am not sure I could fully explain why. It is not something I do normally. But the morning was clear, and sitting in a car, scrolling while I waited, felt wrong for the occasion.
I moved slowly between the headstones, reading names, reading dates. The silence that arrived as I walked was not something I had expected. Not heavy. Not oppressive. Just a particular quality of stillness that you do not find in many other places. Someone had placed fresh flowers at a grave to my left. Another person was kneeling a few rows over, saying something quietly to a stone that could not answer but seemed to deserve the words anyway.
A friend from high school and university was there for the same memorial. He is a lawyer now. We stood together for a moment looking out at all those graves and he said: you know the only two things certain in life are death and taxes. We laughed. Then the pastor began to speak and said essentially the same thing without the laugh. We are all going to come to this same place. Every single one of us. It does not matter how great, how small, how much we accumulated or how little. The destination is the same.
I know this. You know this. Everyone standing in that cemetery knew this.
And yet.
Nobody mentioned the properties
Two days after the memorial, I received news that my Uncle Robby had passed away on Tuesday morning.
By Friday I was at his burial, listening to the people who had known him speak about his life.
Our family spoke. His friends spoke. People who had worked alongside him spoke. One of his daughters stood up and said her father was an interesting man. A cantankerous man. She said it with the particular honesty of someone who had known a person fully rather than partially. Then she spoke about the things she would carry. Nobody in that tent laughed at the word cantankerous. They recognised it. That is what an honest tribute sounds like.
And not one person, in all of it, talked about the properties he owned, or the positions he had held, or the assets he left behind. Some of those things existed. They were real. They simply did not come up.
What came up was not a summary of a man. It was moments.
A man who was jovial and full of life in a way that made even difficult days feel lighter. A man who, after losing his wife of 36 years, stood at my sister’s wedding that same year and called it the silver lining in what had been a very dark year. A man who gave a talk about what it means to truly comfort someone while he himself was still raw from loss, and defined comfort that day as the act of putting courage into another person.
At the moments that mattered to the people in that tent, he had been present.
At Aunty Charity’s memorial earlier that week, I had spoken. There was something I wanted to name that I was not sure others had noticed. Her eyes. The way they would squint when she laughed. I said it out loud and watched her children’s faces. They knew immediately what I meant. Because they carry it. When Brian smiles, when Dalitso laughs, she is right there in the expression. That kind of inheritance does not require a will.
I remembered her visiting me at David Kaunda Secondary School. Bringing groceries. Checking up on me.
For Uncle Robby, what I remember most is the Ndola Trade Fair. I was young, maybe nine or ten. He gathered his daughters and took me and my sister along. We rode the jumping castles. We ate cotton candy. We got on the train. Little Pangela got lost in the crowd and was eventually found at the lost and found, perfectly calm, eating corn ice cream as though she had arranged the whole thing herself. Afterward he drove us to Kitwe, to Nkana East. That was my first time in Kitwe. I sat in the car looking at this new city thinking: this man moves. He gathers people. He does not let family scatter.
That was 1998 or 1999.
The other memory is September 2012. My graduation from UNZA. He hosted the celebration at his house in Makeni that evening. He came dressed in his Nigerian outfit, the kind of outfit that tells you a man has decided this occasion deserves his full attention. At some point Macky 2 came on the speakers, Nangu Bachinge, and we danced, all of us in graduation gowns and good spirits, this man in his Nigerian outfit moving to the music with his nephew who had just become an engineer. It was not a formal event. It was a family man deciding that this moment mattered and showing up for it fully.
Nearly thirty years later, standing at his grave, that memory is still the one I carry.
Not the managing director. Not the properties. The Trade Fair. The cotton candy. Little Pangela at the lost and found.
We do not remember people as summaries
This is the thing that has stayed with me since Friday.
We do not remember people as summaries. We do not carry them around as a list of achievements or a balance sheet of what they built. We remember them as moments. Specific, ordinary, unrepeatable moments that landed in us at a particular age in a particular place and never left.
I noticed this years ago at a president’s burial. What I remembered about him had nothing to do with policy or tenure. It was a meal allowance increase for university students, something that had quietly affected my own life at UNZA. One small thing. That is what the mind had kept.
The groceries carried through a school gate. The eyes that squinted when laughing. The silver lining speech delivered by a man standing inside his own storm. The cotton candy and the jumping castles and the little girl eating corn ice cream at the lost and found.
None of those moments were planned as legacy. None of them were expensive. None of them required a title or a property portfolio. They required only presence. Showing up for that specific person in that specific moment. Deciding, even briefly, that the person in front of you was worth the time.
That is what tends to survive.
The people who cannot go back
Walking alone among those headstones on Sunday morning, I kept stopping at the dates.
Born 1967. Died 2019. Born 1981. Died 2023. Born 1955. Died 2024.
Ordinary years. Ordinary lifespans. People who woke up on an ordinary morning and did not know it was the last one. Who had a conversation they did not finish. A plan that was still running. Something they were going to do when the timing was right or the children were older or the busy season passed.
The timing never became right.
The season never passed.
Standing there, I thought about what any one of them would do with a single ordinary Sunday if they could have it back. Not a special day. Just a Sunday. The kind you usually let go without thinking about it.
I did not have an answer for them. But I walked back to the family with a different relationship to the Sunday I was standing in.
Life goes on. It will not wait.
Five years since Aunty Charity passed. The family gathered. The children spoke. People cried. Then they went home.
Life has gone on. It always does. The world did not slow down. It continued as though the loss was ordinary, because to the world it was. Only to the people who loved her did it feel like something should have stopped.
Uncle Robby was buried on Friday. By Saturday, the world was already moving again.
This is the part I am still sitting with. Not as a lesson. As something I needed to hear myself.
The world does not revolve around any of us. It will go on regardless of what we planned, what we built, what we were in the middle of. The people in that cemetery did not choose when life moved on without them.
We still have that choice. For now.
None of the moments people spoke about were planned as legacy. Uncle Robby was not thinking about his eulogy when he bought cotton candy at the Trade Fair. Aunty Charity was not thinking about how she would be remembered when she brought groceries to a boarding school. They were simply there. Fully there. For that specific person, in that specific moment.
The kind of presence that does not require a plan or a budget or a special occasion. The kind that leaves something in a person without either of you knowing it has happened.
The Trade Fair. The cotton candy. The silver lining in a dark year. The groceries carried through a school gate. The party hosted to celebrate your achievement.
None of it was planned as legacy.
All of it became one.
Thanks for writing Sugo Combs.
You welcome Castro. Appreciate you taking the time to read the article.