By Musa Bility
Last week, while I was in Europe, seated at a breakfast table in the middle of a business discussion, my phone rang. On the other end was news from home, from Saclepea. The message was simple, but it struck me with the force of grief I know too well: one of the last living men in my hometown who connected me to my mother was gone.
There are pains that return you to places in your heart you thought had healed. This was one of them.
For the last few years, whenever I went to Saclepea, seeing him had become part of my journey, part of my healing, part of my return. I sat with him. I listened to him. I leaned on him more than perhaps even he knew. He told me stories about my mother that I could not remember for myself. He brought her back to life for me in ways nobody else could. Through him, my mother was never fully gone. Through him, her voice, her ways, her memory, her humanity remained close to me.
I got used to that comfort.
I got used to arriving home and knowing that somewhere in Saclepea was a man who could still speak of her not as history, but as memory. Not as a name, but as a life he had witnessed. And every time I sat with him, I felt I was sitting not only with him, but also with a living piece of my mother.
That was a gift beyond measure.
He knew how important that was to me. And because he knew, we grew closer and closer. He listened to the radio. He followed what was happening. He heard the things said about me, the things I said, the roads I was taking, the burdens I was carrying. And whenever I went to him, he would sit with me, talk to me, lecture me, encourage me, and strengthen me. He was not just an old man in the town. He was my father in spirit. He was my mentor. He was my refuge. He was one of the last bridges between my present life and the world that gave me my mother.
The pain of losing him is difficult to describe, because it is not only his death I mourn. It is also the closing of a door. It is the fading of a human archive. It is the breaking of a bridge I had quietly depended on. In losing him, I feel almost the same emptiness I felt when I lost my mother. Perhaps that is because, without realizing it, I had begun living in the beautiful illusion that through him I had found a way to keep her near me forever.
But time does what time always does. It reminds us that even the people we lean on most are only passing through this world.
He was over a hundred years old. I knew, somewhere in my mind, that his day would come. But knowing a thing is not the same as accepting it. The heart is often the last part of us to agree with reality.
The last time I saw him, he told me, “When you come back, bring me another radio. This one is old now.” That sentence will stay with me for a very long time. There was so much life in it. So much hope. So much assumption that there would be another visit, another conversation, another sitting together. I too believed there would be another time.
But there was not.
And now I sit with the memory of that request, and with the ache of knowing that some promises become sacred precisely because we no longer have the chance to fulfill them.
I will never forget election day in 2023. He took me under the tree and sat me down. In that quiet moment, he spoke words into my life that I have carried with me ever since. He said to me, “You will win the election, but don’t look back. Don’t look negatively at those who did not vote for you. It is only a matter of time. Everyone will know you for who you are. Be the leader you were born to be.”
I have never forgotten those words.
They were not just political advice. They were moral instruction. They were the wisdom of age, the blessing of experience, and the counsel of someone who saw beyond the noise of the moment. In that one conversation, he gave me something I will carry for the rest of my life.
His greatest wish, I believe, was not for himself. It was for those of us who remained. It was for us to live rightly, to lead well, to keep faith with the people, and to remember where we come from. He understood something many of us forget in the rush of ambition: that the true measure of a life is not in what we accumulate, but in what we pass on.
And he passed on strength.
He passed on memory.
He passed on wisdom.
He passed on a bridge.
Today, that bridge feels broken, and I grieve deeply. A huge part of me, of how I think, of how I process memory, of how I return home in my spirit, has gone with him. There were only two people left in Saclepea who gave me that direct and living connection to my mother. Now one is gone. And with his passing, the circle grows smaller, the silence grows louder, and the burden of remembrance grows heavier.
But perhaps this is what life demands of us in the end: that when the bridges built by others begin to fall away, we must become bridges ourselves.
We must carry forward the stories.
We must preserve the lessons.
We must honor the dead not only with tears, but with the lives we choose to live.
So today, I mourn him not only as an elder from my hometown, but as a father figure, a mentor, and a living memory of my mother. I mourn the conversations we will never have again. I mourn the radio I will never get to bring back. I mourn the comfort of knowing he was there.
But I also thank God for the privilege of having known him, of having sat with him, of having listened to him, and of having been strengthened by him.
Some people do not leave monuments of stone. They leave monuments in the souls of those they touched.
He was one of those people.
And though he is gone, the bridge we built remains in me.