Dear Dad
Five years since you left and I am beginning to understand that remembering you will never be one story. There are too many memories, too many lessons, too many versions of you that I was fortunate enough to know. So this is only one zof remembering you. Just a few memories I want to share on your fifth anniversary. Maybe that is what grief has become for me now writing about you, telling your stories and telling the world, in every way I know how, how much I loved you and how deeply your life shaped mine.
Grief is different after five years.
It is no longer present in everything I do. I laugh again. I make plans. I go to work. I enjoy ordinary days. I can have an entire conversation without mentioning you. Sometimes I wake up thinking about tea, the weather or whatever the day requires of me. Then, without warning, something brings you back.A song. A tree. A sentence. An achievement I wish I could tell you about.
And for a moment, I am your little girl again.I have learned that grief does not necessarily become smaller with time. It becomes quieter. More private. It learns how to live alongside everything else. In the beginning, people could see it. It was the sleepless nights, and the silence that follows the death of someone who occupied such a large place in your life. Eventually, life resumed its ordinary rhythm. The calls became fewer. The world moved forward, and I had to move with it. And I did.
But moving forward was never the same as leaving you behind.One of my most precious memories of you is from September 2021, when I came home after completing university. I brought you my transcript and played you the speech I had delivered at our graduation. You listened, looked at my results, shook your head in that familiar way and said simply:
“Well done.”
Dad, I don’t think you ever knew how much I needed those two words.
With you, education was never really about the marks. Of course, I did well academically except of Maths and you were still proud of me, but that was never the most important thing to you. You wanted to know what I had learned and, more importantly, what I could do with what I knew. When I gave you my essays to read, you looked beyond the grade. You looked at how my thoughts flowed. You noticed when I rushed an argument or moved too quickly towards the end. You taught me that education was not simply about passing examinations. It was about learning how to think and how to turn knowledge into something useful.
And whenever I did well, there was our little celebration: chocolate biscuits and Fanta Orange.
That became our tradition.
Until I graduated from college.
That time, instead of biscuits and Fanta, we planted two trees you had bought for me.
Trees were one of your love languages.
When I was born, you planted a tree at our childhood home called Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow. It grew beautifully, gave us shade and blossomed with colour. Years later, for your 75th birthday, I wanted to give that memory back to you. I searched for the same tree because I wanted us to plant another Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow together. The funny part is that the sellers had not actually given me the right tree. You must have known. But you never corrected me. You simply admired it, cared for it and allowed your daughter to believe she had found the perfect tree for her father. That was you. You understood that sometimes the gift was not the thing itself. The gift was the love with which it was given. And you cared for that beautiful, wrong tree anyway.
There is something else I remember about that day in September 2021.
As we sat together, I almost told you, “Dad, I love you.”
But I hesitated.
You were that Mkali, Dad.
Not unkind never that. But you had a presence that made any one think carefully before opening their mouth. Even your own daughter sometimes had to rehearse a sentence in her head before saying it to you.
So I let that moment pass.
Later, when you were in your hospital bed, we spoke on the phone. Again, the words came to me.
“I love you, Dad.”
And again, I didn’t say them.
My colleagues were around me, and somehow I did not want to bring my last born daughter emotions into the workplace. I thought there would be another conversation, another private moment, another chance. There wasn’t.
For a long time, I thought about those two missed opportunities.
But five years later, I know something I wish I had understood then:
Love is not only in the words we manage to say. I may have missed those two chances to say “I love you” out loud, but Dad, I had been saying it to you all along. I said it in the letters we wrote to each others . I said it in the poems.
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I said it in my Prayers and God kept his Promises
I said it when I searched for your tree.
I said it when we planted it together.
I said it when I brought home my transcript because your approval mattered to me.
And I hope you heard it in all the small ways your daughter loved you.
There was also the side of you that people outside our may never have known.You loved music Elton John, Dolly Parton, Kenny Rogers and Fally Ipupa among them. And apparently, you could dance. Unfortunately, I was usually the child who fell asleep during family ceremonies before the real dancing began. I would wake up the next morning to family stories about how “Mzee Kapilima na mke wake wameyarudi mpaka chini!” Apparently, Mzee Kapilima and his wife had shown everyone how it was done. I also grew up hearing stories about you and Mum when you were young your dating years, the concerts you attended, the places you went and the life you enjoyed together. As I have grown older, those stories have become more precious to me.
They remind me that before you were my father, you were a young man with dreams. You fell in love. You enjoyed music. You danced. You built a career. You built a family. You lived.
Sometimes I think that if public service had not claimed you, perhaps acting would have. You had an extraordinary relationship with language. Your pronunciation was beautifully and you found great amusement in correcting mine. Yet your early academic strengths were Biology and Mathematics. You attended Pugu during the Mwalimu’ time. Somewhere along your journey, your interests led you towards Governance and local government, and later to Makerere.
That path eventually created the Kapilima many people knew, But I was lucky. I knew another Kapilima, so while others knew your titles, offices and responsibilities, I knew the man at home.
I called you Dad.
You wore so many hats in my life.
You were my father. You became the grandfather figure I never had the chance to know because your own father had passed before I was born. You were my best friend, my mentor, my teacher and my soldier.You taught me everything before I fully understood why they mattered. You taught me democracy and governance. You taught me services to other people. You taught me ethics. You taught me that knowledge without character was incomplete. You taught me to think before I spoke. You taught me that education should become useful in the real world. You taught me to work with purpose. You taught me about love not always through words, but through presence, responsibility, consistency and the things you quietly did for the people you loved.
And you taught me to love my country.
The older I become, the more I realise that whatever depth people see in me came from somewhere. It came from both of my parents. From watching the way you and Mum showed up for one another. From the conversations in our home. From the standards you set. From the questions you asked me. From being raised by people who believed that who you become matters just as much as what you achieve. Five years later, I see you in parts of myself that I did not recognise when you were here. I hear you in the way I question things. I find you in the way I think about governance, ethics, work and service. I recognise you in my stubborn need for things to make sense. And sometimes, when I am writing, thinking deeply or trying to turn an idea into something practical, I realise that I am still having conversations with you.
Perhaps that is why I write about you.
Maybe grief is writing.
Maybe grief is telling the world, again and again, “I loved this man. This was my father. He was here. He mattered. And look at what he left inside me.” I used to think grief was a thief because it took you from me. Now I think differently. Grief did not create this pain. Love did. Because with great love comes the possibility of great pain, and with great loss comes one of the deepest pains we can know. But if this grief is the price of having been your daughter, then beneath all the sadness there is also enormous gratitude. What a privilege it was to be loved by you. What an honour it was to call you Dad. And what a responsibility it is to carry forward what you taught me. The trees are still growing, Dad. And so am I. Perhaps that is the most beautiful thing you left me: roots strong enough to hold me and lessons that continue to grow long after you are gone. This is only one part of remembering you. There are many more stories. Many more lessons. Many more things I will probably understand differently as I grow older. So, someday, when grief visits me again, I will sit down and write to you in heaven again.
I will tell you what I have learned.
I will tell you who I am becoming.
I will tell you about the trees.
And I will say the words I hesitated to say then, without hesitation now:
I love you, Dad.
I loved you then.
I love you still.
And I always will.
I will see you again.
But not yet, Dad.
Not yet.
Continue resting easy, my lovely Dad.
