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The Unhealable Wound: Too painful to Revisit, Too Precious to Forget

December 7, 2024
professormaurice
810 Comments
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Testimony by Dr Patrick Habamenshi

The Unhealable Wound: Too painful to Revisit, Too Precious to Forget

Grief.

Grief is probably the thing I have the least courage to explore. I boldly confront many of my demons, but when it comes to what I call my unfinished lives, courage completely escapes me. Yet I know that, like all other traumas, these wounds will never heal if I keep them buried in the shadows.

I often lie to myself and call my grieving a work in progress. But in reality, it’s more like the proverbial white elephants of my old job: launched with great panache, then abruptly abandoned, for lack of resources or attention. And then one day, several years later, I unexpectedly decide to revisit them. And at each new beginning, I am faced with the additional task of first clearing away the weeds and repairing the damage left by time before I can move forward. That’s what mourning feels like to me: fragmented, often interrupted, resumed unexpectedly, and never completed.

I’ve lost so many loved ones that at times, I feel like a part of me was buried with each of them. These losses, which happened when we were so young, so carefree, and so inseparable, have left a permanent mark on my heart. And with the kind of cruelty that only fate knows how to inflict—as though someone had cursed me—I was never there in their final moments. Their deaths are forever tied in my memory to curt and emotionless obituary telegrams or phone calls from a relative informing me they were gone.

Oh, those phones that ring in the middle of the night, those shattered and shattering voices repeating words I’ve heard too many times but that never get easier to bear! And the endless questions that will never be asked, lingering in a silence that will never end. A phone call from death that you still don’t want to hang up on…

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I had never imagined a life without them; the thought wouldn’t even have crossed my mind. Those first losses locked something inside me—not a fear of death, but a refusal to understand what it meant to live without them.

One of the things that held me back in my grieving for a long time was the need to have a physical place where I could go to visit them. I couldn’t bring myself to speak to them unless I was where they were buried. Some are even laid to rest in distant lands, in villages and forests where no one could likely ever guide me—making closure feel impossible, at least that was the case for a very long time.

Those who rest in my home country, I visited them often. Their graves seemed like the only place where they still existed for me, the only spot where I could connect with them. But when I left my country abruptly, losing that physical access set me back even further in my grieving process. It took me years to accept that I didn’t need a physical place to honor their memory.

In April 2019, something changed. While Rwandans around the world remembered those fateful months when our country descended into chaos twenty-five years earlier, I found myself in Dakar, Senegal. Like many mornings in my life, I went for a long walk through the city, with no specific destination. I would pick a random direction and walk for two or three hours before retracing my steps.

That day, chance led me to a cemetery: the Catholic Cemetery of Saint-Lazare de Béthanie in Mermoz. It had been more than ten years since I had set foot in a cemetery, and though none of my loved ones rested there, something compelled me to go in. Here’s what I wrote that day, in a blog titled Under the Rustling Tree:

“I walked in silence and then went to sit under a mango tree, one of those old plants majestically overlooking the graves of St. Lazare. I looked at all those graves around me, all these graves of people I did not know. Some were recent, others older. Some had plants around them; others were bare. There were flowers here and there, dignified witnesses of recent visits. I did not start any conversations with these beloved departed from Senegal; I wouldn’t have known where to start or what to say to them. But I took a moment of silence and thought about my fellow Rwandans, and all the dead in the world who had no one by their side when they died, and those whom no one visits. I cried for the nameless graves left along our cross paths and unending exiles.”

                   "You are no longer where you were but you are everywhere I am"-Victor Hugo

That moment marked a turning point for me. It was the last time I went to a cemetery to talk to them. Perhaps that experience, in a foreign place, allowed me to free myself from the idea that I could only be with them beside their graves.

Since that day, they live differently: in my heart, in my memories, in the moments we shared. While the sadness of their passing still weighs on me, I no longer reduce their lives to the day of their death. I allow myself to relive the happy days and, sometimes, to create new memories with them.

For instance, I sometimes talk to them in my head, as if I forget for a moment that they’re no longer here. I see something that would have made them laugh, and I catch myself imagining their reaction, sharing a burst of laughter in my mind. Strangers see me smiling—a smile of complicity with someone they cannot see. These moments are fleeting, but they are free of pain. These stolen seconds, free of the sorrow that hovers over their memories, remind me how much I miss their laughter, how alive their presence remains in me.

But I’m still far from overcoming the fear of remembering. Sometimes I think I’ve made progress, found balance, and then something pulls me back: a photo shared on social media by someone who knew them, a birthday, an anecdote someone insists on telling me. These images and evocations, so unexpected, hit me like a freezing wind that rushes into my cozy nest through a door broken open, even though I had made sure it was firmly barricaded. But after the initial shock, I collect myself and remember that I am not the only one mourning their absence.

Still, even with this understanding, I can’t always share moments of mourning with others who knew them. I turn away, as if afraid of adding their pain to my own.

On my path to healing, my grief will remain deeply personal and private—not to ignore it, but to fully embrace it, to experience it without fearing the shadows of my own fears. I want to stop panicking when it intrudes upon my moments of distraction, stop flinching when it catches me off guard, and stop collapsing when it shows up uninvited.

I dream of a grief that would have the grace of canoes gliding boldly along the winding rivers of my thousand childhood hills, peaceful in the soft breeze yet powerful in the storms. I am trying to master the art of not resisting the current. To allow myself to be carried by its unpredictability, to let it guide me where it wishes. I want to learn to leave its devastation behind me and find joy in the discovery of new shores, to honor their memories without the fear of capsizing into despair. To let this river propel me forward, carry me farther, rather than me pulling them with me into the depths of the abyss. And above all—to share with them, through my eyes, the beauty of the world they will never see again except through me.

In the story of my life, I know these unfinished pages will never be turned. I will keep writing them, slowly, inscribing everything I remember of them, everything that, through me, pays them homage. Lines and paragraphs, alive, free, crossing two worlds without limits or constraints—until death reunites us once again.

Dr Patrick Habamenshi

READ ALSO–Dr Patrick Habamenshi –Forgiveness: Love or Betrayal?

VERSION française: La Blessure Incicatrisable : Trop douloureuse à Revisiter, Trop Précieuse pour l’Oublier

You may also read: What is life in a word? The wise men have responded

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HAKIZIMANA Maurice II To follow my channel  Whatsapp https://whatsapp.com/channel/0029VaCyM5ILdQejDYwQ2b2u II To follow me on facebook: https://www.facebook.com/professormaurice/. 

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