Last Salute: Of Life, General Ogolla and the Literature of Death

“I am doing what old men of my age usually do: leaving worldly life to spend the last days of my life in solitude and quiet,” Leo Tolstoy wrote on 7 November 1910 as he was dying of pneumonia, at eighty-two, at the railway station of Astapovo, a far-flung Russian village. The letter was to his wife Sonya who he had left on October 28, fleeing what he considered to be an unbearable domestic situation and its assorted intrigues. In the early hours of that day, it’s reported that Tolstoy rose after a sleepless night, bade farewell to his daughter Alexandra (Sasha), and departed for good. Like the sad stories he wrote, this is a real story of the writer’s disappearance and, like all stories of vanishings, fadings and erasures, it’s heartbreaking. ?Tolstoy left home intending to go somewhere he never reached because on his way to wherever, he was taken ill on board a train and had to lodge at Astapovo, where the stationmaster gave him the room in which he died. Astapovo was his last stop. Leo Tolstoy, the man who had written the short story, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, was facing his own final moments of reckoning. In the short story, the main character is Ivan Ilyich, a judge from Moscow who had, despite his very high status in life, lived a life of quiet desperation. At the final stop on his deathbed, Ilyich holds his wife’s hand, looks at her sadly and asks, “What if my whole life has been wrong?”

I thought of another last stop recently when the Chief of Defence Forces, General Francis Ogolla, died in a helicopter crash on?18 April 2024. Whereas Tolstoy’s last stop was Astapovo, General Ogolla’s was Sindar, Elgeyo-Marakwet County. Somewhere during that final and doomed helicopter flight, the pilot probably touched something that struck a spark or whatever the cause, in answering fury, probably with a whiff of brimstone, the helicopter burst into flames. It was a last moment of dissolution and fading into ashes. Maybe the sun’s rays shone through the helicopter windows, streaking the sides with brilliant shafts. Then as the copter crashed, it probably felt as fragile and as brilliant as the window’s glass, the people inside as delicate as the glass as though they would shatter and fall in glittering fragments. Then death stealthily walked in, invading with its battering presence, taking away the general with the famous salute; the hand raised with the perfect ease borne out of experience.

The trees stood still in the wind as if offering their own salutes at the accident scene in Marakwet East, and far away, from the urbane counties to the rural counties of Kenya, from Mombasa to Kisumu, as the air blew in warm drafts, scented with suntan?oil and a peppery flare of wild rosemary, there were expressions of shocked grief and a thrill, compounded apprehension as the nation absorbed the news of the accident.

The general’s life, like all our lives, and the lives of literary characters, is a narrative with a beginning and an end. General Ogolla seemed to have lived an eventful and colourful life. And he seemed like a man who had lived with mortality in mind. He had said in an earlier speech in October 2023, at the 50th Anniversary of the Life Ministry (Kenya), that, “In my military life, I have had to learn the reality of human mortality. I have appreciated that life is finite, humans are mortal and life is short. One morning, you are with a healthy colleague, the next minute he is ashes and gone forever. Now you see him, now you don’t”. And he seemed to have prepared his family on how he would be buried and where in the event of his death like someone who had a premotion.

However, no matter how prepared, death is always a mystery to loved ones left behind. Since time immemorial, writers have grappled with death and how to give words to grief. Literature on death is varied from elegies to tragedies. An elegy is a form of poetry that commemorates the dead. One of the best examples of an elegy is the poem In Memoriam A.H.H. by Lord Alfred Tennyson—a tearful elegy for his Cambridge friend Arthur Henry Hallam, who died of cerebral haemorrhage at the age of 22 in 1833. Unlike an elegy that’s usually gentle and meditative, a tragedy is raucous and involves violent passions such as rage or jealousy and other emotions that lead to murders and other acts of cruelty. It has been said that “Tragedies conclude in exhausted sorrow among the survivors”. Good examples of tragedies include Shakespeare’s Othello, Macbeth, Hamlet, and King Lear; the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides; Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles.

Unlike fictional characters, General Ogolla and all who perished in the helicopter accident have left behind loved ones caught in the crosscurrents of deep grief and anguish. They can be comforted by the memories of the lives they shared with the departed. As for General Ogolla, the son of Ngiya has departed to the great beyond but we’ll remember his service to the nation. And the clipped salute.

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The writer is a book publisher based in Nairobi.

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