Gone without a trace: The grief, agony of families left waiting

He disappeared. Last seen heading towards Tanzania, he then vanished without a trace. He was my first cousin, just two classes behind me in primary school. By then, our family had already lost three sons, and we had become painfully familiar with premature death. But this was different.

I remember asking his siblings in the early days, “Any news?” without pressing for details. I could not imagine what it meant for my aunt to live without answers, trapped in a state of ambiguous loss and suspended grief. Eventually, we stopped asking altogether, joining the collective conspiracy of silence because it seemed to be the kindest thing to do.

Disappearances are now part of our political reality. It is one of the darkest possibilities that Gen Z parents must contemplate in modern Kenya. A child can disappear because of something posted on social media, and the unlucky families are left with unending grief. The trails go cold, the hashtags fade, police files gather dust, and people stop asking questions.

We have rituals for death. We count the dead, bury them and seek some form of resolution. But for those who simply vanish, grief is outsourced to NGOs, missing persons networks and human rights groups.

I think of the Mukuru Kwa Njenga quarry tragedy. On July 12, 2024, authorities discovered at least 19 bodies, most of them women, dumped in a flooded abandoned quarry less than 100 metres from Kware Police Station. Many were wrapped in sacks, tied with nylon ropes and bore signs of torture and dismemberment.

I also remember the bodies recovered from River Yala in 2021. This tragedy struck close to home. My village borders the river, and I swim there whenever I return. The river I once celebrated in writing had become a grave for the unknown.

Over a period of several years, a local diver retrieved more than 30 bodies from the river. Most were never identified. During the violence that followed the 2017 elections, fishermen in Kisumu discovered bodies wrapped in body bags and dumped in Lake Victoria. Some bore gunshot wounds. Local testimonies suggested that more bodies washed ashore, but many stories went unreported. 

When I was younger, I believed one act of kindness could change the world. I thought all Kenya needed was a gifted leader capable of fixing its systemic failures. Like many people, I searched for solutions outside myself, waiting for an unlikely hero to emerge and lead us towards redemption.

The limits of hope

I often think about the parable of the starfish, where a young boy throws stranded starfish back into the sea. When asked what difference it makes, he replies that saving even one is worthwhile.

The story became a motivational slogan about individual impact. Yet in stripping it down, we lost something important. We became obsessed with making a difference while forgetting how to sit with realities that cannot be fixed. I thought of my aunt again. Hope can be like a knife. Hold on to it long enough and it cuts you.

As I began working on this series about grief, I found myself asking what lessons disappearances hold for us. How do we live with frozen grief? How do we carry loss that offers no conclusion?

I was tired of narratives that promise closure. I searched instead for examples of people who could bear witness to the unresolvable.

That search led me to Chamseddine Marzoug, a former Tunisian fisherman who became known for retrieving the bodies of migrants who drowned in the Mediterranean while attempting to reach Europe. He was featured in the documentary Strange Fish and spent years creating a cemetery in Zarzis for unidentified migrants whose bodies washed ashore.

Marzoug moved me because he was not trying to save one life or change the world. Instead, he devoted himself to honouring the dead who could no longer be identified. He forced society to look directly at lives that had been rendered invisible.

His work offers a lesson in how to hold loss without illusion.

Marzoug’s cemetery mirrors our own sites of tragedy, Mukuru quarry, River Yala and countless waterways that have become graves for the disappeared. These places remind us that everyone comes from somewhere.

I imagine my aunt’s silence as standing before a cemetery with no visible graves. There is nowhere to place flowers, nowhere to kneel, nowhere to mourn. Only an open space that never closes.

Does she still pray that my cousin will one day walk through the door?

Marzoug was not searching for impact. He sought only dignity for the dead. Through his example, we find a way to honour absence and accept what cannot be repaired.

Kenya needs spaces to hold unresolved grief, not to fix it, but to honour it. We need memorials for the disappeared and recognition for those who recover the forgotten as a final act of humanity.

I still think about Nick.

That is why we must end the war on memory and create sacred spaces where the unmourned can finally be remembered.