Suicide/Star illustrationsFor two months, a mother watched her daughter vomit repeatedly, wondering what was wrong. She suspected pregnancy, but when she asked, the girl denied it.
A visit to a clinic eventually confirmed what the mother feared. Her daughter was pregnant.
What the mother did not know was that behind the pregnancy was a secret her daughter was struggling to reveal, a secret that would only emerge after her death.
The mother says she gently asked her daughter who was responsible for the pregnancy. Her response left the mother waiting.
“My daughter said that she would let me know with time. I did not want to push her further because I knew it could scare her. I decided to take it slowly and find out with time,” she says during an interview with Mueke TV.
She never got the chance to hear the answer from her daughter, and one day, the mother went to check on her and found an empty bottle beside her bed. The bottle had contained insecticide used to spray potatoes on the farm.
“I got an empty bottle by the bed. That is what she had taken,” she says.
She called the girl’s father to check on her. He confirmed the devastating news: her daughter was no more.
But three days later, while arranging her daughter’s clothes, the mother found something that would change the meaning of everything she had witnessed in the preceding months.
It was a suicide note. The note was addressed to her; in it, her daughter revealed that the pregnancy was allegedly her father’s and explained why she had kept the truth hidden.
The girl said that she had feared that speaking out earlier could put her mother in danger.
“Dear mum, you are a good person, and I love you so much. I can’t raise this child, and my father is responsible. If I had said earlier, father would have harmed you, but it's good that you have known the truth.”
For the mother, the discovery brought a new kind of pain; she had spent the final weeks trying to understand why her daughter was vomiting and why she would not reveal who had impregnated her. She now had an answer, but it came too late.
“I always say that it would have been better if she had told me; I would have known what to do,” she says.
She says she sometimes thinks it would have been better to leave the marriage and raise her children alone rather than lose her daughter while later discovering that the person she alleges had abused her was her own father.
The betrayal, she adds, is difficult to comprehend.
“It could be better if I left the marriage but stayed with my children instead of losing her, knowing the person who defiled her was her own father. The father would have cheated on me outside our home then, and it would not have pained me this much,” she says.
