Tambudzai Manondo Chirwa - A Beautiful Woman of Substance

 

Tambudzai Chirwa (1994)

Tambudzai Mauawawa Manondo Chirwa passed away on 20th January 2021 in Lexington, Kentucky, United States of America. The epitaph says “Loving Wife, Mother, Aunt, Sister”. The obituary says she is survived by husband Robert Chirwa, sons Robreen, Ulalo, and Kabelo, sisters Catherine Chitedze and Amy Brown (husband Matt), nieces Martha Tambala (Husband Alex), Hannah Thomas, and Sadie Thomas, grandnephews Alexander and Zachary Tambala, and many other nephews as well as nieces. Five words on an epitaph and one thousand words of an obituary cannot do justice to painting a picture of this amazing woman. Many called her sister, aunt, or granny because that is how anyone she cared about felt. Omitted from the list of sisters are names such as Dana Reitman, Margaret Seiffert, Sophie Kachoka, Joyce Mponela, Karen Berry, Julia Thorne, and Joyce Mponela just to mention a few. And she treated her nieces and nephews as her own children.

This is a story of a unique woman. A woman who was perfect. She was endowed with a good proportion of every good attribute of a person. And she carried herself very well. I have toyed with the idea of telling this story since her passing away. I hesitated to undertake this project for the past two years because I felt inadequate at the task before me. My insufficient vocabulary and poor word choice limit my ability to accurately depict this wonderful human being. However, I am compelled to write because I became a grandfather recently. A gift of this magnitude requires an act of gratitude of giving a written account of his grandmother. Later, when he grows to the age of asking questions, this account will help his parents (my son and daughter-in-law) to explain the type of woman his grandmother was.

The life of one Tambudzai Chirwa, or simply Tambu as we called her, will be documented in the coming pages. I will focus on her biography, her beauty, her loving nature, her intensity, her passion, her honesty, and her sense of humor. Along the way, I will also cover the diverse nature of her careers. Careers that ranged from manual labor to white collar office jobs. And you will read about how she was comfortable helping and befriending people of all ages and all economic classes.

I hope you will smile, laugh, and cry with me as you read these pages. For this is how I grieve her: smile, laugh, and cry. This is the best way of honoring her because she frequently went through all these emotions in short order. Incidentally, her grandson also goes through multiple emotions within a few seconds. He reminds me of Tambu.