The Dr John Kiggundu Spire that I knew, as a brother

They say time is a healer, but there are pains you certainly know you will die with. There can only be a bit of mental relief over time, but not total healing.

When my father died, I was only 13 years old. And at my mother’s passing, I was only 17. Perhaps it is due to the healing effect of time that I feel that the pain of my brother’s death has been incomparable to any other.

I could have been rather young and easy to distract when my parents died. Older now, with more reflectiveness and the burden of deeper memories, I experience the pain of loss in all its ruthless rawness. The breakage of a bond with an immediate sibling, a bond that stretches all the way from childhood, leaves something more than a wound.

Nevertheless, it is already some sort of progress in healing, that I can write this little tribute while tears drip onto my keyboard in the silence of this existential loneliness. John was passionately obsessed with medicine. Unlike some of us, he knew what he wanted to become very early in life.

In high school, when they started dissecting frogs in Biology, he hunted for them everywhere like a madman. In the exercise, which I found awful, he was already seeing himself conducting operations. When he finally became a medic, his practice remained obsessive, yet always with his signature smile.

He sought for knowledge endlessly, and quietly. At the time of his death, he had just finished a second master’s degree in Spain, for which he was paying himself. And he was talking of starting another. When he was bored, he often pulled out his iPad or phone, and it is medical stuff you would see him reading or watching off YouTube.

Whenever we were together as a family, the most annoying thing was his phone, which rang endlessly into the night – and, against all advice to rest, he always picked. They were often patients with all sorts of problems, whom he calmly responded to, offering free consultation or advising them to go to hospital.

He had such a big heart that he never announced. He often went to our village with medicines, because when people saw him (especially the elderly), within a short time they would start walking into our home to cry to him about their ailments. These he always treated and advised free of charge.

Sometimes he ran free medical camps. Many mourners testified that he first treated them and told them to pay when they could. I once fundraised for a hospital which we set up in our village (Masaka/Kyotera), Padre Pio hospital, spearheaded by our cousin, Brother Joseph Zziwa.

The idea was mainly to help to extend affordable quality health services to this poor area that was severely devastated by Aids and that remains challenged in accessing such services. John was the managing director of the hospital.

It is a baby that he spoke so fondly of, how it would grow to transform healthcare in the region – as our way of giving back to the community and, we hoped, where we would be treated in our village retirement. His dreams and conversations were hospitals and medical practice.

Since in our family five of my siblings are into medical practice and/or administration, conversations during our family meetings would often end up in medicine. Analysis after analysis, plans after plans! When John would learn something new, that became his song.

When he learnt laparoscopic surgery in India, he would always be watching videos of how it worked, and explaining to whoever cared to listen. With strange excitement, he would selflessly mobilise fellow doctors to teach them whatever new thing he studied, and sparing no time to explain it in media – especially on Faridah Nakazibwe’s NTV show.

Medicine turned John into a workaholic, conducting complicated surgeries late into the night. He would sometimes start dozing in the middle of a conversation, and, when I laughed, he would tell me that he had conducted an eight-hour surgery the previous night!

When you thought this was too much on him, then you would hear that he is setting up a fertility center (FemCare)! Yet, despite of all he did, he never sought for any glorification.

He kept a very low profile. When you found him at his hospital (Henrob), you would think he was any other worker. It is the same way he oriented his teenage twin sons, by making them work at the hospital during holidays – including cleaning toilets!

When he died, and all sorts of people were giving testimonies of how he treated or helped them deliver children after long struggles and failures elsewhere, many were wondering: ‘How come I didn’t get to know such a doctor!’

Whoever interacted with him would know what the country lost in John; the great hope he had created in Uganda’s medical practice, the lives he touched, the human face that he brought to healthcare… When his funeral gathered thousands of people that spoke in tears of how he meant a lot to them, even we his own close family felt like we never really knew what we had in our brother!

It looked like all his non-stop patients’ phone calls were now gathered as real crying people. What he sometimes jokingly said, that “I don’t know where you will seat my people when I die” came to have meaning as we sent him off.

The way he was loved by so many is a source of both pain and joy. Though he died at only 47, he left a legacy of a 100-year-old. If only grief permitted us to celebrate!

The writer is a brother to the late Dr Kiggundu John Bosco Spire