Jaramogi Oginga Odinga passed on in the late hours of January 20, 1994, as the sun was finally going down.
According to Raila Odinga's biography The Flame of Freedom, on Jaramogi's side was his personal doctor Odhiambo Olel, an aspiring politician and astute student James Orengo, and Susan Agik, Oginga's third wife.
Raila, who had been at Lavington at the time, had sent Orengo (who was on his way to his sister-in-law's funeral in the then Nyanza province) to check on Jaramogi in Kisumu to confirm the itinerary for the slated visit to Kampala, only for Orengo to find Jaramogi in terrible shape.
Raila wrote that as soon as Jaramogi passed on, the sorrowful Orengo tried to get to him by phoning his house in Nairobi but he was not available.
Instead, he got to Ida Odinga, who was reported to have been shell-shocked by the news of the passing of her father-in-law.
Raila claimed that as soon as Ida rediscovered her voice, she called him through his car phone (which he noted were a new invention then).
"In keeping with the Luo custom, she did not tell me what had actually happened, but instead asked me to come home at once for the news from Kisumu was not good," he stated.
It was the break in her voice that enabled Raila to understand the unsaid, and he wrote that sorrow overcame him even as he drove home.
" I was driving alone, and as I struggled to come to terms with my own shock and grief even as I wound through the roads on my way home," he stated.
Even as he was consumed with his own clouds of sorrow however, he wrote that he wondered how Ida would come to terms with the death of a man who was so dear to her.
"Ida had loved her father-in-law dearly, and had in turn been a favourite of his," Raila wrote.
Ida was a key pillar during the preparation for the funeral, all the way to the burial of the father she loved, and has been by Raila's side for close to fifty years now.
