Eight years ago, media personality Lorna Irungu hit newspaper headlines when she announced that she had lupus, a rare hereditary kidney condition.

A life-saving operation in India kept her alive, but not without the special gift of a kidney donated by her father, Mr Festus Irungu.

Today, Lorna buries her father, but not without a startling revelation that she hopes will help heal her heart and still his soul. She tells her story.

"My parents separated when I was three years old. I and my two sisters, Rose and Carole, were raised by my mother, but always maintained a relationship with our father.

School holidays were spent in his house, enjoying freedom in its totality, the sort that mischievous children desire.

He was always a lot more lenient than our mother, taking us to Adam's Arcade to bowl and play table tennis, before rushing to KFC for a bite, sliding on the stone sculpture next to Java.

Our father was also a great cook who enjoyed showing off his skills and ensured that we always had a decent meal.

But his love for nyama choma and beer was legendary. Unlike the typical tale of drunkards who come home after eating to their fill, Dad religiously woke us up to eat what he brought home.

Our relationship changed as we grew older. We no longer spent holidays with him, but this, too, changed when I joined Moi Girls, Nairobi, in 1988. My father taught Kiswahili and sports.

I had no problem adjusting to the new role of being his student. He was, after all, a much-loved teacher, thanks to his humour and generosity of spirit, underlined by those occasional treats to the supermarket from hockey matches.

To students in boarding schools, a shopping treat is a lifetime treat.

My father also excelled in his work, leading Moi Girls School to national championships.

And his conversations were not complete without a quote from Ibrahim Hussein's Kinjeketile or Shaban Robert's Kusadikika, texts that he taught.

My father loved us as fathers love their daughters and was very proud of us. Where society dictates that men show little emotion, my father had no problem displaying his.

When marking my birthday last year, he travelled from Nyeri to cook lunch for me, just because I had mentioned that I missed the way he made chicken.

But the gesture of his selfless love came in 1998, when he donated his kidney to me. Three years later, when I needed a second transplant and he had just retired, dad used up most of his pension to pay for the operaton in India.

In mid-December last year, my father was admitted to hospital, and diagnosed with HIV.

His greatest concern was that his daughters accept him. I have battled with poor health for more than 10 years, so why would I have rejected him on account of his?

Kenya declared Aids a national disaster, yet no one seems to die from it, at least not people we can put faces to.

The main reason for people shying away is the stereotype that only promiscuous people get infected.

We do not know how my father contracted the virus, but it is not our concern. What we, as his daughters, care about is that the world knows that though he was not perfect, we are still very proud of who he was and what he meant to us.

I am glad that in his final days he was surrounded by his daughters. The night before he went into ICU, he had great difficulty breathing but was still cracking jokes.

I would like to share one of our favourite quotes. It is often and wrongly accredited to Nelson Mandela although these are the words of Marianne Williamson:

"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves 'who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?'"

He was a teacher in life and in his death he has taught us that we are not immune and that we are vulnerable to HIV and other vagaries of life."