1997 – 2000 Grieving What Was Lost While Slowly Rebuilding a Life

These years stripped my life down to its barest bones. Losing financial stability forced me to sell our townhouse. The loss of my two boys hollowed me out. Distance and circumstance turned us into strangers. Despite the grief, Karen and I started rebuilding our lives almost from scratch.

I started crying again now as I wrote these words, a quarter of a century after the events, and called a friend for support. We both agree – grief never goes away, because it's engraved in your soul.

Having lost the monthly maintenance payment I had been receiving at least some of the time while all the children were living with me, I could no longer afford my townhouse and had to sell. Financially, those were exceptionally hard times, and although I had access to a company car, I could not afford the fuel to visit the boys. Karen and I saw them only on the rare occasions when I had to attend regional conferences in Cape Town, for which my employer covered the travel costs. By the time my financial status improved, we had become strangers. Karen visited once or twice afterwards, but then she refused to go again. I think this is a factor that almost broke me, that my children were not together anymore. There are no words to describe how I grieved and cried for my lost boys. Nothing was the same after they left. The family jokes were no longer funny. I had no energy to cook family meals for Karen and myself only, and I had a standing order at our work canteen for a jumbo hamburger every weekday. That was Karen’s meal. I ate grief for every meal. I grieved for lost years. I grieved for my marriage; not the marriage that was, but the one that should have been. I grieved for my old life — lost friends, lost jokes, our house, colleagues I never saw again. But I wanted this freedom from a man that I no longer loved or wanted in my life.

Karen and I had to rebuild our whole lives. And we did. We rented one half of a double garage that had been converted into a flatlet with one bedroom until I could afford better lodgings. I picked up where I left off in my law studies and worked hard to earn promotions and raises. Soon, we were able to buy another small townhouse. I was responsible for training staff and implementing the correct procedures in branches across a large region, including the entire Free State and part of the Northern Cape. This meant I occasionally had to sleep over for one or two nights. Over the next few years, I always took Karen with me on the road, and at the end of every trip, Ollie was waiting to welcome us home.

One unforgettable long weekend, we went hiking and horse riding in Lesotho. This was Karen’s first-ever trip out of the country. She was twelve years old. She loved riding the Basotho ponies, and she returned to the rondavels in the evening with a big smile. I arrived at the rondavels with very little skin left on my buttocks. We had ourselves an outside braai one evening after sunset and only realised the next morning that we had made our fire on the grave of the Unknown Stranger.

When we went to Durban for regional conferences, Karen and I visited my mom in Umhlanga, where she still lived with a friend who was caring for her. We saw the Augrabies Waterfalls, took the scenic route to Harrismith through Golden Gate, paid a visit to The Eye in Kuruman, spent some time in Kimberley at the diamond mines museum and bought pebbles at the scratch patch.

I remember that I was driving an Opel Kadett at the time, the first car that I bought after my long-awaited promotion. There was a built-in front loader CD player in the car. Karen and I started out with two Huisgenoot CDs, which we listened to for endless hours until we knew all the lyrics and could sing karaoke. Then we attended a performance of West End Story in the Bloemfontein theatre, and both of us fell in love with opera. We started buying up collections of opera CDs. I still watch performances or just listen to the music on YouTube these days.

Corné had a temporary job in the Upington area towards the end of 2000, and when we realised our travels would take us past the town where he worked, we planned to meet whenever we could. He also visited us in Bloemfontein. We talked a lot during those visits, but not much about the earlier years. I didn’t want to ask, and Corné did not offer much information on his own.

Closer to home, Karen and I went cycling and hiking in and around Bloemfontein. Naval Hill was one of our favourite spots until the day that an ostrich spotted us too close to her nest and she started chasing us downhill. We never pedalled our bikes as hard and as fast as we did that day. From that day on, we hiked on the other side of the hill, where Karen spotted a tortoise. She nagged for weeks for us to take the tortoise home, but I refused. We had a very small garden, and Naval Hill is part of a nature reserve. We would never get permission to remove one of the tortoises. So, Karen sneaked one into the car one Sunday when I wasn’t keeping an eye on her, and to my surprise, when we got home, I realised that we had a new pet. The tortoise was very happy in our garden. It ate all my veggies, and then it started in on my climbing rose, a Double Delight. There was not a single rose left at the bottom half of the rose vine by the end of that week. I’ve never seen such big tortoise stools before; believe me, they were unbelievably thick and long. And they stunk to high heaven. This tortoise had to go back from whence it came, I declared the next Sunday. When we arrived at the top of the hill, there were Fauna and Flora officials everywhere. Were they looking for a lost tortoise? Sneaking a stolen tortoise back into a nature reserve proved nerve-racking, but we succeeded in the end, over all of Karen’s objections. After that, we preferred to visit the Bloemfontein Zoo, where Karen could enjoy the company of the animals without any worry on my side that she would sneak them out.

When we were talking about this little episode recently, Corné reminded me of a time before they left when we took my mom to the zoo on a family outing. They, Corné and his grandmother, were teasing the lion-tiger (yes, there was a cross between a lion and tiger bred in that zoo). The lion-tiger was too lazy to react, and my two crazy family members kept moving closer to the animal’s enclosure. Then suddenly, the lion-tiger let out a mighty roar. Corné jumped straight up in the air, landed on his behind and started crawling away at warp speed. I looked around and saw my 80-something mom run in the opposite direction on her two thin little legs, aided by her knobkierie (walking stick). That is such a special memory.

Little did we realise how fortuitous these meetings and the rebuilding of our relationship with Corné were. When Karen and I moved to Johannesburg in 2001, and I was diagnosed with breast cancer six months later, Corné was the one I turned to for assistance.

Featured photo: Karen, then a twelve-year-old, on the back of a Basotho pony in the Drakensberg, Lesotho.

Image in body: Stylised photo of Karen and the turtle she snuck out of a nature reserve and then had to sneak back in, circa 1996.