I have been living in Johannesburg, South Africa since 2003. Johannesburg is largely know as the business hub of South Africa, if not Africa. I grew up in a small town called Pietermaritzburg which is about 500kms from Johannesburg.  It’s also where my parents lived until my father’s death in September 2014.  My mother now lives in Johannesburg with my sister Yuraisha, not too far away from me.

In December of 2013, I had to make a last minute business trip to Cape Town before going on leave for the holidays.  Since my kids were on holiday already, I sent them to Pietermaritzburg to spend time with their grandparents.  I drove down to Pietermaritzburg to leave them and then flew to Cape Town on the Sunday evening from the Durban airport (the nearest large commercial airport to Pietermaritzburg).  I spent 3 days in Cape Town finishing up the work and was scheduled to fly back to Pietermaritzburg to begin the December holidays with the family.

I had a very early morning flight back to Durban, I think it was around 6.30am.  I was very tired, it had been a long year, and a rough 3 days in Cape Town trying to wrap up and I was looking forward to the holidays. When I got to the airport, I tried to find my flight on the overhead flight boards.  Confused, I stared at the board for like 5 minutes in utter panic!  Where the hell was my 6.30 flight to Johannesburg?  I obviously had become accustomed to looking for the flight back to Johannesburg and not Durban.  It took me like 5 minutes of staring in confusion to remember that I was flying to Durban and not Johannesburg.  I had quite a laugh all by myself, checked into my flight and finally reached my childhood home in Pietermaritzburg, completely exhausted.  That’s when I recorded the memory you see in the picture.

In December 2018, my family and I were doing a road trip on the Garden Route of South Africa and where going to spend the rest of the festive season in beautiful Cape Town.  Whilst we were driving, I looked at my memories on Facebook and found the very precious memory.

I’m really so glad that I recorded this memory, one of my most precious. It would be the last time I would hear my parent’s voices together in my childhood home.  It would be the last Christmas/December Holiday that was ‘normal’ for me, Mum and Yuraisha. We try so hard to find our new ‘normal’. 4 years later we still struggle. Time doesn’t heal wounds, you just learn to cope with the loss. I miss him so much everyday and especially now on this road trip. He was supposed to retire the year that he died and he and mum had plans to tour the country and stop over at all the towns along the garden route.

Whenever I though about my father getting old, I always pictured him becoming this old man in his 80’s who couldn’t hear.  I say that because he had the ability to switch off and ‘not hear’ us when he wanted to. He was always so comical with the things he did and I just pictured this comical old man in his 80s. Up until a week before he died I still didn’t believe that he would die. It was only when the doctor told us that there was nothing more that they could do that I finally accepted it.

For every beautiful thing I see on this trip I can just imagine the conversations we would have.  That’s what I miss the most. We both had a shared love for all things old, nature, war stories, history , politics and religion. I guess in my eyes nobody could ever fill those shoes.

He lives on in my memories and I love how I’ve learned to see the world ‘through his eyes’.