Letters from the Other Side

5. So long, farewell, auf wiedersehen, goodbye

1 June 2010 (30 years old)

Dear Karien

My, I can't believe it's been a year and half since I've been back in South Africa. What a surrealistic nightmare, just like the movie, "What dreams may come". Our dearly beloved, Bo, who was only 5 years old, was taken from us. He was his mother and father's sweetheart and his Grandma's darling. We miss him very much. No one will ever take his place in our lives.

There are no words when a child dies. Just shock. And unbelief. Nobody expected it. For the life of you, you just can't wrap your head around it.

There are so many tears you didn't even know you had so much water in your body. We cried so much our tear ducks were dry. The physical action of crying became painful after a couple of weeks. But you still can't stop.

Time moves on and you pack it away in that suitcase under the bed. The worst shock is, at least, over now. All that remains behind is a dull ache, like the phantom pain of a amputated limb. You know he lives, just not here anymore. But you get used to it.

I still struggle to find words to tell what happened. These days I find it easier to talk to people who also lost a child at a young age like my current employers who also lost their first baby.

The pain is unbearable. I was only Bo's aunty. I can't even, in my wildest nightmares, imagine how it must be for my sister, brother-in-law and mother. Mommy, Daddy and "Ouma" (Granny) each dealt with it in a different manner. That's why I'm silent and I don't talk too much when I'm around them. Some want to talk, others don't and some run away. But each deals with it in their own way. 

I was there and have first-hand experience of how it hit "Ouma". My mom and Bo had a very special bond. She worked for my sister, when Bo was just a toddler, as his childminder. My mom has just always had this wonderful way with babies and young children. She never wanted to be a career woman, she just wanted to have lots of children and be a stay-at-home mom. That was her dream. But Life did not ask her and took her on another road. She had to enter the work force and she hated it!

So it was an absolute dream job for "Ouma" to help raise her grandson. She was Bo's caregiver for the first months and years of his life and that's why the two of them had a very close bond. When mom and I went to babysit the kids, I just immediately went up to the girls. Bo only had eyes for his "Ouma Het". I always teasingly called myself "Oupa Yvette" because I was there, at my sister's house, almost every weekend, babysitting with my mom.

I still remember the day, when we were far away in Thailand and got the news that Bo was sick and would we please pray for him? He'd picked up some weird virus at the sea. The medicine wasn't working.

It was the week before Christmas in 2008. Mom and I were teaching in Thailand. It was the middle of the school semester and we were busy hustling and bustling with all the school work and activities. Thailand doesn't celebrate Christmas but usually gives Christmas day off to the "falang" teachers. I was very excited, because after 8 months, mom would come visit me in Phetchaburi for the first time, on her own, over the Christmas weekend.

It was then that my sister sms'ed us and asked us to pray for Bo. Like clockwork, we were so used to the children's illnesses making the rounds, with the seasons, that not one of us really worried. We did, however, pray for him with full faith, believing he would be healed and then we put it out of our minds.