A Widow's Best Friend!

“I know it’s my life, but sometimes I feel as though it can’t possibly be my life. My husband was just here; he was sharing this very same bed with me” this is a constant conversation in my head almost every evening before bed.

This is why I need anxiety medication. For most challenges. I’ve managed to cope without any medical intervention, but this one was built different.It’s as if my enemy was carefully studying me. The blows he kept throwing at me years before were not just to kill me, but they were also to test my tolerance level.

We tend to forget that those who declare war on us are already prepared when they strike. While for us it’s usually the first strike that makes us aware there’s a war waged on us.

Also, those who choose to be our enemies are very patient, calculating and absolutely cunning; because how else would they overcome us?

This was proven to my great friend Nthabiseng. After a few years of marriage, her and her husband expected their first child. I was one of the first people to know about the news because my now husband and I were trying to conceive too.

But just after their precious baby boy was born, her husband was retrenched from work.

My Mbu and I were good friends with Nthabi and her husband. We often toasted the New Year together as couples and shared braai dates as often as possible – so when Calvin lost his job we were all sad. We were hopeful that it wouldn’t be long before another job became available for him. But this this wasn’t about to happen in our time frame.

The first year was tough, but they managed to stay afloat. Their savings came in quite handy. This was now 2015. When 2016 started, my husband and I relocated to Kuruman, a province hours away. I now became a house wife and had a small hair business to keep busy. All our friends and family were now far and we travelled often to visit them.

It was also in 2016 that things went from bad to worse for my friend and her husband. She’d often call for money and to off load. At first I didn’t mention the money to my husband. I would take the kids school fees money and give to her and once money came in from the hair business, I’d then pay the kids school fees. It wasn’t because my husband would have had issues about it, but because it wasn’t a lot of money. It was a few hundred rands that we could spare, but for our friends it meant food for their child. And also because there’s that confidentiality thing; I knew my friend and her husband were going through a tough time and probably her husband wanted to keep his pride. I mean Calvin could have reached out to Mbu – but he didn’t, so it was kept between the wives.

As the year progressed, one evening I received a text from Nthabi. She said they had been involved in a bad car accident. They were all in the car with the baby, by God’s grace they were not hurt, just minor scratches but the car was written off. Yet another huge blow for them.

A few weeks later my friend called me, it was another offloading call; but this time I battled to carry the load she was offloading. My husband walked in a few minutes later, I had tears in my eyes. He asked what had happened. I than sat him down and told him that for the past months I have been giving my friend money to help out and that she paid it back but only to borrow again. I told my husband that I can’t take it anymore and asked him if we could commit to helping them. He was shocked that I never mentioned it for all these months, but as a man he appreciated that we protected Calvin’s pride. Calvin and Mbu became friends through us; the wives. And we didn’t know if their own friendship would be able to handle this.

Nthabi and I have shared money for years. Before meeting Mbu, I went through a divorce and that introduced me to debt. So for me and Nthabi this was another challenge, but for Calvin and Mbu, it was the first test of their friendship.

Mbu then took me to the bank, withdraw from our savings and asked me to send the money to Nthabi. I sent it and then gave her a call. She cried, she felt relief too, it was now in the open and all four of us knew about the challenges our friends were going through.

Mbu is the one circled. I think they were watching soccer.

This sigh of relief was short lived because a few weeks later, Mbu became very ill. And in a month’s time he was gone.

So yesterday morning Nthabi sends me audio messages. She was telling me about a dream she had of me. I am usually the dreaming one in our relationship but I suppose for this to echo in my heart it had to come from her.

For the past month or so I have been in this transition of letting go of my late husband Mbu and last week was particularly hard because it would have been his 35^th birthday – so that on its own makes things not just confusing but very challenging and often hard to explain to those around me.

Which is why her dream left me in tears. It was a huge sigh of relief but narrated as a cry. I confessed to her that yes, everything you dreamed about was true. And maybe as my friend the dream was meant to help her better understand me and support me in this transition and journey of widowhood.

This particular blog post is about not just her, but many other people who have seen their friends lose their spouses and the unwritten rules of how to support them. So in her words, that's why I am using screenshots from her WhatsApp status. May you not only find courage to support others, but may your patience for them grow.

Like I said to her yesterday “…this (me losing a spouse to death) was new to us all as a friendship, our other friends included, but you guys stood by me even though I didn’t make sense to you and for that I thank you, because there is no manual for this journey. I had and still have no point of reference; I find things out as I go…”