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Remembering the precious loved ones lost to us this year

Marianne Thamm
By Marianne Thamm
10 Dec 2024
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It’s a time of the year where we look back and reflect on the people close to us who died, as well as those we didn’t know personally but their deaths leave a void nevertheless. Here’s to all of them.

As with the passage of all time, this year brought to a close the lives of many loved ones and beloved, known and unknown, whose absence this holiday season will still be a presence. The dull weight of feeling the loss of them will be relieved only through remembering.

Author Kurt Vonnegut’s experiences in World War 2, captured in his novel Slaughterhouse Five, led him to the understanding that time is nonlinear and that the clocks on the walls and the watches on our wrists are all an industrial illusion.

His stories revolve around key narrators who can perceive all of the space-time continuum at once by travelling from past to present.

The longer you live and the more memories you accumulate, the more you come to understand this concept. That’s why so many older people take up jogging. It is an unnatural form of exercise, if you think about it long enough. We are only designed for such prolonged and sustained activity when a lion or other predator chases us.

Rest is far more restorative. Ask the lion who spends 21 hours of the day sleeping. But the elderly runners are everywhere across the globe, trying to turn back the hands of time.

Knowing the ending


In Vonnegut’s world, we live our middle and our beginning and soon we come to know the final chapter, or how the story ends – for others, that is. For our own ending, we won’t be present.

For example, we all know now how the beloved poet, painter and activist Breyten Breytenbach’s story ends: born on 16 September 1939; died 24 November 2024. Laid to rest in the necropolis of fame, Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, France, in the company of figures such as Oscar Wilde and Jim Morrison.

He lived, of course, with the constant acknowledgement that we are just a breath away from non-existence. “Vriende, medesterwendes,” he wrote – best translated as “Friends, fellow mortals”.

Breytenbach leaves a legacy of a young language, his mother tongue, Afrikaans, which he buckled and bent like an old saw to make it sound like both an orchestra and a weapon.

In our own lives we may know how stories end when we return, in reverie, to a cherished memory. In my own childhood, in the parks, classrooms and the geographical space we called home, I am the last of three adventurous friends to survive.

From time to time in the 40 years we knew each other, we would phone across great distances to confirm some delinquent adventure we had in the streets of Pretoria. Now two of us are dead.

When I think of us now, I know how my dear friends’ stories end. When I recall us being silly in school assembly or in class, I now know when and how they would cease to exist, how many marriages they would have, how many children, how many joys and pains, even how many pets.

The death of a loved one changes how they are remembered. And only when they die do we see them in their entirety, which is why we miss them so much.

Good riddance


There are some who have departed not a moment too soon, mind you. When people who have brought pain and misery die, we are entitled to feel anger and then the relief that they will cause no more harm. Markus Jooste, for example.

Or there’s another childhood friend who felt the weight of the world lifting when he looked at his father’s limp body jammed behind the steering wheel of his bakkie after suffering a massive heart attack.

Many of us in the neighbourhood witnessed this man’s sadistic cruelty, but for his son the wound was deep and lasting, until the day he died. Then came the release and freedom.

Wrangling free from the grip of such a person can take a lifetime. But when the cord is cut, you fly.

Set a place


For those in our own circles – family, friends, colleagues who will be absent for the first time this year – set a place, light a candle and bring them to life through the memories, music and stories they have left behind.

Personally, this has been a year of great loss for me. My dear friend and well-known best beloved, Stuart Lowe, who fought his cancer like a warrior for 10 years, died in October aged 62.

Before this, the Lowe family – Gabi, Stuart and Kristi – fought for the life of their eldest daughter Jenna, who died in June 2015 before her 21st birthday of complications from pulmonary hypertension and a lung transplant.

I have known Stuart and Gabi for a long time, and Jenna and Kristi from birth. The Lowes have made their mark, left their gifts to many, and Gabi and Kristi continue this legacy surrounded by what has been left behind.

Here’s to the memory of those we love. And, be kind this holiday season. DM

This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R35.

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