To my mind nothing screams excruciating torture more than the idea of suffering through an hour-long bus ride between Khayelitsha and Mowbray without my Behringer headphones on. On my way to and from work, mornings and evenings, music and podcasts are my chosen prescription for mind numbing boredom and niggling existential crises. Lately the latter has become a problem. Blame it on Covid, blame it on being close to turning 30, blame it on my balding head. All I know is that only once in every blue moon will you find me without my headphones covering my ears, snug on my head like a toupee.

I say all of this as a prologue to lend weight, to give an air of profundity to a recent occurrence in my daily travails on one of Cape Town’s Golden Arrow buses. With no blue moon in sight (as far as I could see), I spent a whole trip from Khayelitsha to Mowbray with my headphones in my bag. I was only able to achieve this great feat thanks to my sheer awesome shamelessness in eavesdropping on a conversation between two wome

In low voices that were sometimes swallowed whole by the bus engine’s low growl, I listened to two women talk about, grief. More specifically one woman related to the other about a never-ending ache from her belly button that had been plaguing her since she lost her son. Now I don’t want to recollect for you what exactly happened to this woman’s child. There are stories that should, and indeed, can only be told by the people who lived them.

As a placeholder I can only offer a convoluted image. It’s a tragedy so swift, quiet, and yet incredibly devastating that it filled a hard-nosed agnostic such as myself with the certainty that there is a God. They exist and they are an uncomprehending, unempathetic, careless child sometimes reaching down to pluck a life as if plucking an unripe fruit from a tree. Then chuck it without thought as soon as they taste its bitterness, already reaching for another in the next moment.

I was deeply affected. Hearing this woman talk about her having to deal with the grief that followed. The way she would regularly burst into tears months after having buried her child, constantly overwhelmed by the magnitude of what she had lost. For a time, grief swept her away into an ocean of pain, confusion and regret, an ocean of dreams where her son came back and spoke to her. She would have drowned in her own sorrow had she not had other children other people to live for. She still finds herself crying, from time to time years after, and lives with a constant longing, an ache. She still sees his ghost from time to time in her dreams, on the bus on her way to work, in the young boys who would’ve been his peers were he still alive.

At some point in their conversation, I feared one of the women would glance my way and see me blinking back tears like an idiot emerging out of a cave, blinking out the light.

Yet listening I found myself thinking about my mother and our relationship. I thought about the relationship I had with my siblings and my extended family, including a couple of my best friends. To lose them would haunt me and I’m sure they would find my passing difficult to deal with as well. What’s more, death is guaranteed, like the seasons it is a part of the natural cycle. With time we lose people from our lives and the loss of each person leaves us with an ache, a longing.

The agnostic in me thinks of people being like leaves on a great big tree. With time we bloom and are tested by the elements. Some of us are blown out of our stems by the wind. Others are lucky enough to be able to grow old, changing colour till they are carried to the ground by a light breeze, to lay on top of the tree’s roots.

I like this image because the tree remains upright in spite of losing its leaves and eventually with time it goes from being bare to lush with green again. It encapsulates the cyclical nature of life, emphasises how brief our lifespans are, in the grand scheme of things. I know I’m being macabre and selfish, maybe this is all very depressing to read. I am deeply sorry if it is.

It’s just that I was and still am in awe of that woman on the bus. In a way I want to be like her. Her love for her child reminded me of that Donny Hathaway song with the line ’I love you in a place where there’s no space or time’. I want the courage and humility it takes to love so intensely, that I make myself prey to grief that will shake me to my core. I want to have the strength it takes to be able to continue living and loving despite that grief.

Something for me was affirmed that morning and with that affirmation came a stronger resolve, a renewal in my sense of self, in my sense of purpose. I believe that this is one of those things that if I can recall during the difficult and dark moments life inevitably puts one through, then I’m guaranteed the will to overcome.