Sunday Times (Johannesburg) - May 29, 2005

He sighed in relief when I assured him that the young man had died peacefully, unexpectedly.

Then we proceeded to talk about funeral arrangements.

On Saturday, we buried Thabo Cornelius Khumalo, 32, a soccer player, a schoolteacher, a brother, a father.

When a person dies, people tend to sing eulogies, looking at the bright side of his life - sometimes even going to the extent of inventing one. It's human nature.

I could have crafted a colourful eulogy about the deeds Thabo performed in the late '80s as a small-time community activist; about the glory he brought to my father's soccer team. But focusing on this would have been a distortion of a complex life, a lie.

His friends - teachers who taught at the same school as him, and hijackers and thieves who worked with him on the dark fringe of society, going in and out of jail with him - had their turn at the night vigil.

I did realise that both sides knew a man I never knew, and the man I never knew might have been the real man.

As an employed man, he had no reason for being involved in crime, I used to tell him. He'd found himself, I used to justify to myself, caught in the maelstrom of the confused times we live in. In a way he was part of the so-called lost generation. He fought during the '80s political violence that killed the minds and hearts of many young people in the country.

But he managed to wriggle out of this and go to university. When you spoke to him he had dreams about his life.

Anyway, on the night of the vigil, I decided not to say a eulogy.

After the funeral, we sat down as a family. We didn't brood and cry. As we reminisced and laughed about his colourful life I silently vowed not to write a single line about him and his life.

I thought that was the stuff that belonged to our family's memoirs. Grief is a private thing.

But later, sitting alone, looking through our family photo album, it struck me how the world makes more sense when I take personal, private things and put them under the public glare, share them not with just a few close friends but with those who care to read my ramblings.

Not so long ago, I wrote about an erstwhile friend, Musa Soni. A senior bureaucrat with the Tshwane municipality, Soni, in a moment of rage or frustration, shot his wife dead and turned the gun on himself.

I thought I should leave his family to grieve in private, that I should internalise my frustration, my search for answers to his drastic action.

But I later found out that the more I spoke about him, the more I began to make sense of the world I live in - that we are a generation under immense pressure from the conditions we live under.

I guess my writing about another friend, Spencer Chirambo, was also inspired by the search for answers, the search for internal peace. As I wrote at the time, Spencer died of the big disease with the small name, as the singer Prince once called it.

He was the first person close to me to openly say he had the disease. His subsequent death brought the disease closer to me, so to speak.

The disease ceased to be a phantom that lingers somewhere in the ether, gobbling the lives of nameless, faceless people.

I found myself exploring the realness of the disease by writing about it through Spencer's death.

Now my late brother Thabo has brought the disease even closer home. A few months ago, he told the family and some of his friends of his HIV status.

It wasn't clear how far advanced his condition was as he had only found out recently.

Whether he'd known all along and kept quiet about it, or whether he had discovered his condition as recently as he told the family is immaterial now. What matters is that frantic attempts were made to help him live with the disease, since there's no cure yet.

Various diets were suggested. He went through rigorous tests. Food supplements were brought to his bedside. Now, it's very frustrating to try to help when you know very little about the disease; when nobody has any certainty as to what will work. Some antiretrovirals were tried.

When I visited him at our Mpumalanga township home at the end of April, he was his cynical self, talking about football. His favourite team was Moroka Swallows but he was rooting for Orlando Pirates to take the league championship as he hated the next contenders, Kaizer Chiefs, with a passion.

Before my wife and I drove back to Johannesburg, I took him to a restaurant where we had fish and vegetables. He was still talking about football.

Nevertheless, he lived and died in the grip of the dichotomy of our times: crime and Aids.

But typical of one who poked fun at life, Thabo died on his birthday, May 15, laughing at us, as I would imagine, as we wondered whether we should be singing Happy Birthday or Hamba Kahle.

050529
ST050514