Pride and grudges: Don’t wait for the funeral to say what matters

Family grudges can last for decades, but death makes reconciliation impossible. One call today may prevent a lifetime of regret,

Family grudges can last for decades, but death makes reconciliation impossible. One call today may prevent a lifetime of regret, writes Sanjith Hanuman. This piece is inspired by “The Flowers Can’t Hear Your Apology”, by Sam The Motivator.

EVERY South African family has a photograph like it. Taken outside the old house on a Sunday, a pot on the fire, too many people squeezed into the frame in the best clothes we could afford.

Children on shoulders, not only your own, because then every child belonged to everybody. Nobody in that picture had much, and nobody cared. Some of them are no longer with us.

A sister and brother whose last real conversation was at his wedding. Two cousins, once inseparable, until one said something at a party the other never forgave.

An uncle who walks past his nephew at the market as if they never shared a bed as boys. Ask any of them how it started and you will get a shrug. All that remains is the distance, growing for ten years, twenty, sometimes thirty.

Then one day the phone rings with the news nobody planned for, and the whole family is in the same room again. Not the yard this time.

Everyone in their best black, standing a little apart, all thinking the same thing: I should have called. Instead, the flowers did the talking. If that sounds familiar, it is because it happens in every family.

Sam The Motivator’s song has travelled across millions of phones this year because it refuses to dress this up.

It says what your grandmother said and what you have told yourself at two in the morning.

The people who need your apology can only hear it while they are alive. The tears at the graveside are real, but they are late.

Think about where most of us come from. Three to a bed. One bathroom for nine people. School shoes passed down until the soles gave out. A mother who ate last, and less, and told you she was not hungry. We could not afford to fall out then. We needed each other too much.

And yet it is precisely those families, the ones that survived everything, that are now broken over the smallest things. Money lent and never returned.

The house left to one child and not the others. A word said in anger, repeated to the wrong person, and carried like a stone ever since. Now think about who is waiting.