The hardest thing about losing someone important, loved and present in one’s life is that often, you don’t know when the ‘last’ time will be.

Today there will be no table laid for Tata who sat at it for more than a decade.

No more making sure there is money in cash, and macaroni cheese, dessert, rusks and fruit.

No tea will be made in the morning on the days he came here, no breakfast snack put out with my dog skipping around my and his feet, trying to get closer to his body that had been through so much.

The last normal day – I do not remember which it was as it is a blur of illness, hospital visits, recovery, family discussions, and then leaving to be cared for by a family member in another town.

What I know is that after the storm, he is gone. And today, is quiet.

Tata is one of the humans who bore the brunt of apartheid. Worked his whole life, hard, for decades and had so little. I remember when the “rainbow” began crumbling in earnest for me – it was on the day of Mandela’s funeral and I looked out the window, with sadness in my heart at the loss of a leader of his caliber, someone who had laid down so much. And there was Tata – old, bent over, working in the field. Someone for whom not much had changed in his lifetime, regardless of Mandela and all he had laid down in his younger life.

My friend Mawethu, and I, helped him move homes a few years ago. We drove him from Samora Machel, a township community where he lived for some time after having to leave Constantia where he had lived on site working for a family for 30 years. He was moving to Vrygrond, near Lavender Hill. We took Mawethu’s bakkie and my little car, so we could fit it all in. And we did not need to – except that we needed space for his dogs. He had so little.

I drove behind Mawethu with Tata’s dogs and Tata. Peggy, his tiny feisty one, sat contented in his arms. Tsotsi in the back, not so sure. I looked at the contents of Mawethu’s bakkie. So scant. Hard work does not lead to wealth or even ‘enough’ for wellbeing. This I know.

We were his last ‘stop’ in terms of work. We encouraged him to retire. But he loved the garden and being outdoors. Knowing where he lived and what poverty and a lifetime soaked in injustice looks like waking up each day, I understood why. He had no garden, no yard, not even a patch of grass to grow something in. His dogs were two of the happiest creatures I know, because of him and how much he loved them, not because he had ‘space’.

He also needed the wages. To keep going.

After his illness and absence for more than a month, he came here for a day – played with my dogs who looked more excited to see him each morning than me, lay on my couch in the sunshine, resting, falling asleep. I did not know that was the last day. A friend who cares about him wrapped a warm scarf around his neck and we laughed together.

I laid the table. For the last time.

I remembered the day he had stood there in that same spot on my verandah five years before, with his hands covering his eyes, saying, he knew that God loved him. Because he had a little ‘home’ of his own, thanks to some of my family and friends. It was his own. A shack of sorts but sturdier. Better than before. With a toilet of his own. But, still – a shack. He felt that he knew God’s love because he could stop moving around and apologizing for his pets. He knew God’s love because he had a home to call his own – despite how meagre. He knew God’s love …

I laid the table, not knowing it was the last time.

I laid a table each time I served Tata lunch because I knew what his decades of work as a domestic staff worker had probably been like. At some stages, probably a tin plate on a step. I knew I was in the presence of a sacred human who had not been treated so for much of his life.

I saw the honor. The privilege. The joy of being able to set the table for Tata. It was a tiny act of honour in a world that had not seen the worth of a human in this ‘position’ in a society bent on classism and marinated in racism.

We never knew it was the last time. But we are grateful for the hundreds of times before.

The table is empty today. It will never be the same.

But I know I honored his humanity as he honored mine. I sometimes wish I had known it was his last – I would have made more of a fuss …