There was a banking advertisement many years ago that ended off with the line: “Makes you think, doesn’t it?” I can’t even recall the name of the institution, but it was the question that stuck, because it’s sticky and it can be added as an afterthought to so many experiences that we often write off as irrelevant or, not our rodeo, and we do it way too often. Sometimes it’s a lesson, other times a call to action, literally or via metaphor. Former judge loses everything I recently visited a home set up for social grant recipients on the South Coast, a place where seniors are forgotten, the closet that kids put mama and papa in while they get on with their lives.
It was heartbreaking. One of the inmates – because they are prisoners – was a former high court judge. When I met him he was sitting on his bed staring at the ceiling.
An hour later, he was staring at his phone as if he was expecting a message that never came, because 60 minutes after that, he was still doing the same thing. Staring, hoping and in his eyes it was easy to read the absolute pain that he was going through, and the Groundhog Day-like disappointment he experiences every day – because, according to the matron in charge, this is what he does every day. He waits.
And he mourns. Who would have ever thought that a high court judge would end up depending on less than R3 000 in South African social security agency grants every month, that his home would be a single bed in a halfway house for peop.
