Impunity Credit
This is no real-time blogging here. It takes time to unpack everything that happens at the moment.
We had a family reunion on Sunday night: my uncle, his wife – my younger aunty –, my older aunty – the sister of the defunct –, my cousine...
We all felt some elation to be together.
For the first time we were not speaking of him because he had yet caused more grief to other people. We talked about him because the madness had ended, because he ran out of impunity credits.
Clearly there's a lot of (in-)famous people out there, whose impunity credit has not expired yet. And it feels good to know that one of them is out of the picture. There's nothing wrong about being honest about our feelings.
We also spoke about his wife, and none of us could fathom what made her stay despite everything I had witnessed, and everything they had witnessed. None of us would have stayed, whatever the inconvenience to leave. And she had been offered asylum by her own aunt, several times, and refused – in front of me – and I was a kid then. The rationale of her decisions remains alien to us.
His sister accepted to perform a DNA test to confirm my doubts about being his biological son. Results in a month time.
Then there were mentions of the succession. That's something I had crossed out of my mind a long time ago. 23 years ago to be precise. The family provided the right arguments, but I would have done nothing, until friends mentioned the topic again 4 days later.
Today I contacted a serious notary (conveyancer) I worked with already, and asked her to handle that. That also will take time.
So really, his death was not an end. That was a misconception of mine. It's a new beginning.