MY GRANDMOTHER'S HOUSE IS THE AFTERLIFE

MY GRANDMOTHER'S HOUSE IS THE AFTERLIFE

My Parents Died, But They Live On at My Grandmother's House in Polokwane

When my parents died, the world I knew fell apart. One day the house was full of noise and food and laughter. The next day it was empty. I had to leave Johannesburg and go live with my grandmother in Limpopo. Her house stood in Polokwane, Bendor — old, high-walled, and full of shadows.

People in the neighborhood said different things about my grandmother. Some called her a healer. Others whispered the word witch. I did not know then what it meant. I only knew I had no place else to go, so I packed a small bag and climbed into the taxi that would take me to her house.

The house felt alive from the first night. It was the kind of quiet that pushes sound into your bones. At midnight I would hear slow footsteps in rooms that were empty. The lights would dim while we ate, though no storm came. I would wake with the scent of herbs in my nose — sage and something sweeter, like the smell of my mother’s kitchen when she used to boil tea.

Curiosity pulled at me until one afternoon I found a door the whole house seemed to hide. It was at the back, where the walls were thick and the sun came in small, dusty strips. My grandmother never let me go there. She would say, “That room keeps itself.” The words sounded ordinary at the time, but now they sat like grit in my mouth.

One day she left to visit a cousin. The house was empty and small, and the silence felt like a coat around my shoulders. I walked to the back and found the door unlocked. I pushed it open.

The room stopped me. It was full of my parents — or at least of the things they used to touch. Clothes folded the way my mother liked them. My father’s hat on a nail. Photos pinned to the wall with string. In the middle of the room was a low table. Around it were bowls of food that looked fresh, cups with spoons, burning candles, and bundles of roots and dried leaves.

Someone had placed their shoes beside the table, as if the owners might come back and step into them. The air tasted of smoke and sweet medicine. I touched my mother’s scarf and the fabric was still soft. I could not tell whether I felt relief or like I had stepped inside a dream that would not let me leave.

That night I heard my grandmother moving in that room. It was a chant at first — low and steady. She called names that I had only spoken at funerals. Her voice rose and fell like a small wind. Sometimes she cried in the middle of the night and I could hear the dishcloth shiver through the floor. I wanted to knock on the door. I wanted to beg her to stop. I did not. I only listened, and the sounds filled the house.

At first I told myself it was only memory. Grief makes memory feel like a living thing. But then other things began to happen. I would walk into the kitchen and find the kettle already boiling. A plate would be on the table with a small piece of my father’s favorite bread. Once, I opened a drawer and found a folded letter addressed to me in my mother’s handwriting. I had never seen that letter before, and yet it said things I needed to hear.

Sometimes, in the late afternoon, I would see a shape at the end of the corridor. It was like a mist that smelled of my parents’ clothes. Once I reached out and my hand brushed cold air and the weight I felt was like the press of a palm. My heart leapt and something in me laughed and cried at the same time.

People in the village began to talk. Children pointed at our gate and said their mothers told them stories about the house where the dead lived with the living. Some neighbors crossed to the other side of the road to avoid our yard. Others knocked at the door with baskets of fruit and asked my grandmother for help with sick children. She always gave them leaves and a piece of prayer, and they swore they felt better.

I watched my grandmother work with the dead like a woman tending a garden. She took food to the small table and spoke to the photos as if the people in them could answer. At dawn she would sweep the yard and scatter ash like a blessing. At night she burned something in a bowl and the smoke carried her voice into the rafters.

There were moments when I felt safe because of it. When the neighbors were cruel or the city felt too big, their faces would come to me — my mother smiling, my father offering his coat. In those moments the house was a refuge, wrapped in ritual and kindness. The presence of my parents filled the rooms and made me feel protected, like a hand at my back.

Yet there were darker hours. Once, in the middle of the night, I dreamed my mother was at the edge of the bed, her face wet with tears, telling me to leave. She moved her mouth in the dream but no sound came. I woke as if someone had called my name from far away. At breakfast my grandmother watched me with eyes I could not read and plucked a grain of maize from a bowl. “They speak when they must,” she said. “You listen and you obey.”

My grandmother loved me in the only way she knew. Sometimes that love felt like a chain. She would hold the house’s power close to her chest and not share it. When I asked what would happen if I left, she would only shake her head and say, “They will not let you go easily.” I did not know if she was warning me or trying to protect me.

As weeks turned into months, the boundary between the living and the dead grew thin in that house. I would find my father’s footprints on the floor at dawn, small wet marks that dried before anyone else woke. I would laugh and be ashamed for laughing, because grief, after a while, made everything feel wrong and right all at once.

One day a visitor came who had once known my parents. He sat in the front room and talked until the light fell soft and golden across the floor. He told stories about my father’s laughter and my mother’s stubborn love. He looked at my grandmother and asked for a blessing for his child. My grandmother took his hand and pressed it to the photos on the wall. She told him the dead were never lost if remembered. The visitor left with tears on his face and a small bag of ash in his palm.

There were times I wanted to fight the house. I thought of walking back to Johannesburg, of finding a small room and a new life, far from the smoke and the chanting. But every time I tried to leave, the memory of my parents’ warmth and the soft careful way my grandmother humored their presence held me fast. The house had them, and the house had me. I could not untangle the three of us.

In the end, I learned to live with both the light and the shadow. The witchcraft in my grandmother’s house was not all evil or all good. It was a way of keeping people close, of bending grief into something that could be spoken to at night. It held my parents like stories hold children — not the same as a beating heart, but alive enough to matter.

Sometimes I still wake and smell my mother’s cooking. Sometimes I lay my head on a pillow and feel a whisper like a hand smoothing my hair. The house keeps their names, and through my grandmother’s hands their voices keep returning. I have learned to listen. I have learned to accept that, here in Polokwane, under the old roof and the tall trees, death can be a long conversation and the dead can live on.

If you ever visit Bendor and pass the old house with the crooked gate, you might hear the faint sound of chanting on the wind. You might think the people inside are mad. Or you might understand that keeping memory alive takes its own strange magic — and sometimes, it is all that keeps a child from falling apart.