LOSING a loved one is immensely difficult and it can have a lasting impact on the lives of family members of loved ones. And in some cases, the loss can tear a family apart, especially when a life is lost under troubling circumstances like that of suicide. Living in the village of Vriesland is a woman who has felt and dealt with the challenges death can bring.

Aklime Dudwah is 64 years old and was born and bred in the village of Vriesland. She came from humble beginnings and was among eight siblings. Like many at the time, her family depended on farming. “My father used to plant a garden. He had cows and goats. We grew up in an old house not too far from here. My father died when we were small,” Aklime stated. After the death of her father, the family’s breadwinner, the family was placed under pressure to provide for themselves.

With the new need to provide for themselves and each other, many of Aklime’s siblings began searching for jobs and those who didn’t were left at home to care for the younger children, and this responsibility fell on Aklime most of the time. Having these responsibilities placed on her at the age of 13 was enough to grapple with. But it also hampered her and her siblings’ accessibility to an education. “I was 13when my father died, I didn’t get to go to school. My sisters went and looked for jobs because my brothers were the smallest,” Aklime shared. “We tried to hustle, but we didn’t get to go to school too far. My sister began to go to work, those who were older than me. And I stayed at home to ‘mine’ the younger ones.”

As time went on, the Aklime’s family found circumstances increasingly difficult. And sometime after her father’s death, Aklime’s mother decided to leave the family. Aklime, her sisters and brothers didn’t know exactly why their made the choice she did. All they knew as children was that they didn’t have a father and now they didn’t have a mother either.

“Our mother took someone else and moved away and left us,” Aklime stated, “She took a man and moved on with her life. There were seven of us: four sisters and three brothers. I was the third sister.” This left the siblings in a precarious position, and as Aklime described it, they were children learning to be adults.

Four years after the death of her father, Aklime met her husband. The young couple saved enough money to have a modest wedding among themselves. The pair had their first child not long after. They moved to a new home just a few lots from where Aklime grew up, never leaving the village of Vriesland.

“I had my first child at 17; I got married at 17. We got married. We saved some money and got married at home,” she stated. The couple’s marriage life was just like any other. Aklime’s husband worked at the Wales Sugar Estate and she did various jobs to provide for the fast-growing family.

Over a period of years, the couple gave birth to 10 children. And for a number of years the couple lived a relatively normal life. Of course, they had a few ups and downs, but Aklime says they were happy, but then tragedy struck again when her husband took his own life. “My husband drank poison 25 years ago,” she stated. This incident shook the family and impacted relationships. The family is still working, in many ways, to recover from the loss of a father and husband.

The day it happened, Aklime stated, was like any other. She remembered how her husband had begun to quarrel and she simply left to give him some space. But when she returned to the calls of her daughter, she had already lost her husband. “He started to quarrel, and I walked out onto the road. My daughter called and by the time I got back, he had already drunk it,” she said. Although this was two decades ago, the emotional wounds caused by it are just as fresh as the day it happened.

While Aklime and her children will never truly know why their husband and father took his life, they have their beliefs and theories about his reason. But whatever the reason might be for his act, the family is still finding their way around dealing with the loss and Aklime’s life and experiences have taught her much. But above all else, she says she has learnt that with each passing day, it is best to make peace with the ones around you.