Jackie Strydom and her sons lost everything she owns when a fire razed their flat, but the greatest loss is her husband’s ashes.
|||Durban - When Jackie Strydom lost her husband in a horror car accident last year, she kept his ashes in her flat to keep him close.
Last Friday, a fire razed her Musgrave flat, leaving the mother of two young boys destitute, having lost her home, everything she owned and her husband’s remains.
Fredrik Strydom died just eight months ago in a head-on collision. Jackie, who was with him at the time, broke both her arms and was badly battered.
“All I saw was lights coming towards us. I screamed: ‘No!’,” said a tearful Strydom.
She recalls waking up still trapped in the car and felt for her husband next to her.
“He was still and cold.” She spent two weeks in hospital.
With the family’s breadwinner gone, an unemployed Strydom had to move out of her Glenwood home into the Jesmond Court flat, on Berea Park Road. “I wasn’t working - I moved into the flat on faith.”
Her faith paid off. She was offered a job on a recommendation by an acquaintance who knew about her situation.
Her employer, Monique Peterson, said: “I hired her on compassion - there was just something about her.”
Things were just starting to stabilise for the Strydoms when the fire, thought to have been caused by a faulty wall plug, devastated them.
“We lost everything - the toy cars the boys used to collect with their dad, his photographs.”
She said her sons - Jayden, 6, and Malachi, 4 - were traumatised. “Malachi has become withdrawn and quiet. Jayden talks about the fire all the time and cries.”
Peterson said she did not think twice about taking the family in.
“It was a miracle that there were exactly four beds in my granny flat” - for Strydom, her mother, Shelagh, and the boys.
Strydom describes Peterson as an absolute blessing.
Peterson’s kindness comes from her belief in God and having lost her eight-year-old son to brain cancer.
Strydom said she was overwhelmed by the support she had received from the Peterson family, friends and even strangers.
Daily News