Her death is still hard to get used to for those who were close to her. Real Housewives of Johannesburg star Naledi Willers had fought stage two triple-negative breast cancer for two years but she lost the fight in December 2021.
Close friends and family described her as a no-nonsense, intelligent, beautiful, and well-spoken person. They still mourning the passing of the Botswana-born beauty.
In a cryptic message to Naledi, her best friend, O’neal Zibanani Madumo expressed how he has struggled to come to terms with Naledi’s death.
“Today makes it two months. I was assured the unfairness of It will eventually go away, well, it has not,” he wrote on social media.
“I haven’t been able to escape the platitudes either Lol (Inside Joke). I realise you knew this was coming. But you were counting on me coming to terms with this as soon as possible as time was running out. You wanted us to have an intellectual conversation about this, to pathologize your “End”, but I was none the wiser. Perhaps I wasn’t ready?”
Naledi made it her duty to speak about her journey and share with other women like her.
“While it may not be my life's only interest, it has certainly become one of my primary goals to be a voice of awareness, information, and change in the silent but gruesome battle women face against this brutal disease. I want to lift the veil of secrecy and quiet suffering for it is that concealing of information that invariably leads to the mortality of so many.”
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The long-time friend says her passing has been challenging.
“The paradox is, as you were declining and crumbling under the burden of fighting for your life, somehow I was becoming more alive. I began to feel in ways I haven’t felt before. It was almost as if you had mechanically initiated a transfer of emotions to me for “safe-keeping”, for purposes of my own Cognitive Impairments. It is not self-evident why you shared as verbosely as you did towards the end,” he wrote.
"Your passing challenged my proclivity, all my go-to trauma responses have vanished, and as irony would have it, the only person I could spar with on this matter happens to be you Whitey (as he affectionately referred to her) the subject of this seemingly never-ending stream of consciousness.”
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O’neal says, “Is the amount of time spent conversing with a loved one, a great predictor of how we perceive the clinical process of death after the fact or this is just another form of bias. Fading Affect Bias (FAB) Perhaps? OK Let me explain this part, this is when unpleasant effect fades faster than pleasant effect - An outcome of measured neuroticism, depression, anxiety, and negative "religious coping…" (common in the African community) death attitudes, and complicated grief as potential predictors of FAB for unpleasant / death and pleasant events at two points in time. OK, I digress! Whew! All I meant to say was I miss you, that's all. LOL!”
Her mother Bagomi Willers spoke fondly of her daughter at her funeral and detailed how she remained strong she was until her last days.
“Last year when she got this disease for the first time, she wasn’t really that sick. She was bouncing around, gyming and it was just a test. She was happy. When it came back this year, it came with something else. But she was s fighter, she was very strong. We believed somewhere somehow that she would make it. She met one of these doctors who played God in her life. She was told she had a few months to live. But she fought. I was so proud of her,” she told mourners.
“She was a wonderful daughter to have. What she went through made me strong and I would not be able to stand here. She made me tougher. I know seeing me standing here, she is clapping hands for me. She never wanted me to lose it in front of people. But I feel strong enough to share this with you all and I know I will get stronger every day. I believe she is watching over me and God is watching over me.”
