Home-made breakfast bright and early in the morning.
A lounge filled with paper bags filled with gifts suitable for his two daughters and wife.
It would be incomplete without three bouquets of flowers in different colours, stuffed with bank notes and maybe a little extra money for the eldest daughter.
This would be the most ideal way that Valentine’s Day would have kickstarted yesterday in the Ngubeni household.
To end the love celebrations with a bang, he would have taken all three of his favourite girls out for dinner when the youngest one comes back from school.
But ever since Menzi Ngubane passed away three years ago, Valentine’s Day has never been the same again. In fact, it’s a very quiet day.
Instead of celebrating the day at all, Menzi’s widow Sikelelwa spent the whole day in her bedroom, missing her husband while her eldest daughter was also cocooned in the next bedroom.
Knowing that her father was going to go all out for the day, she took a day off from work because she is also still hurting from the loss.
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“He was quite a romantic and he loved to surprise me with beautiful presents, bouquet of roses with money in it, he would take me to dinner and buy me dinner but ever since he passed, days like these and anything that has to do with celebrating, I just get into a cocoon and stay indoors. I was quite lonely, and I was thinking about him at all. It still hurts.”
Sikelelwa reiterates what she previously told TRUELOVE earlier this year.
"Life has been very difficult since the passing of my husband. It's difficult to pick the pieces, nothing feels good. Nothing makes sense, me and kids are taking it one day at a time. It's almost three years now but it still hurts.”
"I miss everything about my husband. His hugs, his laughter and the way he looked at me and the way he made me feel. I asked my daughter what she misses about him, and she said his smell. My husband smelled darn good," she said.
Reminscing on the last big gift he bought for her, she shares that it wasn’t even her birthday or Valentine’s. Menzi randomly got her a Mercedes Benz CLA AMG to apologise to her after they had “a little tiff” over the holidays.
The widow featured on Showmax’s Widows Unveiled reality show says that whenever she would get spoils, the daughters would also be in for a treat.
According to his logic, this was to ensure that her daughters are so used to princess treatment that they do not accept the mediocre type from boys in the streets, trying to date them.
As she battles tears, the mother of two tells Drum that she now knows how true the saying of only stumbling upon your soulmate once in a lifetime is.
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“Udali (that’s what we used to call each other) was ubambo lwam. That man loved me, he treated me like a queen. I was saying yesterday to my eldest daughter that I’ve been in relationships before, but I never felt the love that my husband gave me from anyone else. He worshipped the ground I walk on. Whatever I wanted, udali would get for me when he can.”
“I doubt that I’ll ever find a love like that again. I would rather just be with my kids. Yes, loneliness will creep in somehow, but a relationship right now is the last thing on my mind.”
13 March 2024 will mark exactly three years since he passed on and Sikelelwa says that it still hurts like it happened yesterday.
The two lovebirds dated, broke up and got married. They were together from 2014 until 2021 when the legendary actor Menzi Ngubane took his last breath. Their daughters are aged 25 and 14 years.
