HE DIED WHERE HE WAS HAPPIEST

Her son loved the sea and his job on a catamaran in Greece was a dream - then tragedy struck when he went for a dive and never came up

- NOKUTHULA ZWANE-EJIKE

LIKE any parent who has a child working overseas she was counting down the days until her son returned home for a visit.

Lualle Bezuidenhout and 20-year-old Ben would message each other every day while he was in Greece where he worked as a deckhand on a catamaran that hosted tourists.

“My routine was waking up and messaging him,” Lualle (44) says. “It was a thing between me and him, morning and evening. Even if it was just, ‘have a lovely day’ or ‘I love you, Mom’. It was a thing for us to communicate daily.”

She last saw her son in person at the start of this year and was looking forward to welcoming him back in August. Now she’ll never see his smile again, never text him again, never share a meal with him or hear about his globetrotting adventures.

On the afternoon of 11 July Lualle and Jaen, her ex-husband and Ben’s dad, received a distressing call: their son had disappeared while diving near the town of Sami on the island of Kefalonia.

Ben, who grew up in Knysna, had loved the ocean, Lualle tells YOU. “He was five when he started surfing and his dad invested a lot of time giving him the opportunity to get to know the sea.”

So when they heard he’d vanished they knew something was wrong. Tragically, they were right. The Hellen Coast Guard and Air Force along with private vessels and divers swarmed the area to search for Ben – and 12 hours later his parents got the news they were dreading. Their son’s body had been found not far from where he’d been diving, near to where the catamaran had been anchored in the Gulf of Sami.

Lualle, who’d been clinging to the hope that her boy would be found alive, fell apart.

“I was devastated and literally screamed, ‘Is it him?’ And I just remember the word, ‘yes’,” Lualle says. “I lost it.  I completely blanked out.  I couldn’t believe it was my son.