NTOMBIZAKITHI NGIDI

● A week before Tygerberg Hospital nurse Ntombizakithi Ngidi died, she asked her colleagues if they could put money together and cook a special meal before they all went on break.

“We all thought it was a good idea and we bought two imileqwa [farm chickens], which we prepared with dumplings. Now looking back, it’s as if Zakithi knew this would be our last supper together. She loved cooking so much and taught us new recipes all the time,” said her colleague, Sisanda Dakie, who worked with Ngidi at the designated Covid-19 hospital’s J Ground medical emergency ward.

Ngidi, an assistant nurse, died at the age of 49 last Thursday after being ill for about a week. She is the second nurse to die of Covid-19 in the Western Cape.

Siyabonga Ngidi described his little sister, who was diabetic, as the “backbone of our family”. “Zakithi was everything to us. She was the sole provider in the family … our hope is gone,” he said.

“My sister touched so many lives with her caring hands. She was a soldier that fought this invisible enemy … But when she died in that hospital ward she was all alone. The war had cost her life and no-one could even be at her bedside and say: ‘Go well, Zakithi, you have finished your race.’”

Ngidi will be buried today in her ancestral village of Nyangwini near Port Shepstone, KwaZulu-Natal.

Dakie, in self-isolation while she awaits her test results, said Ngidi loved her family and always showed her pictures of her elderly mother. She went back to nursing so she could help her mother care for her two orphaned nieces.

Ngidi’s death has “left a sadness that’s difficult to explain”, she said.

Her death has also “left all of us paranoid. None of us are prepared to die, but as nurses this is a war that we must go into while everyone is running away from it.”