The 1998 Corolla My Late Husband Refused to Bury, and the Engine That Brought It Back

My husband Sipho drove the same white 1998 Toyota Corolla for twenty-two years. When he died, the car was still in our driveway in Germiston, and I could not bring myself to sell it, even though I had a perfectly good car of my own and this one sat there gathering leaves and slowly losing its shine.

People told me to let it go. My son told me it was just a car. My neighbour offered to help me advertise it. My sister, who is blunt in the way that only sisters can be, told me I was keeping a shrine on four wheels and it was not healthy.

They were all probably right. And I ignored every one of them.

Why the car mattered

You have to understand what that car was to us. We bought it second-hand when the children were small, when we had nothing, when a set of new tyres was a family financial event that we discussed for weeks. Sipho learned to service it himself because we could not afford a mechanic for anything short of a disaster. He knew every rattle. He gave the car a name that I am not going to share because it was silly and private and belonged to the two of us.

That Corolla took our children to school, to matric dances, to university residences with the back seat folded down and boxes stacked to the roof. It took us to the hospital the night my daughter was born and it took us to too many funerals over the years, including, eventually, in a manner of speaking, his own, because his coffin left from a house with that car parked outside it.

So when everyone told me to sell it, what they were really telling me was to sell a piece of our whole marriage. I was not ready.

The morning it would not start

For about a year I started it once a week, let it idle, and put it away again, the way Sipho had taught me you should with a car that is standing. Then one cold morning it simply would not turn over. It coughed, it strained, and then it fell silent, and something about that silence undid me completely. It felt like losing him a second time. The last thing in the world that still ran on his care and his knowledge had stopped.

I sat in the driver's seat, in the cold, with my forehead on the steering wheel, and I cried in a way I had not let myself cry at the actual funeral.

Then I got angry, which for me is usually a better fuel than grief. I decided the car was not going to die in my driveway. Not that one. Whatever it took, I was going to get it running again.

Learning what I was dealing with

A mechanic came, a young man recommended by my neighbour, and he did not sugar-coat it. The engine had a serious problem, something to do with the block, and rebuilding it would cost more than the car was worth on paper. He said the honest thing, that most people would scrap it and buy something newer.

But then he said something that changed the whole direction of my grief. He said I did not have to rebuild this exact engine. I could have a good used engine fitted, one pulled from another Corolla of similar age that had been in an accident or written off for reasons that had nothing to do with its motor. The body dies, he explained, but a sound engine can live on in another car for years.

I had genuinely never thought about where such a thing would come from. He explained that there are places, proper ones, that strip vehicles and sell the good parts on. He sent me to a Scrap Yard that he trusted, one that deals properly and keeps records, and told me to go and talk to them rather than buy an engine off the side of the road from a man with no name.

The day at the yard

I was nervous going in. I had a picture in my head of a scrap yard as a lawless place full of men who would see a widow coming and charge her triple. It was nothing like that. It was orderly. Rows of vehicles, tagged and catalogued, engines pulled and stored on shelves like enormous books in a very strange library.

The man who helped me was patient with all my ignorance. He walked me through their Engines for sale and explained what to look for, why one motor was priced differently from another, what the mileage meant, why he would trust this one over that one. He did not talk down to me and he did not rush me. When I explained, a little tearfully, why this particular old Corolla mattered so much, he did not laugh. He nodded like a man who had heard versions of this story before, and he probably had. A scrap yard, it turns out, is a place absolutely full of the ends of people's stories.

He found me a good engine from a car of the right year, a Corolla whose body had been crumpled in a collision but whose motor had barely been run in. I put my hand on it before I bought it, which is a strange thing to admit, but I did. It felt important to touch the thing that was going to bring Sipho's car back.

The transplant

The young mechanic fitted it over two weeks. I visited more than was reasonable. I brought him tea. I hovered. He was very kind about my hovering.

The morning he told me to come and start it, my hands were shaking on the key. It turned over, caught, and then it ran, smooth and steady, a heartbeat back in a body I thought was gone for good. I sat there listening to it idle and I could almost hear Sipho beside me, telling me to listen, telling me a healthy engine sounds like this and a sick one sounds like that, the lessons I never paid enough attention to while he was alive and would have given anything to hear one more time.

What I understand now

I drive that car now. Not every day, but often. I take it to the shops on a Saturday. I have driven it out to visit my daughter, three hours on the highway, and it did not miss a beat. There is a slightly different note to the engine than the one Sipho knew, because it is not the same engine, and at first that bothered me. Then I made my peace with it. The car is like me. It is going on with a heart that came from somewhere else, from another life that ended, and there is no shame in that. There is only continuation.

My sister came for lunch a few months ago and I took her for a drive in it. She was quiet for a while and then she said, grudgingly, that maybe it was not a shrine after all. Maybe it was just love that happened to need an oil change. That is about the most sentimental thing my sister has ever said and I have not let her forget it.

I do not know how much longer the car will last. Bodies rust, floors go, one day it will genuinely be beyond keeping. But that day is not today, and until it comes, I have a promise I am keeping to a machine and to a man, and every time that engine catches on a cold morning, I feel like I am winning a small argument with death.

The strangest lesson in all of this is where I found comfort. Not in a church, not in a support group, though I tried both. I found it in a scrap yard, among the wrecks and the shelves of salvaged engines, being shown by a patient man that when one thing ends, a good part of it can still go on and carry someone else forward. I think about that far more than I ever expected to.