What Aunt Miems Left Me Was Not Really a House

The phone call that made me an executor

My Aunt Miems died on a Tuesday in April, in the room she was born in, in a face-brick house in Bellville that still had the same green Formica kitchen table she had eaten off for sixty years. I was in Durban when my phone rang. My mother told me in that flat voice people use when they have already cried themselves out, and then she said the sentence that would swallow the next eleven months of my life. Miems had named me as the executor.

I remember standing in my garage holding the phone and feeling something that was not grief yet, more like the cold that comes before you understand you are cold. I loved my aunt. She used to slip me a fifty rand note folded into a serviette every Christmas long after I was a grown man with children of my own. But I had not asked to be the one who would carry her last wishes, and I certainly had not asked to be the one who would stand between her house and the two cousins who wanted very different things from it.

She left the house split three ways. Me, and her two nieces on the other side of the family, Sonja and Elmarie. Equal shares. A modest three-bedroom on a corner plot, nothing grand, a lemon tree that dropped fruit no one collected anymore, and a stoep where she had sat every evening watching the road. On paper it was simple. In practice it was a small war waiting for a reason to begin.

Three people, three numbers

The trouble started at the funeral tea, over melktert and weak coffee, which is a very Afrikaans place for trouble to start. Sonja mentioned, in the way people mention things they have clearly rehearsed, that a house down the road had gone for two point one million. Elmarie, who lives in the Cape and had not set foot in that house in four years, said quietly that she thought Miems' place was worth at least two and a half, given the plot size.

I said nothing. I had learned by then that saying nothing is a skill.

But inside I was already tired, because I could see it. Each of them had arrived at a number, and each number was really a wish wearing the costume of a fact. Sonja needed money for her son's studies and wanted it sold fast, so her number was low enough to move quickly and she talked about it as if slow was foolish. Elmarie did not need the money urgently and her number was high because a high number felt like respect, like proof that Miems' life had been worth something you could count. Neither of them was lying. That was the awful part. They were both completely sincere, and completely incapable of hearing each other.

And there I was in the middle, the executor, the one legally bound to be fair to all three of us, including myself. If I pushed the price up, I benefited and looked greedy. If I pushed it down, Elmarie would think I had cheated her. Whatever I did, I was going to be suspected by someone I had loved my whole life.

Sorting a life into black bags

Before any number could matter, someone had to actually deal with the house, and that someone was me. I flew up and spent nine days there alone. Nobody else could face it, which is a sentence that means nobody else offered.

There is a particular loneliness to sorting a dead woman's cupboards. Miems kept everything. Ice cream tubs full of buttons sorted by colour. Every birthday card any of us had ever sent, held together with a perished rubber band that snapped when I touched it. A drawer of folded plastic bags, the good kind, the ones from shops that had closed down years ago. I found her wedding photo behind the geyser cupboard, wrapped in a dish towel, and I sat on the bathroom floor and cried in a way I had not cried at the actual funeral.

I want to be honest about something. While I was doing this, while my hands were grey with the dust of her life, Sonja phoned to ask whether I had found the good cutlery yet, and whether we should not just get an agent in to give us a quick figure so we could list it. I understood her. Grief makes some people go still and other people go fast. But I put the phone down and looked at Miems' handwriting on a recipe card, her looping old-fashioned letters, and I thought, no. We are not going to reduce this woman to whatever a hurried person hopes for on a Tuesday. We are going to do it properly.

The word that changed everything: independent

I did not know much about how houses get priced. I knew what most people know, which is nothing useful, just a vague sense that estate agents throw out numbers and you argue from there. So I did what I do when I am out of my depth. I read at night, on the couch, with the TV muted.

What I slowly understood was that there is a real difference between what an agent tells you to get your listing, and an independent, professional valuation done by someone with no stake in the sale. An agent's estimate can be shaped by wanting your business. A proper valuation is meant to be a defensible, arms-length opinion of value, the kind that will hold up if a family member, or a taxman, or a court, ever asks how you got there. For an estate with three heirs who did not trust each other's maths, that difference was everything.

I also learned, reading late into those nights, that the number is not conjured from air. It sits on top of a whole layer of information about the wider South African property market, about where prices in a suburb are actually moving rather than where a grieving family imagines they are. The valuer looks at what is really happening on the ground, not at what any one of us feels the house should be worth because of who lived and died in it.

Meeting the man with the clipboard

The valuer we eventually appointed was a soft-spoken man in his sixties named Theron, who arrived in a dusty bakkie and spent almost two hours in that little house without once saying anything that sounded like a sales pitch. He measured. He photographed the damp mark under the lounge window that Miems had painted over three times. He noted the roof, the age of the wiring, the single carport, the corner plot that was bigger than the neighbours' but faced a busier road.

I followed him around, partly out of nerves and partly because I genuinely wanted to understand. And Theron, bless him, explained as he went. He told me that Property valuations are not about what a place could fetch on a lucky day with two desperate buyers, and they are not about what the family hopes for either. They are about the most probable price, in a normal sale, between a willing buyer and a willing seller who are both under no pressure. He kept using that phrase, no pressure, and I thought of Sonja who was all pressure and Elmarie who was all sentiment, and I realised the valuation was the one thing in this whole mess that was under no pressure at all.

That was when I stopped being afraid of the number. Because a number that does not want anything cannot betray anyone.

Comparable sales, and the end of wishful thinking

The part that finally settled my cousins was the comparable sales. Theron did not just hand us a figure. He gave us a written report showing recent actual sales of similar houses in the same few streets, adjusted for size and condition and the busy road. Real transactions, real recorded prices, the underlying property data that showed what people had genuinely paid for houses like Miems', not what anyone imagined they might.

Sonja's two point one had been one real sale, yes, but a renovated house on a quiet street. Elmarie's two point five turned out to be a hope with no house under it at all. The honest figure sat lower than Elmarie wanted and higher than Sonja's rushed instinct, and it was written down, explained, and defensible. Nobody could accuse me of anything, because I had not decided it. A man with a clipboard and a folder of recorded sales had.

I sent them both the full report. Not a WhatsApp with a number, the whole thing, all the reasoning. And something in it did what months of my careful silence could not. Elmarie phoned me the next evening and said, in a small voice, that she had not realised the road counted for so much. Sonja said she was sorry she had pushed, that she had just been scared about the money. For the first time since the funeral tea we spoke like family instead of like claimants.

What was actually being divided

We sold the house in the spring, roughly at the valued figure, to a young couple expecting their first child. The lemon tree was still dropping fruit no one collected. I gave the couple Miems' recipe card for melktert, the one in her looping hand, because it did not feel right to keep it and it did not feel right to throw it away, and a house should keep at least one of its old secrets.

I have thought a lot since then about why it worked. It was not really the money. The three shares, once you split a modest house in Bellville three ways and take off the costs, did not change any of our lives. What the process gave us was something harder to name. It gave us a way to disagree about something enormous without any one of us having to be the villain. The honest number stood in the middle of the family like a neutral witness and absorbed all the blame that we would otherwise have thrown at each other.

I understand now that a fair value is not a compromise between what people hope for. It is a separate, stubborn thing that exists whether we like it or not, and the kindest thing you can do for a grieving family is to go and find it rather than argue about it. Aunt Miems, who sorted her buttons by colour and saved every card we ever sent, would have approved of the neatness of that. She always did like things done properly.