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STORY HIGHLIGHTS
- South Africans thronged outside his home, savoring "Mandela Magic"
- Mandela's funeral last year was a measure of the man
-- Last December 5, just after 7 p.m. South African time, I got a text message from one member of Nelson Mandela's family. "It's imminent." And so that's how I knew a great man was taking his final breaths.
"It's done," said the next message from those who were with him at the end. It was 9 p.m. and Nelson Mandela was gone.
By that stage, we were all in the CNN bureau and ready to go live, to tell the world Mandela was gone. However, I had made a promise to my sources that I would not go to air with any information they gave me about his condition until there were an official announcement by President Jacob Zuma.
We waited.
The televised address to the nation came just before midnight. It was a long wait, but I was so grateful to his family for trusting me with the information -- those three hours of preparation allowed me the time and space to clear my head.
I am a South African, a white South African whose country was changed for the better by his visionary leadership. I had my own personal thanks to give for Mandela's life. Then I had the responsibility of delivering this news to CNN's global audience. That task continued for the next 11 days until he was buried in the rural hills around his boyhood home in Qunu, Eastern Cape.
The immediate days after Mandela's passing created a wonderful celebratory mood in the country -- strange as it might have seemed to others. For South Africans, it was the most natural reaction.
Sadness and mourning had been done already in the months before, when he was critically ill. Now, South Africans gave thanks, paused in gratefulness and came together in ways that reflected the debt they owed to this one man.
White, black, old, young gathered outside his house in Johannesburg, laying flowers and saying a personal prayer of thanks. It was astounding to watch. The manicured pavement lawns of suburban Houghton became like an altar of reflection for a time of hope and reconciliation that seemed like an age away.
It was called "Mandela Magic"-- and now that he was gone it felt like the 'magic' that had sustained a battered, racist nation would go with him. It was always an ephemeral, false even, suggestion that Mandela saved South Africa. South Africans did it together, he just led them on the right path.
Still, older South Africans brought their children, some just babies wrapped in blankets, to his home in the days after he died. Often, they dressed the kids up in their best clothes, like they were going to church, and solemnly walked to the piles of flowers on the sidewalk or loitered by the exterior walls.
It was as if a whole generation of South Africans wanted their kids to feel and breathe in that last little bit of "Mandela Magic.' There was an important sense of occasion, a primal need to 'be there.' At times, I watched families appear quietly outside Mandela's home and silently soak up the atmosphere.
Other times, I felt like I was watching worshipers presenting gifts to a deity, pushing forward toddlers and young kids to the front of crowds just so their children could be closer to the place where he died. In years to come, a new generation of children will be able to say, "I was there. I said goodbye."
Mandela's funeral was a measure of the man.
I watched from inside the funeral tent and thought how apt it was that his goodbye was both about pageantry and plain-speaking. I stood by his casket as it made the final journey and softly said goodbye and thank you as that great man was laid to rest on a simple grass mat, as he had wished.
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