Better Late Than Never

In  The Limpopo Academy of Private Detection, by Alexander McCall Smith, Mma Ramotswe, the wise detective of Botswana, and her husband, J.L.B. Matekoni, meet a grieving detective from America. He is visiting a friend who is very busy and must leave him alone in this unfamiliar place when she leaves on business.  Mma Ramotswe and J.L.B. Matekoni contemplate their new acquaintance's pain, the way of memory, and lateness.

"...All I know is that he is sad in his heart." She touched her chest. "That is the place where his sadness is. Right here. And I do not think that it is ever very easy to deal with sadness in that part of the body....three weeks...is a long time when you have nothing to do." She paused. "Except to be sad. Three weeks of sadness is a long time, I think."

 It was, reflected Mr. J. L. B. Matekoni. Three weeks of sadness was a long time, by any standards, but it would be particularly long when one was far from home in a strange country, when everybody else would have their friends and family about them and would seem so occupied with their own lives. In such circumstances you might easily forget who you were, and how you once were happy...."

Mma Ramotswe's own father is late, but she still talks to him of this and that as if he is beside her. "She did not think that he had altogether ceased to exist, but of where exactly he was, where that place to which he had gone was located, she had no idea, other than it was somewhere above Botswana  or on the same level as Botswana but around some corner that one day we all must turn. Beyond that, she could not be certain. All she knew was that it would be a place of cattle bells and gentle, life-giving rain; a place in which all our tears would be wiped tenderly away....."

Later, during a stake-out,  Mma remembers a woman who had already turned that corner. 

"Mma Ramotswe felt that shame still that she had not done anything for that girl, and now she had heard that she was late, having died giving birth to her first child, and there had been no husband. There were so many lives, she thought, that could only be led with difficulty, with pain, and because we were so bound up in our own lives, so many of these were invisible to us until suddenly we saw, and knew, and felt that sudden pang of human sympathy that comes with knowing....

     It was strange that the girl should come into her mind, the memory triggered by no more than looking up at the sky. But that, she told herself, was how memory worked; one would see something and then it would make one think of one thing and then of another; snatches of conversation would come back, images of things one had seen, memories that one thought one had forgotten, but that had been filed away in the back of the head, in those recesses where such things are tucked away."

Beyond these meditations, there were mysteries to solve, justice to be done, and injustice to be undone in Botswana. The mournful detective teams up with Mma Ramotswe to solve the cases. As their sleuthing adventures bond them in friendship, Mma Ramotswe counsels him:

"....Your late wife will still know that you love her Rra, She will know that...

 ....It is good to talk about late people, Rra ... It is what they want us to do. Late people would be happy if they knew we were talking about them...

....And the late person doesn't want you to be miserable. A late person doesn't want you to think that your work is no use. A late person wants you to get on with life, to do things, to make good use of your time. That is well known Rra... It is very well known."

Maybe you don't want to read this book, because I have just plucked out the late parts.  But this is another engaging tale told by a Scotsman who has the ability to think like a woman of Botswana and put the fear of lions in us. Death the mystery, is a recurring theme, but no more so in this book than in life, and the title of the book is a clue to the solution to living with those who are habitually late.