In those last moments Yolande Korkie shared with her husband Pierre, he hugged her and told her how much he loved her and his two children.
Yesterday she was set to see her husband again, but this time as part of the formality of identifying a body.
It wasn’t, she told media yesterday, the outcome she had expected.
In the hours before Pierre was killed on Saturday during a botched US special forces rescue in Yemen, Korkie had been told that his release was eminent.
“I visualised something different, him holding me in his arms, hearing his soft voice,” Yolande said. “This morning, there were intense emotions of longing.
“We will never have him to the end.”
Pierre’s body arrived at Waterkloof Airforce base yesterday morning.
But before Korkie went to see her husband’s body yesterday, she addressed the media, with her son, Pieter-Ben,17, and daughter Lize-Marie, 14, by her side.
She spoke of the tremendous support she had received from South Africans and the sadness that her children never got to say goodbye to their father.
“I had the opportunity of spending eight months with Pierre,” she said of her time in captivity with him.
The couple were kidnapped in May last year. She was released in January.
Gift of the Givers, the humanitarian organisation that organised the press conference, had negotiated Pierre’s release from his Al-Qaeda captives.
The organisation’s founder, Imtiaz Sooliman, said yesterday that the plan had been to take Korkie out of the country to meet with her husband once he was out of Yemen.
Yesterday Korkie said she had forgiven his killers.
“What will it help to find out what happened? Will it bring Pierre back? We have chosen to let it go,” she said.
The family are planning to hold a memorial for Pierre on Friday in Bloemfontein.