Sunday, January 19, 2020

Our old neighborhood, part 1


n an earlier episode I mentioned that my parents bought their first house in Fern Glen, Port Elizabeth.  We moved in when I was about 3 years old, in 1957.  At that stage there weren’t any houses south of the red line in the image below, just open veld.  The highway, William Moffet Expressway, at the right hand end of the red line, hadn’t been constructed and there was no road of any description through the Baakens River valley at that point. 

Most of the roads in Fern Glen, including the one past our house, were still unpaved.  A grader used to come by occasionally to smooth out the gravel surface.  It wasn’t until several years later that the roads were paved.  In contrast, for the development below the red line paved roads were put in and stood idle for a few years before any houses were built.  

The fancy-pants label “Fernglen Forest” is recent – it definitely wasn’t called that when we lived there.  (And none of those businesses that Google shows were there even by the time my parents sold the house in 1979.)


Google Maps image of Fern Glen.  The superimposed red 1 indicates our old house.



At about the point marked with a red 2 was the open end of a large concrete storm-water pipe.  My friends and I sometimes crawled a short distance into that, or looked for small fish and crabs in the water.  We didn’t go very far into the pipe.  I have since heard from some of my contemporaries that they explored extensively inside such pipes in other parts of the city.

Not only were there no houses (or roads) south of the red line, but the vegetation in the veld was mostly scrub, whereas now it is more substantial.  The first of the photos below was taken when we visited the area in March 2019.  It shows the view looking west from from the point marked with a red star on the Google Maps image.  The photo shows much more substantial vegetation than existed back in the day.  The second image is from Google Street View, at the same point and in the same direction.  That’s somewhat more like the veld used to look.  The third photo was also taken in March 2019, aiming south from the same point.  The name “Upper Guineafowl Trail” is recent.  Not only was it not called that back then, I don’t even remember seeing guineafowl there, though I often walked my dog or ran through that area.  Part of the reason there was less vegetation in the ’60s and ’70s may be that back then there were occasional veld-fires that burned back most of the scrub.  The fires sometimes came worryingly close to the houses. 



Photo taken in March 2019



 Image in the same direction from Google Street View




Photo taken in March 2019




A few trails are visible in the Google Maps image.  There used to be many more, crisscrossing the veld, made by people walking to and from the ‘coloured’ township of Fairview, which was on the other side of the Baakens River valley, south of the part shown in the Google Maps image.  I knew that most of these people were forced to move out of Fairview at some point but I didn’t know when until I searched the Internet for information.  I found the following Master of Arts dissertation “More than an Apartheid loss: Recovering and Remembering Fairview, a ‘lost’ Group Areas history” by Inge Salo, from my alma mater (the University of Cape Town).  The quotes below are from the dissertation:

Fairview was declared a “white” area in terms of the Group Areas Act in 1968.  Removals of the people who had been living there took place between 1969 and 1973.  (There were other parts of Port Elizabeth and Cape Town where local residents were moved to make way for “whites”, District Six in Cape Town being the most famous.  In many instances these communities had been living harmoniously adjacent to “white” areas.  The forced removals obviously caused much resentment, fracturing the communities and moving people much further from employment and other opportunities.) 


“For all former residents who had to leave Fairview described the removals as a traumatic experience. If not personally, because they were too young to grasp what was happening, then certainly for their parents.”


A quote from a former resident:

“It was hard, it was hard, as I said my husband didn't want to move, he didn't want to move…You know....the day when we moved people from ‘Joburg’ [Johannesburg], English people, ‘nie Boere nie’ [not Afrikaners] … they bought the house, while we were in the house they bought the house, and they were waiting for us, sitting in the car outside wait[ing] for us to get out”

Although the ruling National Party government had overwhelming support from (white) Afrikaners, there were also plenty of English-speaking whites who supported Apartheid.  Essentially all white South Africans of that era benefitted to at least some extend from Apartheid, even those who opposed the system.

From the dates given above, the removals must have been taking place while I was in high school.  I probably didn’t read newspapers back then and wasn’t really aware of the removals.  After I went off to university in Cape Town and later to compulsory military service, I do remember on trips back home during breaks seeing that buildings in Fairview had been razed and that no new development occurred while my parents were still in Port Elizabeth.

“After the majority of its residents were forcibly removed, Fairview stood scarred and under-populated for almost a decade before development finally began (Evening Post, 14 March 1989). This is depicted best in the 1980 aerial photograph of Fairview (Figure 6) in which there are visibly a lot less buildings and houses and more trees that fill the empty spaces.”

In contrast, District Six remained mostly undeveloped from the time the old buildings were razed until the end of the Apartheid era.


Back to more pleasant memories …

Below is a closer view of the area around our house.  (In a later episode there are even closer views.  I have kept the numbering the same across the image below and those in the later episode.  For instance, the red 1 always indicates our house.)  In 1957 when we moved in, it wasn’t just the area below the red line in the image near the top of this episode, some of the houses marked below hadn’t been built yet.  What were then still initially vacant lots include where there are now houses indicated with a 2 and a 6.  Most of the other houses were already there, including 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, and 9.  Even many of the ones that were there have been modified substantially in the past 40+ years.  There were no swimming pools in the area in 1960 either.






The house marked 6 was a vacant lot for many years.  A few days ago I remembered something about it that I hadn’t thought of for more than 50 years.  While the lot was still vacant some of the older kids in the neighborhood cleared much of the vegetation and made a cricket pitch in the middle of the lot.  I have no recollection of the names of the other kids who played cricket on that makeshift field.


The house marked 2 was built just a few years after we moved in.  One day while the lot was still vacant, one of my mother’s friends, Betty van Tonder came for a brief visit.  Betty had two daughters, Annette and Frances.  The visit was intended to be so brief that Betty left her daughters in the car, which was parked out in the street (with the engine off).  We were standing the front yard when one of the girls managed to release the handbrake and the car started rolling down the rather steep hill.  (Either the car had been left in neutral or one of the girls had managed to get it into neutral.  As is still the case today, most South African cars have a manual gearbox – what Americans refer to as a stick shift – rather than an automatic one.)  Fortunately they managed to steer into the vacant lot rather than going straight down the hill.  Betty ran to try to stop the car and fell (or was hit) breaking a leg.  The bushes in the lot eventually stopped the car.

All I remember about when the house marked 2 was being built was that one of the workers was rather overweight and we kids rather nastily referred to him as “Fatty Boom Boom”.  More on the people who moved into house 2 in the next episode.

The people who were in the house marked 3 were the Drennans.  They moved out after a few years.  About all I remember is that they had a son, Evan, who was several years older than me.  I managed to find Evan on yesterday Facebook.  He remembered our family and noted that my father was master of ceremonies at his wedding in 1973!  Evan said they moved away in 1964 when his father was appointed to a position at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, about 80 miles from Port Elizabeth.  (Grahamstown is now called Makhanda but, somewhat surprisingly, Rhodes University hasn’t changed its name, at least not ).  In searching for information I came across this article mentioning Evan and others being savaged by a dog:


The Heines lived in the house marked 4 for several years.  They had 4 sons, the second of whom, Bryan, was at school with me from pre-school through 12th grade.  He is the only high school classmate whose wedding I attended.  The Heines moved about a mile away, probably when we were still in elementary school.  The father was an owner of Heine and Strydom, a company that operated breakdown trucks (tow trucks) and currently sells car parts, though I don’t know if it did the latter back then.  The father died tragically in a boating accident at some time in the ’70s.

At one stage we had a marmalade cat called Marmalade.  The cat later disappeared.  According to my mother a woman living in the house marked 5 enticed the cat to move there.  More on a subsequent resident of that house in the next episode.

The Doubells lived in the house marked 7.  My father had what seemed to be a running battle with Mr. Doubell.  Not a physical battle, I should note.  The Doubells sometimes hosted noisy parties, which disturbed my father’s sleep.  I suspect that on some occasions he called the police to complain about the noise.  Mr. Doubell had a racing car – like a Formula 1 car (what Americans refer to as an open-wheel car) that he sometimes drove up and down our street.  It was probably not licensed for use on public roads and my father complained about that too (maybe even to the police).  Evan Drennan reminded me that the Du Preez family, who lived next to the Doubells, had a baboon that sometimes used to escape.  In recent years I have seen some of my Facebook friends from Port Elizabeth mention attending wild parties at the Doubells’ house!

The first residents I recall the house marked 8 had two sons.  I don’t recall the name of the family or of the sons.  One son was about my age and we used to play together.  The other son was younger and had Down syndrome.  That son died while the family was still living next to us.  More on subsequent residents of that house in the next episode.

In our early years in the neighborhood there were two older boys living in the house marked 9.  I sometimes climbed over the fence between our houses to play with them (the fences of 4 of the houses met at that point).  There used to be a shed at the bottom of their yard.  A boogie man (bogeyman) lived in the shed.  At least that’s what the kids who lived there told me.  Who was I to doubt them, especially as I even saw the boogie man on a few occasions!  It probably wasn’t until after that family had moved that I realized what was supposedly the boogie man was one of the older kids wearing a deep sea diving suit similar to the one in the photo below.  When one is very young it is quite scary when a creature like that comes lumbering towards one.  More on the subsequent residents of that house in the next episode.



A diving suit, similar to the one that the people in the house marked 9 had in their shed.



Friday, January 10, 2020

Parents, part 5, through to my father's death


At the end of the previous episode we had moved to Seattle and my Dad was searching for a new wife.


My father had long been interested in the history of his profession and over the years collected related information and artefacts.  He eventually enrolled for a Ph.D. in Medical History through MEDUNSA and in 1991 was awarded that degree for his thesis “The Introduction of Ether Anaesthesia into South Africa”.  He was very proud of this achievement.  He sent me (and presumably also my brothers) a signed copy of his thesis and a large hard-copy of the photo below.  In contrast, he didn’t seem particularly interested in my Ph.D. and didn’t ever ask to see a copy of my dissertation.  I presume he showed a similar lack of interest in Mick’s Ph.D.  (That’s not to say he wasn’t proud of our achievements, probably just not interested in details.)  I couldn’t have sent him a photo of me receiving my Ph.D. or photos from any of my other graduations, because I didn’t ever attend one (partly because I was never in the same city at the time of the ceremony).



Image: My father being awarded his Ph.D.  In case it is not obvious, he is the one on the right.



I don’t recall from my father’s letters to us when he met Margie Sandilands, a divorced mother of two girls.  (Sometimes she writes her name as Margi, other times as Margie.)  The divorced part is relevant because, although Anglican rather than Catholic, my father and Margie attended a rather conservative Anglican church and they apparently had to get the church to annul Margie’s first marriage before she and my father could wed.  They were married in 1992 and on their honeymoon visited us in Seattle.  Unlike the other women my father had dated, we felt that Margie was very suitable and we had no qualms about welcoming her into the family.  If I remember correctly, at the time one of her daughters was finishing high school and the other was in college.  So in my late thirties I acquired a step-mother and two step-sisters.  I still find it hard to think of them as step-sisters though because we have never lived under the same roof.  (I am Facebook friends with my step-sisters and with my sisters-in-law, though not with my brothers as they are not on Facebook.)


Image:  Dad and Margie’s wedding, with my brother Ian on the left and Margie’s daughters, Janet and Lyndall, on the right.


Riëtta was pregnant with Lisa when Dad and Margie married and they were hoping to see the new grandchild when they visited us in Seattle.  But Lisa inherited a stubborn streak from both sides of the family (on my side it bypassed me J) and she waited until after they had left before making her appearance.

Shortly after Dad and Margie arrived back in South Africa my father suffered a stroke.  He was scrubbing up to go into the operating theater when it happened.  He apparently hadn’t been aware that his blood pressure was very high.  He survived the stroke, but his speech and ability to read were somewhat compromised.  He eventually recovered sufficiently to be able to return to work, though from being in quite robust good health that was the beginning of a downward spiral.  It was a cruel blow for Margie, after a few short weeks of marriage she had to take on what became more and more of a caregiver role.

We moved back to Pretoria in June 1993 and for a little over 6 months rented a house a couple of blocks away from Dad and Margie.  That provided an opportunity for my father to be reacquainted with Steven and to get to know his only grand-daughter.



Image:  Christmas dinner at my father’s house, 1993.  In the foreground is our daughter Lisa, who was then about 20 months old.  Others round the table, clockwise from the left, are Margie’s daughter Lyndall, my Dad, Margie, my brother Ian, Ian’s wife Jacqui, their son Tim (whose wedding we attended in March 2019), and our son Steven.  I don’t recall what Steven was looking at.  If this had bene a recent photo, I would have suspected a smartphone, but 1993 was well before smartphones and most other small hand-held electronics.


In February 1994 we left South Africa again, this time for Hobart, Australia.  Despite his declining health, my father was still interested in travelling internationally.  In 1995 he and Margie (and my brother Ian) visited us in Hobart.  Dad was clearly struggling mentally and physically but was still trying to make plans for further trips.  If I remember correctly, he was wanting to visit Russia again.  He had last been there when it was still part of the USSR.



Image:  Dad and Margie in March 1996



Image:  Dad and my brother Mick, visiting from the US, on the same trip in March 1996


My father had long had a keen interest in photography.  He mostly took slides, rather than making prints.  One of my brothers has all the slides and the other has the cine film he took on some occasions.  Both those formats make it difficult to sort through and share images and movies, so they haven’t had a chance to pass on much to me yet.  I have older prints from an earlier time, including many of relatives I don’t recognize.  The slides my father took – and he took thousands – included many of family gatherings and of his travels, both within South Africa and internationally.  But even by the time he and Margie visited us in Hobart he was struggling to operate his fancy camera.  I’m not sure how aware he was of his difficulties.

Although he hadn’t been in a hurry to retire, and probably would have continued working for several more years had he been able to, he had plans for doing a lot of reading, writing and photography once he eventually retired.  Unfortunately the series of strokes affected his reading and writing so badly that he was unable to do any of what he had planned.  (Moral of the story – don’t put off things you’d like to do for some vague time in the future.  That time might not happen for you and even if it does you may not be capable of doing what you had planned.)

We were still living in Hobart when my father passed away in January 1997.  When he was on his deathbed I was asked whether he should be kept alive on machines so I could see him one last time before he passed away.  I didn’t see any point in that, particularly because he wouldn’t even have known I was there.  I did fly back for the funeral though.  I was somewhat surprised when I saw his death certificate in that it had the underlying cause of death as infection – from the leg wound he had suffered more than 45 years previously (mentioned in part 1 of the sequence of posts about my parents).

After the funeral there was a reception at my father’s old house.  It was great to see family and some of my parents’ friends who I hadn’t seen in many years.  Some photos from the reception:


From the left:  My brother Ian’s good friend Rowan Duval, my mother’s cousin Jenni Law, my brother Mick, our cousin Paul and his wife Bronwen, my parents’ friends Margaret and Errol Parry, who lived next door to us in Port Elizabeth for several years before they moved to Johannesburg about 10 years before my parents left Port Elizabeth.  Errol celebrated his 90th birthday a few months ago. 




Family photo:  My Dad’s sister Ruth, my brother Ian with his son Tim, Yours Truly, my other brother Mick with Ian’s son Mike, my Dad’s brother Derrick.




My Dad’s brother Derrick, Hank Doeg, a long-time friend of my parents who moved to Pretoria several years before my parents.  For the first 6 months after my father moved to Pretoria he boarded with Hank and Jerice Doeg.  Hank passed away last August, aged 85.  Jerice survives him after 61 years of marriage!  I don’t recognize the guy on the right in the photo, though the belt and tie are both in my possession. 




The Three Stooges.




In one version of the photo above this one, we were holding a photo take when we were young.  When we were in South Africa last March someone hauled out a copy of that photo and made us pose again, holding that photo containing the earlier photo.


While I was in Pretoria, Margie and my brothers and I went through the house marking the artworks and other objects we each wanted when Margie eventually wanted to move to a smaller place.  We managed to divide things up without any wrangling.  Several years later Margie shipped to the US everything that I had marked as wanting, including the painting below (because I had been the one who remembered when my father won it in a raffle – see an earlier episode).




 We are very grateful that Margie came into my father’s life (and into ours).  We saw her most recently in March 2019 when we were in South Africa for the wedding of Ian’s son Tim.  Margie, her daughter Janet, and Janet’s son Matthew, represented their side of the family at the wedding.



Image:  Mick’s wife, Mary Beth, Margie, Matthew, Janet.


Neither of my parents had a visitation/wake/viewing or an open casket funeral as these are not parts of our tradition.  Also, both were cremated.  I have no idea what happened to their ashes and don’t care.  I don’t need a gravestone, ashes or other physical reminder.  It is enough to know that they provided a good home environment and opportunities for their kids that many others have not been fortunate enough to receive.  What does, however, make me very sad is that they didn’t live long enough to see how well their grandchildren (not just our kids but those of Ian and Jacqui too) have turned out.

That's the end of the series about my parents.  Now perhaps I’ll write more about myself again.  Nah, I think I’ll first write something about our old neighborhood in Port Elizabeth and some of my parents’ friends.











Saturday, January 4, 2020

Parents, part 4, through to my mother's death


The previous episode ended with the parents having a few drinks with some “very relaxed” guests.

Religion:  My father had been brought up as a Presbyterian (Church of Scotland) and my mother as Anglican (Church of England or, in South Africa, Church of the Province of South Afrca).  When we were young my parents went to church once a year – they took us to the family service on Christmas Day at St. Columba’s Presbyterian Church (now Greenacres Presbyterian Church).  For the Christmas service the church had an angel that at one point in the service flew up (or down) on a rope/pulley system.  A few years later we started attending Sunday School at St. Hugh’s Anglican Church, which was about a mile from our house.  Our parents used to drop us off just before 9 AM and then picked us up again at around 10 AM.  Later I began cycling there and back, even when my brothers were still driven each way. 



Image:  St. Hugh's Church



At some point I started “singing” in the church choir and continued doing that through high school.  Towards the end of that period I was losing my religion  Paradoxically, as I was losing mine my father was finding, or maybe re-discovering, his.  He started attending St. Hugh’s Church regularly and became very involved in church business, including being on various committees in the diocese.  In later years he used to “credit” me for his “conversion” though I had never made any attempt to get him to go to church.  He remained involved in religious activities for the rest of his life.  My mother used to go to church with my father, though I didn’t ever get the sense she was a true believer.  Through his involvement in church affairs, my father became friendly with Phillip Russell, who was bishop of the Anglican Diocese of Port Elizabeth from 1970 to 1974 (later Archbishop of Cape Town from 1981-1986, where his successor was Desmond Tutu).  One winter Bishop Russell came to dinner at my parents’ house.  He had come from a meeting near the top of Ford House, which was one of the taller buildings in the city and may have been where his office was located.  He said he had seen snow falling past the window.  If it had been anyone other than a bishop telling the story no-one would have believed it.  (Snow is unheard of in Port Elizabeth, and this snow must have melted before it reached ground level.)


R.E.M. -- Losing My Religion


Another visitor at around that time was a “Coloured” minister and his two young sons, who were just a little older than toddler age.  I think one boy was Ben, but I don’t recall the name of the father or the other son.  They had come from a walk along the sidewalk near the beachfront.  The boys had wanted to go and play on the sand where they saw other kids.  As that was still deep in the Apartheid era, the father had to explain to them that that was not allowed because of their race.  How does one explain something like that to young kids?  (How does one explain something like that to anyone!)

My parents seemed to like being in charge of things and to organize events (traits that I very definitely did not inherit).  I think that as undergrads both chaired the “House Committees” of their respective residence halls.  In 1976 my father headed the organizing committee for the annual conference of the South African Society of Anaesthetists (SASA) in Port Elizabeth.  In a rather Trumpian manner he used to claim that people said it was the most successful SASA conference ever.  He was also in charge of two subsequent SASA conferences, in Sun City (about 100 miles from Johannesburg) in 1983 and at MEDUNSA in 1988 (more on MEDUNSA below).  As I mentioned in a previous post, he represented South Africa on the World Federation of Societies of Anaesthesiologists (WFSA) and attended WFSA assemblies between 1976 and 1988.  Until reading his obituary I hadn’t been aware that he served on the WFSA Membership Committee and later the Education and Scientific Committee, was President of SASA in 1978 and 1987 and chaired the Association of University Anaesthetists from 1987 to 1989.  He was also active in committees in his church and in the local Anglican diocese more broadly.


Image:  My father's obituary

My mother served on the committee of the Medical Wives Association in Port Elizabeth (back when almost all doctors in South Africa were male), including being President in 1977.  Towards the end of their time in Port Elizabeth my mother was Principal and chaired the Board of Directors of the small private school where she had taught for many years.  As I mentioned in the previous episode, my mother and some of the other teachers had bought out ownership of the school from its founder.

In 1979 my father was appointed as professor and Head of the Department of Anaesthesiology at the Medical University of South Africa (MEDUNSA), now the Sefako Makgatho Health Sciences University, outside Pretoria.  This was still deep in the Apartheid era and MEDUNSA was exclusively for black students.  Several years later, as racial restrictions were easing, two young white men who had not managed to get accepted into any “white” medical schools sued to be admitted to MEDUNSA, partly on the grounds that their academic records were good enough for acceptance into MEDUNSA.  They eventually lost their case, probably at least in part because of pressure from black students who hadn’t had the same academic opportunities.

Taking up the position at MEDUNSA meant that my parents had to move from Port Elizabeth to Pretoria.  My father started his new job in the middle of 1979 and for the rest of that year boarded with friends who had moved from Port Elizabeth to Pretoria several years previously.  My mother stayed in Port Elizabeth until late in the year so that my brother Ian could finish high school without having to move to a new school for one semester.  Pretoria is a predominantly Afrikaner city and my parents wanted to live in a part of the city with a larger English-speaking community, so they ended up buying a house on the far side of the city from MEDUNSA, even though that meant about a 25-mile / 40km commute each way for my father.

One of the accomplishments at MEDUNSA about which my father seemed to take much pride was his mentoring of Dr. “Bommie” Bomela.  (My father always called him “Bommie” so I don’t know what his actual name is.  The Internet has not been helpful in this regard.)  I believe that Dr. Bomela became the first black professor of Anaesthetics in South Africa.  I think he later went on to senior academic management positions, though from what little information I can find on the web it seems he is now in private practice as an anaesthetist in Port Elizabeth.

An aside about me rather than my parents:  After I finished my two years of conscription in the Navy, I was appointed as a lecturer in what was then the Department of Statistics and Operations Research at the University of South Africa (UNISA) in Pretoria.  I moved back in with my parents, in their new home, staying with them for more than two years, until some time after Riëtta and I were married.  So I was ahead of my time, foreshadowing the boomerang kids of today.  Part of the reason that we stayed there those extra few months is that Riëtta and I were about to move to Cape Town and so it didn’t make sense for us to rent a place for a very short period while she completed the semester at the school where she was teaching.  Riëtta actually lived with my parents for a few months after I moved, even though her parents also lived in Pretoria (though on the opposite side of the city and much further from her school).

Several years before moving to Pretoria my mother had begun studying further, while continuing to teach high school.  She first took French classes through the Alliance Française and then more French plus several linguistics classes through UNISA.  (UNISA is, or at least was at that stage, the largest distance learning tertiary institution in the world.)  She continued with linguistics classes after moving to Pretoria and within about a year she was appointed as a Junior Lecturer in the Department of Linguistics. 

Early in 1980 my brother Ian began his undergraduate studies at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.  The rest of the family – both parents, my other brother, Mick, and I had all attended the University of Cape Town.  Ian started out studying languages, for which he seems to have a flair, or maybe it is just that he is less self-conscious than I am.  I have no talent for languages.  I struggle enough to speak or write coherently in English.  Ian completed a BA in languages although he had switched to studying medicine part way through.

After Riëtta and I had lived in Cape Town for a few years, we moved back to Pretoria at the end of 1985 when I returned to UNISA, in the Department of Statistics, the Operations Research part having split off in the interim.  Subsequent events made us particularly grateful that we had moved back then.  In 1986 my mother began having strange pains in her back and elsewhere.  The symptoms were unusual for what later turned out to be advanced colon cancer.  At some point it was decided to cut my mother open to try to find the reason for her symptoms.  That’s when they found the extent of the colon cancer and immediately performed a colostomy.

Despite being a doctor, my father didn’t want to face reality.  He seemed to cling to some hope that my mother would recover.  He didn’t ever talk to my brothers or me about her real prognosis.  I think he believed (or at least had persuaded my mother) that if/when she recovered the colostomy could be reversed.  My mother had chemotherapy and my father also persuaded her to take some other substances that I believe were not yet approved for human use but were recommended by one of my father’s colleagues.  My mother was a model patient and put up with all of this with minimal complaining.  She had also been a model patient when she had had a stomach ulcer about a decade earlier, sticking to the bland diet that was then thought to be necessary to allow the ulcer to heal.  (This was before it was found that many such ulcers are caused by an infection with H. pylori bacteria and can be treated effectively with antibiotics.)

Ian, partly because a medical student and partly because he is more out-going, called one of the doctors to try to get some information about our mother’s prognosis.  The doctor said she probably had a year to live (from the time of her surgery).  That estimate turned out to be almost spot on.

Mom just missed seeing her first grandchild.  She went downhill very quickly towards the end.  We hadn’t realized quite how bad things were until she was admitted to the Little Company of Mary Hospice.  The last time we saw her was three weeks before Steven was born.  Earlier that day Riëtta had been held up at gunpoint while walking home from a nearby supermarket.  Riëtta refused to hand over her purse, because it was one that my mother had given her and, given my mother’s condition, had particularly sentimental value.  Fortunately the gunman gave up on this crazy very pregnant woman.  Riëtta was still in shock when we went to see my mother.  Mom was barely conscious, but the moment she saw Riëtta she asked her what was wrong.  My father claimed later that my mother had not been conscious enough to be aware of anything, but Riëtta knows that right up to the end Mom was thinking of other people, not just her own dire situation.  Mom died two days later.

That was the third death in the family in little over a year.  First, my paternal grandfather had passed away in June 1986 at the age of 99.  Then, in November of that year, it was the turn of my maternal grandmother (Mom’s mother), who was born in 1906 and so was 79 or 80.

Towards the end, realizing she didn’t have much longer, my mother wrote letters to my father, my brothers and me, to be opened after her death.  My father may have known about the letters but my brothers and I weren’t aware of them until after she had died.  The most heart-breaking part of my letter was: “You’re not an outwardly emotional person but there has been many a day when I have wanted to ask you just to put your arms around me & hold me tight when I have felt really lost and alone.  Maybe I’ll still pluck up the courage to do it.”  (Our family had never been big huggers, or even little huggers.)  It was painful to read that, particularly because I would have loved to have hugged her if I’d known that was what she wanted.  Even re-reading it now, this not outwardly emotional person has tears rolling down his cheeks.  More positive was her writing “Don’t have any regrets about my life.  I’ve seen & done much more than most women my age have”.

The letter to me also had one for Riëtta.  That one included:  “I have come to love you as a real daughter.  I feel closer to you as a mother than as a mother-in-law.”  Writing about the future grandchild (we didn’t try to find out ahead of time whether it would be a boy or a girl):  “You have no idea how much I long to hold it just once in my arms.  Then I’ll die happy.”  Unfortunately that was not to be.


Image:  My mother's obituary


My father was devastated by my mother’s death.  But after a period of mourning he was desperate to marry again.  He started dating a series of entirely unsuitable women.  This is not a criticism of the women, just that they were not appropriate for my father, generally being much younger than he was and some had very young children.  I think he even proposed to a few of them, though they must have realized they weren’t a good match for my father and turned him down.  In my mother’s letter to me she had written “If he wishes to marry again vet his choice.”  Although I had my concerns, I didn’t actually say anything to my father and, as explained below, I didn’t have an opportunity to vet the one he ended up marrying. 

My mother also wrote “please go ahead with your Ph.D. & try to get overseas.  Don’t let yourself be stifled in S.A.”  Taking heed of that advice I applied to PhD programs in the US, and was accepted into the one in biostatistics at the University of Washington.  They had had a smaller entering class than usual for the 1989-1990 academic year and because I already had a masters degree in statistics, invited me to start in the middle of the academic year.  So we left Pretoria for Seattle in March 1990.