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.