Risk and Blame and 25 June
It was a warm night and unusually, after school, Mum took me up to
her bedroom. I don't remember if my siblings were there already or not, but we were all together and it quickly became clear that they knew something I did not. Everyone
was in on it - a familiar feeling if you're the youngest. It's how it
should be, really, I guess. And I don't remember how she said it but I
do remember her telling me and I do remember knowing that Dad was dead.
And I knew that this deadness, which had been on the cards, was not good
news in any way at all.... whatever it was.
Of course, it may not have happened like that at all, who knows, but I have had this memory, too faded, like the photos of my father in their frames, pretty indistinct, to really believe in their distilled 1970s asthaetic, but clearly there in their truth: it was 25 June 1978 and Dad was dead.
I knew it was a possibility, whatever, it meant - dead - for Dad. Mum is not one for lies or flimflam, may the God she believes in love her and keep her and one day bring her home. She is remarkable and somehow it is an injustice to be writing about the effect Dad had on me, when it is she who stood tall in the rain and hail and misery and fear and let us grow up against her, in her shade and warmth. Never shying away, never. She does all kinds of things - she'll make me book tickets for her and enter rooms before her and strike up conversations she doesn't have the nerve to start, but all of these things are nothing when I think of her sheer, dogged, determination to let us have whatever parts were left of our now utterly stained and strained un-childhood. She does not flinch. She will not let go. And she has a clarity which is awe-inspiring and sometimes immovable. Of course, unlike her sisters or maybe your mother (though maybe not) she has had many enormous, glorious, life-altering, and utterly vertiginous opportunities - not limited to but focusing on the death of her loved ones - to display these qualities and it can be, frankly, irritating that people think she's superhuman when I know how ridiculous she was about getting the shower fixed and for YEARS. But on balance, she's fearsomely bright, warm, curious, open-minded and flexible flexible flexible.... not on timings or politics or manners, but in nearly every other regard, you just have to put in your order early and you'll get what you asked for.
Without my mother I would never have got the education I did, I would not have gone to university, I certainly would have been taken out by the terrible depression which descended when I went away to study and I would not have survived my sister's murder. Credit where credit's due, my sister helped with these things too (not her own murder, she was epicly poor at helping with that), as did my brother. But Mum taught us all so much, including how to look out for one another.
She also taught us to risk.
My mother is not a risk-taker by nature, in fact, I suspect she'd describe herself as timid. I think she'd also say she's not the shy 17-year-old she was, but there remains a reserve and I think she believes her life might have been... somehow slightly improved if she'd taken more risks. I don't know what those risks are, but one of the corollaries of this is that she encouraged us to take risks. As I believe I've mentioned before, she let us ride our bikes even though it was a cycling accident which lead to Dad's death.
Today, while I cycled into a job, I thought of her. I always think of her when I'm cycling. I think of him too, always, it's a pain in the arse, but I think of Mum. If I were to die cycling she'd be devastated (ditto for my also-cycling brother) but that's no reason for her to put any pressure on us not to do it. I can't speak for brother Charles, but I absolutely love cycling. I presume it's inherited, but it also depends on my childhood skeetering around the village on my bike, wild and free as you like. It engenders such feelings of freedom in me, even though I'm now a chubby middle-aged woman on a folding bike cycling from one commitment to another. I look like an idiot and I don't care. I love to ride my bike. I'd like at least one other bike, a different kind of bike, and maybe one day I'll get one. It is a passion of mine as it was Dad's. Mum can't even ride a bike but she entirely endorses my cycling life, or at least keeps her mouth shut, knowing that her fears are her own and that if I predecease her (I make every effort for this not to happen, by the way), then it won't really matter why; it'll just rip another ghastly hole in her formidable hull. She had children so we could live and live we do and when she doesn't like how we're living she reminds herself that her own mother described children as "hostages to fortune." Good old Granny.
Which leads me to blame.
A man was responsible for my father's death. It's so easy to harm or kill someone with a car. I knew it when I got behind the wheel and I hope you did too, if you drive. Maybe, like me, you didn't want to learn to drive for fear of killing someone. Maybe, like me, it was your mother who forced you to learn, realising it's basically a life skill. Maybe your mother said, that was fine, you didn't need to learn but that, once you turned 17, if you wanted to go anywhere you'd have to work it out for yourself as she was giving no more lifts. And maybe you lived in the middle of nowhere, so you relented and learnt to drive.
I don't even know the name of the man who killed my father. My mother was so pragmatic and realistic, that he was irrelevant, but not in a violent way, just in a quiet way. We simply got on with things, in spite of the year she spent preparing for the court case. She knew how easy it was to kill someone; he didn't mean to kill anyone when he left his house that day and I guess she learnt, as the steel of her devastating bereavement cut to her bone, what Archbishop Desmond Tutu articulated so well:
"Don't forget, when you hold someone to blame, you have hold of one end of the rope."
I saw this quote at the District 6 Museum in Cape Town and it has thundered around inside me ever since, looking for a place to settle. I am not my mother. Though I bear no ill-will towards either my father's or my sister's killer, other, smaller matters, drive me wild. I have a long way to go before I become Desmond Tutu. I am far too quick to blame, oh, and I'll never dance that well either.
Sudden, violent, meaningless loss can do so many things to you, it's a smorgasbord of horrors, and it can make you fear and it can make you blame, but my mother was clearly having none of it.
She stood where she could, she was never Dad, never tried to be, as other men did, strange men from other families who thought it was their place to interfere given Dad's absence.
But for all the incredible efforts of Mrs P, the 25 June 1978 changed us all forever. There is no going back, but I think the little, uncomprehending kid I was made valiant efforts to traverse the gulf, like some lone hobbit trying to get to an outer-space Mordor with no spacecraft. Alone. To get back to whatever had been before. Alone. In grief we are so alone and a child who is grieving has a special kind of aloneness because they are not fully formed, and they do not have the vocabulary to express what they are enduring. Of course, no one does, but a child is, whisper it, a child. And as horrifying as a traumatised child is, we ignore this damage at our peril, as it will form the adult they become. Or don't become - childhood trauma makes suicide later in life more likely.
Frustratingly, the wound carved out of my soft flesh and sparky psyche by the death of Dad has never healed. I know I am weak and ungrateful, I am afraid and self-pitying, I have not worked hard enough and I find myself incapable of dragging myself out of my mother's bedroom on that sunny evening 40 years ago. How I long to return there, or rather to, say 24 May 1978. I know it is my fault that Dad's death lives on in me and stifles and hobbles and fills me brim-full with doubt and self-hatred. I know it has been my inability to find my way out the maze which was my unyielding grief and terror which has created the bizarre psychological world I find myself in. But I'm grateful to my dad, who I'll tell you about sometime, promise, and I cannot thank my mother enough for getting Kate, Charlie and me out of childhood and into adult lives in spite of the seductive pull of that very peaceful father of ours and his pacific post-mortem perfection.
Of course, it may not have happened like that at all, who knows, but I have had this memory, too faded, like the photos of my father in their frames, pretty indistinct, to really believe in their distilled 1970s asthaetic, but clearly there in their truth: it was 25 June 1978 and Dad was dead.
I knew it was a possibility, whatever, it meant - dead - for Dad. Mum is not one for lies or flimflam, may the God she believes in love her and keep her and one day bring her home. She is remarkable and somehow it is an injustice to be writing about the effect Dad had on me, when it is she who stood tall in the rain and hail and misery and fear and let us grow up against her, in her shade and warmth. Never shying away, never. She does all kinds of things - she'll make me book tickets for her and enter rooms before her and strike up conversations she doesn't have the nerve to start, but all of these things are nothing when I think of her sheer, dogged, determination to let us have whatever parts were left of our now utterly stained and strained un-childhood. She does not flinch. She will not let go. And she has a clarity which is awe-inspiring and sometimes immovable. Of course, unlike her sisters or maybe your mother (though maybe not) she has had many enormous, glorious, life-altering, and utterly vertiginous opportunities - not limited to but focusing on the death of her loved ones - to display these qualities and it can be, frankly, irritating that people think she's superhuman when I know how ridiculous she was about getting the shower fixed and for YEARS. But on balance, she's fearsomely bright, warm, curious, open-minded and flexible flexible flexible.... not on timings or politics or manners, but in nearly every other regard, you just have to put in your order early and you'll get what you asked for.
Without my mother I would never have got the education I did, I would not have gone to university, I certainly would have been taken out by the terrible depression which descended when I went away to study and I would not have survived my sister's murder. Credit where credit's due, my sister helped with these things too (not her own murder, she was epicly poor at helping with that), as did my brother. But Mum taught us all so much, including how to look out for one another.
She also taught us to risk.
My mother is not a risk-taker by nature, in fact, I suspect she'd describe herself as timid. I think she'd also say she's not the shy 17-year-old she was, but there remains a reserve and I think she believes her life might have been... somehow slightly improved if she'd taken more risks. I don't know what those risks are, but one of the corollaries of this is that she encouraged us to take risks. As I believe I've mentioned before, she let us ride our bikes even though it was a cycling accident which lead to Dad's death.
Today, while I cycled into a job, I thought of her. I always think of her when I'm cycling. I think of him too, always, it's a pain in the arse, but I think of Mum. If I were to die cycling she'd be devastated (ditto for my also-cycling brother) but that's no reason for her to put any pressure on us not to do it. I can't speak for brother Charles, but I absolutely love cycling. I presume it's inherited, but it also depends on my childhood skeetering around the village on my bike, wild and free as you like. It engenders such feelings of freedom in me, even though I'm now a chubby middle-aged woman on a folding bike cycling from one commitment to another. I look like an idiot and I don't care. I love to ride my bike. I'd like at least one other bike, a different kind of bike, and maybe one day I'll get one. It is a passion of mine as it was Dad's. Mum can't even ride a bike but she entirely endorses my cycling life, or at least keeps her mouth shut, knowing that her fears are her own and that if I predecease her (I make every effort for this not to happen, by the way), then it won't really matter why; it'll just rip another ghastly hole in her formidable hull. She had children so we could live and live we do and when she doesn't like how we're living she reminds herself that her own mother described children as "hostages to fortune." Good old Granny.
Which leads me to blame.
A man was responsible for my father's death. It's so easy to harm or kill someone with a car. I knew it when I got behind the wheel and I hope you did too, if you drive. Maybe, like me, you didn't want to learn to drive for fear of killing someone. Maybe, like me, it was your mother who forced you to learn, realising it's basically a life skill. Maybe your mother said, that was fine, you didn't need to learn but that, once you turned 17, if you wanted to go anywhere you'd have to work it out for yourself as she was giving no more lifts. And maybe you lived in the middle of nowhere, so you relented and learnt to drive.
I don't even know the name of the man who killed my father. My mother was so pragmatic and realistic, that he was irrelevant, but not in a violent way, just in a quiet way. We simply got on with things, in spite of the year she spent preparing for the court case. She knew how easy it was to kill someone; he didn't mean to kill anyone when he left his house that day and I guess she learnt, as the steel of her devastating bereavement cut to her bone, what Archbishop Desmond Tutu articulated so well:
"Don't forget, when you hold someone to blame, you have hold of one end of the rope."
I saw this quote at the District 6 Museum in Cape Town and it has thundered around inside me ever since, looking for a place to settle. I am not my mother. Though I bear no ill-will towards either my father's or my sister's killer, other, smaller matters, drive me wild. I have a long way to go before I become Desmond Tutu. I am far too quick to blame, oh, and I'll never dance that well either.
Sudden, violent, meaningless loss can do so many things to you, it's a smorgasbord of horrors, and it can make you fear and it can make you blame, but my mother was clearly having none of it.
She stood where she could, she was never Dad, never tried to be, as other men did, strange men from other families who thought it was their place to interfere given Dad's absence.
But for all the incredible efforts of Mrs P, the 25 June 1978 changed us all forever. There is no going back, but I think the little, uncomprehending kid I was made valiant efforts to traverse the gulf, like some lone hobbit trying to get to an outer-space Mordor with no spacecraft. Alone. To get back to whatever had been before. Alone. In grief we are so alone and a child who is grieving has a special kind of aloneness because they are not fully formed, and they do not have the vocabulary to express what they are enduring. Of course, no one does, but a child is, whisper it, a child. And as horrifying as a traumatised child is, we ignore this damage at our peril, as it will form the adult they become. Or don't become - childhood trauma makes suicide later in life more likely.
Frustratingly, the wound carved out of my soft flesh and sparky psyche by the death of Dad has never healed. I know I am weak and ungrateful, I am afraid and self-pitying, I have not worked hard enough and I find myself incapable of dragging myself out of my mother's bedroom on that sunny evening 40 years ago. How I long to return there, or rather to, say 24 May 1978. I know it is my fault that Dad's death lives on in me and stifles and hobbles and fills me brim-full with doubt and self-hatred. I know it has been my inability to find my way out the maze which was my unyielding grief and terror which has created the bizarre psychological world I find myself in. But I'm grateful to my dad, who I'll tell you about sometime, promise, and I cannot thank my mother enough for getting Kate, Charlie and me out of childhood and into adult lives in spite of the seductive pull of that very peaceful father of ours and his pacific post-mortem perfection.
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