MOM

My mother was 89 and died on the eve of her 90th birthday, on 5 July 2020. She had come to live with me in Fish Hoek in March 2018. Before that she was living alone in Montagu in the apartment she and my Dad had shared for about 20 years before his death in 2009.  

I was previously in the habit of visiting her once a month, but it was obvious that she was becoming increasingly frail. She had had a series of back operations which had left her with a sinus wound, a wound that would not heal and constantly oozed pus. It had to be dressed daily. She had a caregiver, but the caregiver only came during the day and not at all on weekends. On the weekends I visited, my mother, who had always been a stickler for cleanliness and neatness, stayed in her pyjamas.  

After living in a rented garden cottage for some time after my divorce, I started considering the possibility of buying a house. As the universe sometimes works, a house found me and I bought it, and so was able to move my mom from Montagu to live with me in Fish Hoek.  

I won’t say it was all sunshine and roses, but it worked out well. Mom had a caregiver during the day and I was there in the evenings and on weekends. Despite her frailty, we even managed to go to the theatre a couple of times. We often sat after supper with a glass of wine, laughing and reminiscing. She told me many things about her early life and marriage, but she was declining steadily physically, her hearing grew worse and her sight was failing. I discovered that she had not been putting in the eye drops necessary to stave off glaucoma, and I was livid with her previous caregiver who had clearly not made sure that she did. 

Then came Covid, and hard lockdown. I would fetch her caregiver every day and take her home again. We had to accommodate each other, I was working from home and the noise factor was a problem. She became quite childlike and would purposely pull faces over my shoulder while I was trying to do Microsoft Teams meetings.  

One day I had real problems as she was kicking up a fuss with her caregiver about having a shower. The woman that her husband and children had nicknamed “Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard” (from Under Milkwood, the woman who polished the potatoes) now hated to shower. I was doing an online interview for a promotion, and she was screaming in the background. 

It was painful to watch her lose all her essential mom-ness. She started to be in pain almost all the time and stopped eating. She stayed in bed all day. I called the doctor and she asked him to give her an injection to “put her down”. He told me this was the end stage and that it would be a zig-zag-like graph of ups and downs on a steady decline until the end. And so it was, for three hellish months.  

I feel selfish saying this, but it was hell. At one stage I tried to see if I could get her into a hospital. Dumb idea, it was Covid. Frail cares were also not accepting any patients. It turned out to be a good thing – if I had put her in an institution, I would never have seen her again. I organised night carers through a local home nursing service, who were great. Most of it was luckily paid for by her medical aid. But it still meant that I felt continuously strained and stressed, listening to her in pain, sitting with her every day for a while.  

Sometimes she recognised me, sometimes she didn’t. Once she asked me for a brandy and became angry when I didn’t get her one, no matter how I tried to explain that that awful bloody woman Dlamini Zuma had banned alcohol. Once she put her arms around me and clung to me and told me how she loved me. Once she said to me: “I don’t know why I am still here!”

Then on Sunday, 5 July 2020, at 7am, her caregiver knocked on my door and said, “she’s gone”. I felt relieved. I cried but I felt relieved. I was just so tired. There was no funeral – Covid. I dealt with the cremation and went on living alone. A year later, on the anniversary of her death, I arranged an online memorial with our remaining family. I read a poem that I had written after her death, and we all shared our fondest memories of her. It was particularly touching to hear how her grandchildren valued the lessons she had taught them about gardening and life. 

I am now grateful that I did not put her in a home. I met a woman at a party who told me how her grandmother had died alone in an old age home, and they were not even allowed to go in and fetch her things. I am left wondering if the total isolation of the aged during Covid was worth it. I believe that most old people would have been absolutely fine with risking death, after a long life, rather than fade away lonely and missing their loved ones.  

***

IAN

During this time, I reconnected with an old flame on Facebook. I met Ian many years ago when I was still young and hot (yes, I was hot, isn’t it awful that we only realise how hot we were all these years later?). Ian raced motorcycles, and so did my friend Terry, the only female on the circuit. I often went with her to races as pit crew. I would don my short shorts and elicit help with the bike from other people’s mechanics. I also held out the board with “get a fricken move on” written on it as she zoomed past to finish last yet again. Ian was racing a 500cc, one of the “big boys”. He was blond and blue eyed and looked a bit like Robert Redford. I was smitten. He was very funny, could play the guitar and had an amazing singing voice. He was also married. 

Ian grew up a Mormon. He got married to his high school sweetheart, they were both virgins. He was not happy in the marriage anymore, and told me he was planning to leave his wife. I know, I know … I was 19 and thought, “well that’s as good as being single”. Besides which the attraction was white-hot. We arranged a dirty weekend. It turned into a disaster of epic proportions – it’s a great story but for another time. Think Withnail and I. It didn’t affect our liking for each other, though. Ian went home and his wife informed him she was pregnant. Ian, being Ian, could not leave her, we had a tearful goodbye and that was it.

We did reconnect years later for a short time after he had indeed left his wife. I had just divorced my first husband. I messed it up by sleeping with his best friend. When I think about it now, I think maybe there was a bit of childish revenge involved, and I am not proud of myself. 

Ian went on to marry again and so did I. Both marriages also eventually failed. Then recently, because I am friends with Terry on Facebook and so was Ian, he sent me a friend request, I accepted. He started sending direct messages, then we moved to WhatsApp and started messaging constantly and calling often in the evening. This is now during Covid.

We talked about everything – religion, politics, that crazy weekend – and we laughed until we cried. I start looking forward to his calls, and he to mine. I can still hear him answering “Hello my darling” to every call. We talked about meeting up when this was all over (he lived in Joburg and I live in Cape Town) and bemoaned the lockdowns. He had taken up fishing, and being the ever-competitive Ian, entered competitions and had South African colours. “Are you off to torture fish this weekend?” I would tease and he would take pains to explain that it was catch and release.

Immaterial to the fish, I would say. Still not fun to be going for a juicy worm and end up with a great big hook through your lip and being hauled out of the water. 

Like me, he loved animals. He told me about his little dog Anson, who started having fits and who he thought was not going to make it through the night. Then, miraculously, the next morning she was fine, and we rejoiced together. I nagged him to get some exercise, he was, by his own admission, overweight. He took his other two dogs for a walk, and because they were unused to walking, he had to practically drag them around the block, much to his chagrin. One night on hanging up I pressed an “I love you” sticker by mistake. He immediately sent back an “I love you” and beating hearts. I was in a bit of a quandary, because I did not want to move so fast. But how do you retract an “I love you” sticker without being a total bitch? 

Not long after, I got a message from him that the skin cancer on his face and neck was regrowing and he had to go and get it cut out. He sent me pictures of his face, covered in plasters. We joked about how miserable he looked. He said that the doctor had recommended that he undergo radiation therapy, but he was reluctant to go for it.  

I got all stern and told him he should listen to the doctor. The next thing I knew, he was in hospital. I got a message from him saying that he had Covid. We messaged and called, and he told me how awful it was, that the nurses were brusque, that they got plastic cutlery that broke and that he had had to help a fellow patient to the loo. In a private hospital. 

His oxygen levels kept going down, he said every time they took him off oxygen they plummeted. On the Friday I got a message that he was feeling confused, and that he was going to ICU. My heart sank. My last message to him: “Don’t you dare die on me, Ian.” He did.

The news of his death was like a punch in the gut. I had not realised until then how important he had become in my life, albeit over a distance. But while he lived there was a faint glimmer of hope, a frisson to my days. I realised that the “I love you” sticker had been true, after all. That all died with him. No funeral, no rites. Covid.

***

DAIV

All along, with all my ups and downs, there was Daiv (pronounced Dave, don’t know why the spelling). A little cross maltese dog with floppy ears and luminous eyes. 

Daiv came to me during my second marriage. My then husband’s sister was emigrating and we agreed to take her dogs, one of them was Daiv.  

Daiv travelled a long road with me during my rocky marriage. We were badly affected by the economic turndown of 2008, and my business suffered. I had to sell my house. My life and marriage were tumultuous.  It ended up, in 2014, with my husband living and working in Rustenburg, a place where I was miserable. 

I found work in Cape Town and for a while we tried to make a long-distance relationship work. It didn’t. I was living in the granny flat at the time. I went up to Rustenburg to fetch my things along with Daiv and Lisa the cat. Daiv was being bullied by the other dogs and was also not being groomed. I was livid. 

Thereafter Daiv was my best friend through my darkest times. He went with me everywhere (even to work sometimes, even though this wasn’t strictly speaking allowed.) Daiv had an innate gift to connect with people. He would sit up on his back legs with his front paws up, begging with those big, moist, brown eyes. It melted the hardest heart. 

One day at the shops he did this with an older lady who almost cried.  She lived in the old age home opposite and had had to give up her dogs.  I started thinking about how Daiv would really be great for visiting old people. I had read about these dogs in the US and UK but did not know if it happened in South Africa. As fate or the universe would have it, one of my good friends suggested that Daiv would be an ideal therapy dog and put me in touch with PAT (Pets as Therapy). Daiv passed his test with flying colours and we were soon visiting a local home for dementia and stroke patients. He was a total hit.

Daiv, the cross-Maltese. Image: Penelope Meyer

Daiv. Image: Penelope Meyer

During the Covid pandemic, my mom, Ian and all my ups and downs, Daiv was at my feet as I worked, and curled up next to me when I slept. When we were not allowed out at all, I would open the gate and Daiv would walk himself in the greenbelt next to me. He would visit my mom and lie next to her bed.

After lockdown restrictions were lifted we went back to the old age home for a visit. It was incredibly depressing. The old people were like zombies, listless and drowsy. I suspect they were being medicated. I could not engage with them and they hardly noticed Daiv. It broke my heart. I never went back.

Daiv was 14 at the time. He started getting stiffer and less able to jump up. He was still eating and quite happy so we just kept on going. Then his appetite started going. I tried to tempt him with treats, sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. I took him to the vet, they said there was nothing physically wrong with him, it was just old age. I wrestled with my heart wanting him to stay and my head knowing that he was not going to.  

His decline mimicked my mother’s. Zig-zag but ever downwards. He became incontinent, and then would only lie on the couch. Eventually I looked at him and realised that he was suffering and needed to go. 

I went on a long walk, crying all the time. When I got home, I called the vet and asked if they could come to the house. I would pay the premium; I just did not want him to have the trauma of going in the car.  

The next day they arrived at noon. I had been working online, but excused myself and went to sit with him on the couch for the 30 minutes before they arrived. I stroked him and cried and told him what a marvellous dog he had been and how much I loved him and how thankful I was for him. Then the vet arrived and I held him while she injected him. I kissed him goodbye.  

***

LISA

Alongside Daiv came Lisa. I had her the longest of all my pets, 19 years. I got her in 2003 as a kitten from my sister-in-law who was homing her on behalf of acquaintances who had not been responsible in neutering their cat. She was beautiful, mainly white with faint stripey ginger points and big blue eyes. The sweetest, most loving and engaging cat. Got on with everyone and everything. Like most cats, she seemed to possess an unerring ability to discern the cat-haters and then proceed to sit on them. 

During Lisa’s lifetime we moved about 11 times. I never had any problems with her, no putting butter on her feet or anything of that nature. She took it all in her stride and as long as I was there she was cool. She dealt with all the dogs that drifted in and out of our lives with aplomb. Daiv was not a big fan of hers but she persisted and eventually he would accept her cuddling up to him.  

When I left my husband, and brought Lisa and Daiv down to the Cape, I left Lisa with my Mom in Montagu initially. I could not take her to the granny flat and I also felt it would be good for my Mom who was getting very isolated. Mom fell in love with her and they got very close. When Mom came to live with me, Lisa came too and we were all together again. She and Daiv would bicker over the cushion in the sun. Daiv would lie on it and then Lisa would come and creep closer and closer until eventually Daiv would get up and leave in a huff. Until one day I looked up and peace had broken out. They were sharing the cushion. 

Lisa the cat. Image: Penelope Meyer

Lisa and Daiv. Image: Penelope Meyer

After Daiv died it was just me and Lisa. Then she started showing the same signs that Daiv had, getting slower and thinner. Same heartbreaking trajectory, same heartbreaking decision. 

This time the vet couldn’t come out so I was forced to put her thin little body in the cat cage that she hated and drive her to the vet. The vet looked at her and said, “Nature is cruel, isn’t it?”. He was kind and once again I held her while she went limp. I walked away crying.

I fell into a deep depression after all of this. Couldn’t understand why.  Until I started talking to people and they said things like “Gee, you have really had a rough time of it, haven’t you?”.  

You see, on the other hand, I had made great strides in my financial and job security. I loved my new job and was gainfully employed during the lockdowns, unlike so many others. I felt that I was so much luckier than most South Africans, that I couldn’t be down. 

I delayed grieving. Until I just let myself grieve.  

Writing this is a big part of it. Acknowledging that we have all been through much. And suffered in different ways. I have tried to be easier on myself, have got help and forced myself to go out with friends and reconnect. I have new animal companions now, Sir Brad Pitt-Bull and Ozzie. Ozzie looks a lot like Daiv and is just as loving. I know that death will happen again. I know it will hurt. But I am not going to trade the love and companionship of my dogs to prevent the inevitable pain. Loss happens, but love endures. DM/ML

Penelope Meyer works in the heritage field; she was born “a long time ago” in Zimbabwe and lived from age five in Johannesburg before moving to Fish Hoek in 2001. She has one son, one granddaughter, and many friends.

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