“Nozi.”
“Answer your phone.” “Ma is dead.”
***
My phone rang. It was my Baba. He could wait. I would call after the speeches were done. The phone rang again. Baba wouldn’t call twice unless something was wrong, so I stepped out of the shade of the tent and away from the crowd.
“Umawakho uwile.”
Baba spoke in uncharacteristically short and staccato sentences. My mother had collapsed, he told me, and he didn’t know what to do. Could I come home? I made my way back to the tent, dazed, sat down next to [my husband] Rori and stared ahead. The uncle was still speaking, sniggers continuing to ripple through the crowd. Rori turned to me so we could share a laugh but he saw that my face had turned to stone. He took my hand, got me to stand and led me away from the tent.
I can recall the 20-second conversation with my father, but the rest is a blur. I remember getting into the car but I don’t remember the nine-hour drive from Mahwelereng in Limpopo to Lincoln Meade in Pietermaritzburg. I am sure that I must have made calls on the way to establish which hospital my mother was in.
I flew through the entrance at Northdale Hospital, navigating the maze that made up the labyrinth of the public health facility. With little signage, I stopped a nurse in the passageway to get the directions I needed. I rushed onwards. It was visible that she’d had a stroke: the left side of my mother’s face was sagging, her speech was slurred, her eyes were darting wildly in what appeared to be confusion and fear. More worryingly, my father told me that Ma had not yet received any medical care since having arrived almost 10 hours earlier.
Why was she in a public hospital? We’d had the medical aid conversation only a few months earlier. My mom had called wanting to understand the difference between medical aid and a hospital plan and very proudly announced that she could now, as a teacher, afford to put herself and my father on a comprehensive plan. We never spoke of it again and I hadn’t followed up. But I couldn’t focus on that now. I made frantic calls to friends who were doctors. Everyone was gentle with me and relentless in getting my mother the help she needed. We managed to get a doctor to attend to her while we awaited an ambulance that would transfer her to a private hospital.
The siren of the ambulance and the wheels of the stretcher bed making its way toward us was all that I needed. I started to breathe again. I’d saved the day. True to the dichotomy of the South African health system, the private hospital had a team of doctors waiting to receive and attend to her.
When we were finally able to see Ma, the news was better than expected. The neurosurgeon confirmed the stroke but said my mother was showing all the signs of being able to recover without surgical intervention. Ma was strong and was clearly fighting to stay with us. By the next day my mother’s eyes were still and while her speech was still slurred, she pointed to her water when she wanted to drink and was showing signs of coming back to us. Even in this moment of frailty and physical weakness, I could see and feel my mother’s fight. We didn’t need words to communicate. Her work was not yet done. I knew it and she knew it. In the silence of the ward, punctuated only by the incessant beeps of the machines and murmured prayers of families around their own loved ones, our silent conversation was loud.
Rori and I were at the hospital at every possible visiting hour. My mother would need physiotherapy to fully regain the use of her body, and we were encouraged by the report that indicated that she wanted to write. Though the writing was illegible, it was a sign that she had not completely lost her language capabilities. If she could write, she could still speak, we were told. We had teased her incessantly over the years for her short temper and quickness to shout. With her capability for speech looking strong, we joked that we would not be spared her sharp tongue once she recovered!
Meanwhile, an hour’s drive from the hospital, the Essence Festival — the largest African American culture and music event — was making its comeback to Durban, SA. The CNBC Africa team that was dispatched to capture and broadcast the huge cultural event had been assembled and I’d been chosen to be one of the anchors to moderate the live panel discussion between Durban’s political leadership and some of the international guests. I must have called my boss during the nine-hour drive from Mahwelereng to Lincoln Meade, cutting through provinces, to tell her what was happening and that I’d need to take some time to be with my family. But I soon realised that I needed to convince her that I wanted my place back on the team. I’d spent almost every waking moment during the past 72-hours either at the hospital or at home waiting to go back to the hospital.
“Bronwyn, I need this. I’m less than an hour away from the hospital. I need a distraction to keep me sane.”
The plan was simple. I was going to take a few hours to myself. I’d moderate on one of the biggest stages of my career, then I’d go back to my mother’s bedside and figure out how to help her regain control over her life, and for me to recover my sense of self. The broadcast was in the morning, so I decided to book a hotel in Durban for the night so that I’d be close to the team at the 5am call time. Rori would spend the night with me and then fly to Johannesburg as I joined the team for the day’s production. Life wasn’t great, but at least I was back in control.
We settled into the hotel for the night and for the first time talked about the bullet my family had just dodged. With slightly clearer heads and calmer hearts we lamented the poor service in the public hospital and shared our gratitude for the friends who had come through and helped us move Ma into a private facility where we felt death could be managed, and even averted. I checked in with my father. Things were as good as they could be. He’d just come back from the hospital, and Ma was resting. I could now settle in for the night and wrap my head around the work I was to do in the morning.
My phone rang from my mother’s number. It couldn’t be! I felt a shaking sensation rising up in my body. I could barely hold the phone steady enough to answer. Questions chased each other around in my head. Could it be her calling? Was it someone else using her phone? Why would the nurses and doctors use a patient’s phone? Was that even ethical?
“Answer it, love,” Rori encouraged.
Ma’s voice slurred and stammered over the line. It was incoherent but it was her. She was speaking!
“M..u.sa ukuth..uka. Ngi..ngi..cela u..u..ngith..engele i-air- time. Ubu..ya ni..ni?”
It took her almost five minutes to deliver her reassurance, to ask me to buy her airtime, and to ask when I was coming back. The tears came then, flowing hot with relief, cleansing my body of exhaustion and my mind from the crippling fear of losing her. Everything was fine. Ma was back. I hadn’t realised that in trying to survive the moment, I had coiled into myself. I was brittle with a fear that was masked as resilience and the belief that all must be well.
The next morning, I woke up feeling lighter and I as I took my seat on the stage I felt grounded and secure for the first time in days. The coil had begun to unfurl. More than anything, I couldn’t wait to drive back to Pietermaritzburg to converse with my mother face-to-face. I could already imagine how we’d probably be teasing her for years to come about how much she’d scared us. My mother was a fighter; this was just another battle, one she’d just conquered.
The energy of 2,000 people pulsating in the Durban International Convention Centre came at me like a wave hitting the stage. I loved the feeling! And it felt good to have something I could once again control. I was meticulous in my questioning, with each provocation flowing from one issue to the next as I wove and threaded the conversation for my panellists. I was listening with my whole body, leaning into the silences and surfacing the insights. Moderating was what I imagined conducting an orchestra might feel like, bringing the right instrument into the symphony at the right time and blending all of these contributions into a magical rendition.
“Thirty seconds to ad break, Nozi.”
That was the moment I took a quick glance at my phone. “Ma is dead.”
***
I was lost in an abyss of grief for a long time after my mother passed away.
As I watched my mother’s body being lowered into the ground, I knew that everything I had thought to be true of the world was vanishing with the dust that was rising and falling on her casket. For the first time in my life, I was truly, utterly, lost.
With the help of prayer, therapy and some courageous conversations with myself and others, when I started to come out of the dark place that I’d sunk into, I could ask myself whether this was my personal head-on collision. Now that I had come face-to-face with my need for control, would I be able, in this shattering encounter, to release myself from living within the constricting lines of control? Was I ready to open the door to all the fears I had neatly managed and packed away? This was not a personal confrontation I was ready for; rather, it was one that had been patiently waiting for me.
I began a new conversation with myself about what control was and what it represented in my life. Part of this reflection forced me to acknowledge how control had served me well in many aspects of my life. Without the discipline I had exerted over almost everything in my life up till that point, I might not have made it to tell this story. Indeed, I think that being in control has saved my life. I watched my parents control everything that they could, to push me out of the pit of poverty our family was in. I learnt that if I minimised risk and kept the playing field tight and well managed I’d make it out OK. The world was not my oyster. The world was a series of minuscule gaps of opportunity that could not, must not, be squandered. Creativity and curiosity were the preserve of those who had safety nets and wells of second chances.
It has been a seven-year journey of meeting myself anew since then. Kicking and screaming, I came to realise that the thing that served me most — control — was the thing that also threatened to hold me back, keeping me from a fulfilled life. I’m only now understanding that what got me here might be the very thing that holds me here, keeping me from reaching “there”.
To borrow from the words of the Reverend Victoria Safford in her poem, The Gates of Hope, my “history has been meeting my hope at the gates of possibility for some time now”. When my past and my future collided, I had a choice: to double down and try to reclaim control over everything in my life, or to get comfortable with relinquishing control and unlocking the power of letting go.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.