weren’t murderers hiding in the bins on our street. My father used to pace the corridors of our house at night warding off thieves and monsters and murderers. I used to wake up to the sound of his incessant pacing, or to him standing at the door, watching over me as I slept. But he was far more frightening than these invisible threats.
Soon after he showed us this picture, we decided it best to leave.
This was the penultimate time I saw my father. It was death that brought us together again. About two years after our meeting in Long Street, my aunt, his youngest sister and a close relative we were all fond of, was dying in hospital due to complications from the severe cerebral palsy she had lived with her entire life. We visited her, Sarah was there to hold me again, and my father was there. Allegedly he was there all the time, and had been there for her, loving her fiercely throughout those last days. We three went down in the lift for a smoke break. He offered Sarah a hand-rolled cigarette. I wonder if he still smokes cherry tobacco. We offered him our well wishes and even a stilted hug. He held onto me too firmly. I hated it. He vaguely complained that I always gave sideways hugs, that I was restrictive with my body. I wonder why.
A few weeks after that hospital visit it was my aunt’s funeral. She was not old, midway through her 40s. She had exceeded the life expectancy handed down many times by numerous abysmal doctors. She was a fighter, a survivor, having suffered a lot from her physical disability. Her young lungs and organs were being crushed by her bones. Still, she did not want to die. When we went to the hospital to visit there were assembled family, religious men, baked goods and Bibles. There were fervent prayers and what felt like a constant, macabre mantra from someone in the room: ‘you’re ready to go to Jesus now’.
My aunt shook her head. She was not. She most definitely did not want to go to Jesus. She wanted the people around her to believe she could survive, as she had her whole life, despite her debilitating condition. It felt so wrong, seeing someone holding on to whatever life they could, willing their lungs to breathe despite the agonising pain, and instructing them to accept death. To hold up the opaque idea of Jesus over the aching reality of breathing, love, struggle, pain. Able-bodied people have this way of making decisions for disabled people. About what they must do and even who they are, casting disabled people either as living martyrs or infantilising them as inept innocents, incapable of desire, of dissent, of power, of personality even. I realised, as my aunt lay living, that in the time I spent with her as a kid (when my parents were together and we had good relationships with my father’s family), it was always with the implication that this was something good to do, in the same way I knew it was ethically sound to care for the quote unquote ‘frail’. I’m referring here to the neo-liberal framing of the 90s, where we saw ableism as virtuous and feminism as girl power. And while my aunt was always nice to be around and I think that we had nice enough visits, it never occurred to me to find out whether she even liked me. Whether she’d rather be doing something completely different than being read to or being made to deal with the probing small talk of a sanctimonious little girl almost 20 years her junior.
My aunt who did not want to die was loved by many, including her friends at the organisation my grandmother had started where people of all ages with cerebral palsy met up a few times a week to make lovely, functional art. And while I have given everyone in that hospital room flack about the obscene ‘Go to Jesus’ sentiment, it would be crude not to note that my paternal grandmother, in a time when it was near impossible to have basic healthcare rights as a second-rate citizen, tirelessly campaigned for disability justice and with her own funds set up a long-running project that benefited not only her own daughter but many others living with cerebral palsy.
Over the years the various homes of both immediate and extended family have been gifted these lovely creations, colourfully painted and textured mugs and plates and cups. When my father left our home, we found packed ashtrays, old newspaper guns, homemade weapons, a panga. Not sure whether these were meant to protect us or kill us, or both. The eclectic collection of crockery, painted by my aunt and prized by my father, was one of the few uncomplicated pieces of evidence of his occupation of the domestic territory he left behind.
I specifically asked Sarah not to come with me to the funeral. I wish I hadn’t. At the end of the service my father was tasked with the responsibility of thanking everyone who attended. He was so evidently distraught that it seemed perversely voyeuristic to look at him, with his insides exposed like that. A grimy peak cap overshadowed his eyes, the lilt of liquor and/or a tipsy proximity to madness in his walk. I became filled with dread, realising the endless possibilities for havoc in that stride. As he approached the podium my mother glanced at me with the same look of foreboding. There was no stopping it, all we could do was watch. From the front of the church, he addressed the assembled crowd of sniffing elderly and friends and family as ‘comrades’, the speech, lengthy and complicated, part obit, part call to action.
I looked at my mother’s face as soon as he started with this mention of ‘comrade’. She was looking up into the mid-distance with what was unmistakably empathy, compassion, the love you see fatigued mothers somewhat reluctantly but intractably hand over to particularly wayward children, kids who are addicts and relentless self-saboteurs. Love that they are not sure is good for either party involved. She could still hold out such love, any kind of love, to this man on the podium, preaching politics in the faded peak cap. The only partner she has ever had. A man who had been her singular reference point for love, for intimacy, the man who had abandoned her to the responsibilities and cruelties of the world, leaving behind an aching, stinking husk of flesh to be washed, fed and feared.
After the funeral we were all expected to go and have the perfunctory tea at the kerksaal, with the family. My aunt was down from London, we hadn’t seen her in years. We were beleaguered. Quietly suffocating under the weight of mourning and the spectre of our father, a spectacle that evoked in us all the nauseous nostalgia of the rambling discourses he performed during our childhood. He approached us, hugging us affectionately as if nothing had happened, neither the years of estrangement nor the rousing speech, as if he could be absolved by the devastation of his grief, as if this was enough to erase everything in the moment because he needed to hold on to us. I felt for him. My brother exiled my father from his gaze, took a step forward. He had to look away quickly, so he would not turn to salt. So he would not with his entire manhood ahead of him become locked in stasis at the sight of a depraved, burning fatherland, hypnotised by the flames. My brother has made it clear over and over again that he wants nothing to do with my father. My father is everything he wants to forget and everything he cannot let himself become. Luckily he is able to turn away and never look back.
My sister, at the same time, is becoming an acrobat. I can almost feel her muscles go rigid. She must make herself balance, her volatile brain chemicals, the restless throb of her sore little heart threatening to push her off the trapeze. I can feel all our muscles tensing up, the time travel down those neural pathways that have protected us, fight or flight, avoid, block your ears, stop drop and roll away into your room and slam the door. Being anywhere near my father’s nuclear reactive presence unlocks these other versions of ourselves with these latent emotional superpowers, shield, force field. I, the eldest, must step forward. I greet, I offer a condolence, sincere. I do this, I speak, I diplomatically shake hands, not because of my own morbid compulsion, not because I am a sell-out, but so that they don’t have to. At least that’s what I tell myself. We wave goodbye outside the church filled with mourners in black with tear-stained faces. I watch the top of his dirty greying cap and the back of his khaki flap jacket as he walks away across the parking lot, in the opposite direction from the small assembled crowd.
After the funeral, we are quiet. We all go straight home. Nobody has space for koe’sisters and condolences.
By the next funeral he has disappeared. My cousin, my father’s younger brother’s son, age 22, tragically fell to his death from a balcony in late 2018. My mother went to this funeral. I did not. My father’s absence was palpable. Nobody in the family had seen him for about a year and a half. In the years since being rendered houseless he had drifted between family members who had tried to accommodate him for as long as they could, until he became so damaging he threatened to make the walls and foundations of their own homes come crashing down.
After the church service which,