How I Lost My Mother , livre ebook

How I Lost My Mother
How I Lost My Mother
A Story of Life, Care and Dying
LESLIE SWARTZ
Published in South Africa by:
Wits University Press
1 Jan Smuts Avenue
Johannesburg 2001
www.witspress.co.za
Copyright © Leslie Swartz 2021
Published edition © Wits University Press 2021
First published 2021
http://dx.doi.org.10.18772/12021036949
978-1-77614-694-9 (Paperback)
978-1-77614-695-6 (Hardback)
978-1-77614-696-3 (Web PDF)
978-1-77614-697-0 (EPUB)
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher, except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act, Act 98 of 1978.
Project manager: Alison Lockhart
Copyeditor: Alison Lowry
Proofreader: Alison Lockhart
Cover design: Hybrid Creative
Typeset in 11.5 point Crimson
For Jenny
I know a few things about Father’s past, and what I don’t know, I’ve made up.
Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl , entry of Thursday 8 February 1944
How do I tell her story? When does it actually begin? When does that dying begin?
Michael Ignatieff, Scar Tissue
He once called her his basil plant; and when she asked for an explanation, said that basil was a plant which had flourished wonderfully on a murdered man’s brains.
George Eliot, Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life
Contents
Introduction
Part I: Finding
1 The Weeping Rose
2 Be sociable
3 Goodwill
4 The trouble with nerves
5 The archives
6 Nadine Gordimer, Anne Frank, Elsie Cohen and me
Part II: Losing
7 Shouting loud
8 Coming home
9 Avoiding surgery
10 Closing in
11 Scar tissue
12 Care
13 What ends?
Part III: Afterwords
14 Death admin
15 How I lost my mother
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Introduction
T his book is, in its heart, my version of the story of Elsie Swartz, born Cohen, who lived from 1925 until 2011. Elsie was my mother. She was born in Johannesburg to immigrant Jewish parents, was considered clever at school, but never completed high school. She married my father, Alfred Swartz, in 1951, and they moved to what was then Rhodesia, shortly after they were married. My elder sister Jenny (born in 1952) and I (born in 1955) grew up in what was then Salisbury, before our family returned to South Africa in 1966. Jenny married and had two children (she is now a grandmother) and moved to Australia. I married (twice), have two children and live in Cape Town.
My father was physically disabled (not a word he himself would have used) from birth and died rather young, at the age of 62. He was an engineer, fond of sport, despite living with impairments and pain, and very happily married to my mother. Elsie, for her part, worked as a shorthand typist most of her life, until retirement, following her husband from cement factory to cement factory, wherever his job took him. She was deeply affected by the impact, on his life and hers, of his mother, my grandmother, and his aunt Leah (who preferred to be known as Lea), Granny’s younger sister; both were demanding and difficult older women.
Ten years ago I published a book titled Able-Bodied , which dealt with my father’s life and its impact on me. Although that book had elements of memoir, it was also a chance for me, as an academic who works in disability studies, to write and think about issues of disability rights and access in southern Africa. This book, similarly, is about my mother, but it is also about other things. Like my mother before me, I am interested in all sorts of things. I am interested in what care is and how we care for one another; I am interested in memory and how we remember; I am interested in identity and how we become (and create) who we are. At different times, I discuss all of these things in this book and I invite you, the reader, to take a bit of a circuitous journey with me.
Most of all, writing this book has for me been an act of love – for my mother and what she gave me, but also for my family, and especially my wife and my daughters and my sister. I don’t know (does anyone?) how to be a proper son, father, husband, brother, grown-up person. Writing this book, for me, has been part of the ongoing journey to try to find out.
Leslie Swartz Cape Town August 2020
Part I Finding
1 | The Weeping Rose
G etting old is difficult, my mother used to say, but the alternative is worse. She should know. When she was 17, Elsie’s father dropped dead in front of her. She never forgot what she called the sound of a death rattle. As the baby of the family by many years, she was the only one of her siblings still living at home with her parents and she was also the only one who was there when her father died. In addition to that, she had been living for months in a house in which her parents were not speaking to each other and communicating, if at all, through her. After his death, Elsie told her older siblings about this state of affairs, but they would not believe it. She was alone, with her own mother, Paulina, with the secret, the one who made things up.
Years later, when her mother died, Elsie was far away, living in Rhodesia with her husband and two young children. Paulina died a few months after the death of her only son, Hymie, who died young, in his 40s. Whereas both her husband and son had died of heart attacks, Paulina was said to have died of a broken heart. Elsie flew to Johannesburg for the funeral but she was not really part of things. For the rest of her life she railed against the fact that when Paulina’s possessions from the old house were distributed amongst the siblings, nothing was set aside for Elsie, who was too far away. Years later, when she saw the jardinière she had loved as a child cracked and in poor shape on the stoep of a cousin’s house, she fumed. Not only had she been forgotten, but the memories she had were disrespected too.
When I think of my mother’s life and death, her suspension between those two poles – too close when her father died, too far when her mother died – seems to me to tell another story. Elsie was the afterthought in a big family: her siblings were Cecilia (known as Tilly), Ida (known as Ada), Hyman (known as Hymie), Annie (known as Hannah), and last of all Fanny (known, appropriately enough, as Babe). Ten years later, as a mistake and an afterthought, along came Elsie (known as Elsie). They couldn’t even find another name for her. She heard told that when her mother was pregnant, her father had said he would forgive her and the child if it was a boy. We all know how that turned out.
Although the house in Abel Road in Johannesburg was quite empty by the time Elsie was 17, it had not always been so. As with many immigrant families, children and relatives were many and space was tight. Elsie never forgot sleeping three to a bed with two grown sisters, having her little pillow jammed between two pairs of big girl feet. This nugget of information proved useful to me in my first job after qualifying as a clinical psychologist. It’s a bit hard to credit it now, but my boss in a psychiatry research unit was fond of explaining that the reason Black South Africans lived in overcrowded conditions was that culturally they liked being close to one another. I would snort and point out that my mother, Jewish like him, had grown up in an overcrowded house, but that as soon as the family had any money, the birds flew the cultural nest and started to live, so to speak, like white people.
With all this pushing and shoving for space, where was the room for little Elsie? In addition to all the siblings there was a changing cast of relatives staying in Abel Road, among them cousin Bernie Apfelstein and his mother, who was, as they say, a bit slow. The story was that Auntie Minna had been raped by a Cossack during a pogrom and that Bernie was the child of this rape. When Bernie was about five years old, kind relatives got the money to get Auntie Minna to South Africa from Lithuania. The journey was via London, and for five days Bernie disappeared in London. Nobody knows where he was (he did not remember any of this) and nobody knows how and where he was united with his mother, who had never been to London, could not speak English and didn’t have the intellectual skills to set up a search party. I quibble now with some of the detail of the story – was it London or could it have been Southampton? – but none of this matters much in the telling and the feeling.
My grandfather, Jacob Cohen, never made a living, and the family moved around a bit – from one house in Abel Road, then to the neighbouring town of Edenvale, then back to a different house in Abel Road. Jacob tried his hand at many things, including, for some time, a bicycle shop, which looked like it might work but didn’t. In his heart he had always dreamed, impossibly, of becoming an architect, and in fact he designed the Lyndhurst house where his daughter Hannah and her family lived for many years. After Jacob had had his fingers burned a few times, he was approached by his cousins, the Cohen brothers, to go into a new business with them. It would be a kind of general dealer, selling things for only a tickey, sixpence or a shilling. Wise by then to the history of all his failures, Jacob turned them down, and the Cohen brothers went on without him to launch what was to become OK Bazaars – ‘Where Africa Shops’, as the brown paper carrier bags said at the Salisbury branch of the chain where we used to shop years later.
Two stories, images really, Elsie told of her mother Paulina stick in my mind, and give me a sense of connection to this grandmother I never really knew (she died when I was three and we were living in Rhodesia). The first is of Paulina in later life, reading newspapers. Despite being uneducated, she could read English, Yiddish and Russian, and she read the newspapers from cover to cover.