My uncle died this week.
Dying uncles are normally viewed with a certain distance; a way to explain a sudden, unexpected cash flow, or a morning off from work. But no real loss, and if there is sadness, certainly not for more than a day. It’s polite to feel that it death is a sad event, but one doesn’t actually expect real grief to follow the words “dead uncle”.
This uncle was different. I like cantankerous old men in general, and I loved this one in particular. I loved him very much. If I’d had some presence of mind, I’d have done something enterprising, like ShitMyUncleSays. The last two years of his life I saw less of him, because I felt awkward. I struggled to look at him getting older and I battled to know what to say to him. He seemed sad. I became self-absorbed.
I also pulled back because my mother, with whom my relationship is strained, is very close to him, and I felt she needed him. I might also have felt that he needed her.
I missed him, though. About eight weeks before he died, we had a confrontation about my mother. He did not know my side of the story, only hers, and felt I was neglecting her. I didn’t want to tell him any details; I don’t want people to judge my mother or take sides, I just want to be left alone about it. But I did tell him that there were things he didn’t know, and asked him to give me the benefit of the doubt. That confrontation turned into a very careful, meaningful conversation about how much he loved his own daughters, and what he meant – independently – to me and my mom.
I didn’t know he was unwell. I knew he had an auto-immune illness, but it seemed under control. I saw him about two weeks after those letters were exchanged and he looked happy. He’d just moved house and seemed older, but content. Actually, he’d just moved out of an old age home (where we’d been planning to raid happy hour at the pensioners’ whisky bar) to a flat in Rosebank. Things looked good.
About two weeks ago, my mother (whose version of a crisis generally needs to be divided by 17) told me he was very ill. I didn’t believe her. I thought it was a projection of her own fears that she would one day be old, and alone. It was only when I saw my cousin during the course of the week and she told me that her dad was at the end of his life that I got a fright. The next day he was hospitalised.
There is something unutterably horrible about seeing someone you love crying and jerking in spasms of pain. I don’t really know how to describe how it was to see him when the pethadine stopped working and he wasn’t able to eat. He was a tall man and had been normal weight around Christmas. By the time he died about two months later, he weighed about 45kg. He couldn’t get his words out, although he tried.
I asked if I could get him anything. “Five – let-ters. E, D, A, H, T,” he said.
“Sorry,” I said. “I can’t help you with that. Is there anything else you would like?”
“What,” he said, “You – could-n’t – smug-gle – a – sick-le – un-der – your – black – dress?”
It was that kind of party. Actually, a lot of parties with my uncle were that kind of party. I think we understood each other with a kind of giggling grimness somewhere between grin and grimace.
The Sunday before he died, my cousin told Anna that he was resistant to help; that he didn’t even want a DVD player in his house.
“What does he do all day?” asked Anna. “Stare at the wall and think about death?”
“Um,” said my cousin. “Basically.”
It sounds morbid, but it wasn’t. He wasn’t morbid. He just didn’t pretend. He had a habitual and deadpan delivery of the truth. He didn’t see the need to make other people feel less awkward about it.
I think we liked each other because neither of us really liked anybody. I am often mistaken for a sociable person. But believe me, it is a mistake. (If I had my way, I would live alone in a corner café in the Karoo in a straw hat, swatting flies and watching nobody come past.)
One New Year I smsed him to say I was sitting alone on my couch glugging JC le Rocks out of a plastic sippi-cup, classy-like, and watching the SABC1 special.
“Aberrant child,” he replied. “You should be out partying. What will you do when you are my age?”
On his second day in hospital, he tried to get longer words out for me to unscramble. He couldn’t manage it.
On my last visit to him, he fell asleep while I was there. My mother says he never really regained consciousness. He died in the early hours of day five.
I can’t really believe that he’s gone. The thing that makes it strange is that I never thought of him as old. He had big specs and a white beard but we were buddies. I didn’t think of him as in another generation. It’s a cliché, but I actually did believe he’d always be around.
I liked going to visit him. I hate chocolate éclairs, but I really liked his. When I was younger, he had a whiteboard on which I always left a cartoon after visiting. He would mutter crotchety things about my "grotty little pictures" but I choose to believe he liked them, deep down. (Perhaps very deep down.) One Christmas, I made him a book - an extended collection of cartoons - and called it Grotty Little Pictures. I wrote in water-resistant ink because he was known for his legendary Saturday-morning baths, when he would disappear into the bathroom with a book for several hours. I'm not sure whether my book ever made it to one of those reading marathons. I hope it did.
When he quit smoking (briefly) some years ago, we each caught the other at my cousin’s wedding, skulking behind opposite sides of the same tree with a fag. I was still in the closet; he’d allegedly “given up”, and hadn’t yet broken the bad news.
His flat was home to sundials he’d made himself, a telescope, countless drawings mapping stars or designs for rebuilding antique instruments, an analemma, and two cats named Frasier and Niles (he did outlive them). Frasier was fat and neurotic, Niles was skinny and hyper-expressive. They were well-named.
An analemma, for those of you who don’t know, is a design mapping the movement of the earth relative to the sun over the period of a year. You allow a sunbeam to reflect off a shiny surface at noon on a particular day of the week, and mark the spot it hits the ground with a nut or bolt. The next week at the same time, you do it again. At the end of the year, your fifty-two bolts form an elliptical design mapping the movement of the earth for that year. It looks like a long, lean figure eight.
My Oom Steve knew everything. He told me why popcorn popped and why mirages appeared on hot roads. He could explain anything you wanted to know about biofuels. He was a physicist, but had an incredible general knowledge: he bought me my first Sara Vaughn album, pirated the Bach violin partitas and sonatas for me (oh come on, it’s not like J.S. was going to get anything out of the sale!), and taught me how to do many great things with chocolate. He taught me that when one buys a car, the first thing you do is to make a dent above the wheel and remove the knobs from the radio face, so that you don't feel so bad when you first crash it or it's broken into. He dug up a limited edition Felice Swados Reform School Girl diary for me. From when I was little, if there was anything I wanted to know, I asked him.
I remember the first time I ever asked him something he didn’t know. I recall it as one of those painful moments when you realise adulthood has come for you and you don’t like it: you may no longer fall asleep on your father’s lap in company; you must cry with dignity; you find out your nanny’s husband beats her and realise your parents are not going to save her; you ask your uncle who knows everything a question and he can’t answer you.
The question I asked him was whether he knew an archaic term for a poisoner. Not an apothecary; it started with a V. I had known the word and forgotten it, and could never find it again.
At the same time – Google wasn’t what it is today, then – I had been on a decade-long quest for the name of Brakenjan’s horse. Brakenjan had been my favourite programme as a kid, and I had a special feeling for that ole yellow pony. Sometime after the programme ended, I forgot the horse’s name and it bugged the heck out of me.
Oom Steve knew about my quest, but kids’ programmes weren’t his field of expertise. I expected him to be more useful in the search for the term for a poisoner, so sent him an email giving him all the clues I could. He didn’t know. I tried the last port of call: Rodney Edgecombe in the English Department. A week later, I had the word: venefic.
I emailed Steve immediately.
“Venefic,” he deadpanned back. “What a great name for a horse. Hopefully this will spur you on to redouble your efforts in the search for the poisoner.”
Oom Steve wasn’t his name, by the way. He was a lone Zimbabwean marrying into a predominantly Afrikaans clan. (When he first arrived, he thought Roomies was the most popular brand of ice cream in South Africa.) On encountering the rest of us, he was somewhat bewildered by the vast droves of Ooms and Tannies. Oom Steve became a nickname; something he said to make himself laugh. I became Niece M.
He met my aunt when she was hitchhiking home and he picked her up. She was a drama student, he was a physics lecturer. He dropped her home and she told my mother: “I’m going to marry that man.” She basically followed him around campus until he did marry her. And it’s a good thing she was so single-minded, because I don’t think he would have approached her first. He didn’t like big displays of emotion. In later years, he softened a little, but he always remained a little awkward.
In the weeks before his death, he disengaged from the world more than ever, although for the first time, he seemed to really enjoy affection. He liked having his hand held, and he would squeeze if you tried to let go. He beamed at visitors, whereas previously he’d only just tolerated them, if he let them in at all.
But he was leaving. The interest he’d always had in anything and everything waned; he stared into space and retreated.
“I’m preparing to go,” he told me.
When my mother cried about it, he lost patience with her. “For goodness’ sake, I’m an old man,” he said. “I’m supposed to die.”
And maybe so. But I’m still going to miss him.
When I was a growing girl in the idyllic mountain village of Lower Woodstock, we used to play a wonderful game called Shag, Marry or Push off a Cliff. The object of the game is to drink a lot of whisky.
