Before Memory Fades: The Story of Three Lives Intertwined Across Generations

INTRODUCTION

This is the first post on my new blog website thebraidedecho.co.za.

This time, I am writing a journal about my life as it intertwines with both my mother’s and my daughter’s. The structure of this journal is explained below under the headings ABOUT THIS JOURNAL and ABOUT US THREE.

Important! I started writing down the memories in this journal long before I began publishing blog posts on the website my daughter prepared for me. Some time later, I realised that my thoughts do not always flow smoothly, or that something had happened in the meantime that I needed to quickly recount before I forgot about it. Sometimes my memories upset me so much that I have to go look for something to cheer me up, and then I write about it. This means my story does not always follow chronological order. So, I have made sure that each subsequent blog following this Introduction includes a title indicating the year to which a specific memory pertains. You, dear reader, must make sure that you look at the title and know in which year this memory was implanted in my head, or you will get lost.

English is the dominant language of this website, but all blog posts will be translated into Afrikaans.

There will also be links to audio clips in both languages for readers with reading difficulties or those who prefer to listen rather than read.

Look for the language selection button at the bottom left of the web page to switch to the language of your choice.

I hope this counts as good news.

ABOUT THIS JOURNAL

I started writing this journal on my late mother’s last birthday. Her ninety-sixth.

I am not entirely sure what motivated this. Who would read what I have written years ago now and remember the people I am writing about? Perhaps I sensed that a day would come when memory, hers or mine, would begin to loosen its grip. Then I could return here, read my own words, look at the photographs, and remember the twists and turns of our lives, hers and mine, braided together.

Maybe I also knew, quietly and without naming it, that my life might follow a similarly untidy path. Not the neat, circular version we are sold as the circle of life, but something far more erratic. Less ideal. More human.

This journal exists to hold what memory no longer can. It traces three intertwined lives: my mother’s, my own, and, to a lesser extent, my daughter’s. It is about old age, dementia, illness, especially cancer, family fractures, faith and doubt, work, loss, endurance, and the quiet, stubborn insistence on living, rather than merely existing.

I do not write about battles with cancer or life’s difficulties. Battles produce winners and losers, and I refuse that framing. This is a record of life as it is lived, sometimes defiant, sometimes dark, often absurd, occasionally tender. Humour appears where it insists on being heard.

This is not a tidy story.

It is simply the truth, written down before memories disappear.

ABOUT US THREE

My mother was the youngest of four children. She grew up in a small rural town in the Northern Cape, where my grandmother owned and ran a boarding house for policemen and a shop. My grandmother was a good-looking, strong, hard-working woman, brilliant and an able businesswoman, the backbone that held the family together. She was also stern, with a short fuse and a tendency towards angry outbursts, according to family stories.

My grandfather was a road-works foreman who helped lay roads and build bridges in the Kamiesberg mountain range in the days when this work was still done by hand, with shovels and picks. He was a quiet man, often away from home, and like my grandmother, he had asthma throughout his life. They were poor, as most people were in those years, earning meagre wages and living carefully.

My mother married my father when she was twenty-three. He was seventeen years older, a widower with six daughters between the ages of two and fifteen. She must have been fearless, or wildly in love. Definitely not desperate for love. She had more than her fair share of good looks, intelligence, wit and courage. She was a woman with a quick temper, somewhat spoiled by my father, and easily offended. She loved to laugh and had an infectious giggle.

My father was a quiet man, not one to wear his heart on his sleeve, but someone who lived according to his convictions. Even my mother never dared push him too far. By all accounts, their marriage, which lasted nearly fifty years, was generally a happy one, although life was not all love and roses. They had five children together, of whom I am the youngest.

Both my grandparents lived with us in their later years. Being the youngest daughter in her family, my mother cared for them until they died, at different times, before I turned six.

I was the youngest in this composite family, born many years after most of my siblings, when my mother was thirty-three. In keeping with family tradition, I, the youngest of her children, eventually inherited my mother's care. She was fortunate in her health and lived to the age of ninety-six. That good fortune was not to be repeated in my own life. Disease and chronic ill-health, primarily cancer and hypertension, ended any hope of a comfortable retirement.

As the youngest child in a large and not always happy family, I was mostly overlooked. No one cared to sit down to share family history, conflicts, joys, or secrets with the baby of the family. I was simply there. Thus, I never really learned about family history and did not have a close relationship with either my parents or my older siblings. I wish I could go back in time and change this situation, know more about my parents' youth and what motivated their life decisions.

I love a good joke. Humour is what keeps me standing during bad times. I married my husband because he made me laugh, and divorced him when the laughter dried up. I inherited the family temper and a tendency to speak my mind, often with sharp sarcasm. Yes, and I was not too bad-looking in my youth, either, although old age and disease have now eroded my looks.

I always adored my children, two boys and a girl, with an intensity that borders on excessive protectiveness, and I never hesitated to protect them when I felt it was necessary. I still do. They will readily tell you that I was strict, sometimes highly so, but they are also quick to reassure me that I was a good mother, whatever that means. All my life decisions, from the day they were born, centred on my love for them and the close relationships I have always tried to foster among the siblings. I don't know if they will necessarily agree with this statement, but this is my story, and I will keep to my opinion in this journal.

My daughter is my youngest, born when I was thirty-three, and, true to form, life repeated itself. Karen has inherited me in my old age, and is now caring for me with the help of my eldest son, Corné.

True to form, Karen is highly intelligent, artistic, creative and beautiful, inside and out. She irritates easily, but is better at hiding it than I ever was. She prefers to do things in her own way and in her own time, yet she is deeply caring, fiercely loyal, and willing to take on dragons to protect those she loves, her family. She inherited a love of laughter but is careful about whom she shares her jokes with.

Life on repeat.

Featured image: AI-generated photo illustration of three generations of women embracing, symbolising the interwoven lives of grandmother, mother, and daughter.