Life is what you make it!

One always has choices in life.  One can choose to be happy or sad.  One can choose to live or to die.  I have chosen to live. We all have to die some time, but until that happens, we need to squeeze every drop of life out of each day.

My days have become very precious.  From the early morning coffee to the late night cup of tea, I am acutely aware that this is yet one more day that I am still alive, and able to enjoy each aspect of life.  

I decided to make a loose end blanket.  I am a knitter and once upon a time ago, I belonged to a creative knitting club. Not that I was any great shakes, although I did knit a few colourful jerseys and blankets.  This time, I am crocheting a blanket.   I discovered that I had a whole array of bits and pieces of wool, which I had wound up into little balls, and placed in a plastic bag.  I am using these to make a blanket bursting with colour.  I am constantly changing the colours to give the best effect.  The loose ends are indicative of my life I think.

More tomorrow, whenever that might be. lol!

CANCER!   HOW DOES IT MAKE ONE FEEL?

Terrible!  The sword of Damocles, hanging over one's head. Never quite knowing when it's going to fall! Never knowing what form it's final death-throws will take.  But before I get too carried away, I am alive today, and I intend to remain so for as long as is possible.  I think that that's the essence of it. Life is for living, and not for dying.  I think that it's very important to have a good attitude and to be positively looking ahead.  

I was diagnosed with stage three Ovarian cancer in August last year and so far I have been through three disastrous lots of chemo, have ingested numerous drops of hemp oil, and spent 18 days in hospital.  The tumor which wrapped its self around my colon needed to be seen to be believed!  I asked the surgeon to show me a picture and he obliged, hauling out this hideous looking mass.  I asked him if I could have it, and so now I keep it in my purse and haul it out at a moment notice to scare away any would be muggers.

I thought I was going to die in hospital, and I think quite a few family and friends thought so too, as I had a steady stream of visitors daily.  It was reported to me that one visitor went home and told a friend, "You had better get in there fast, I think she's on the way out!"  Well! you can't keep and old fuzzy duck down.  I have a young friend who nick named me her "fuzzy duck" on account of my snow white hair, and so that's where that comes from.  More tomorrow....not knowing whether tomorrow will be in a week's time.    

I haven't written on my blog for a long time, but now I think I will blog my cancer journey.  Cancer!  The dreaded word! The word which strikes terror in the hearts of men and women.

Having been diagnosed with Ovarian cancer sometime in the middle of last year, I had to make a decision as to whether I went onto Chemo therapy or not. At first, I decided that Chemo was not for me, and that I would quietly and in a dignified manner, go to my demise. One's mind is in quite a turmoil when one is confronted with something as ghastly as cancer, and so it wasn't very long before I reassessed my decision, and with fear and trembling, began the treatment at the end of September.  I thought that I was worth fighting for.

It always starts with a blood test to see how things are and whether Chemo can be administered or not, then one is given a pill for nausea and hitched up to a drip with a whole array of different sized pouches, seven in all, starting with something for nausea. The fifth pouch is the one with the chemo in it, and it takes three hours to drip itself into you. When it arrived, it looked like washing power.  It was all frothy and bubbly at the top.  From that day onward, I referred to this part of the treatment, much to the amusement of the sister in charge as "that washing power stuff."

One is obliged to sign a form which states all that will happen to you while you are on the chemo.  The list is endless. You can get this, and you will get that, and then at the end it says, and you could die.  Every eventuality is covered in that signed form. 

My mother - the rally driver, not.

My mother was singularly the worst driver I have ever come across. She was in her forties before she finally applied for her drivers licence.  I can only think that the driving inspector was either drunk or felt sorry for her when he signed her off as being competent enough to drive a vehicle.  All she had to do was drive the car around this tiny little village, and park it at an angle, in order to receive her licence.

I hated driving with my mother.  She would take forever to get the car into first gear.  With much grinding and grating she would force the lever into first, leaving the cog with a few teeth missing and bad toothache.  Having coaxed first gear into submission, she would quickly slam it all the way down into fourth. She loved doing this and would announce with great glee, that she had learnt how to double de-clutch!?

The poor car would go from a screaming first to a stuttering fourth, with nothing in between.  She also had another annoying habit of driving in a stop start sort of way.  I could never understand it.  Accelerator, brake, accelerator, brake. it was enough to leave one carsick for days.

I had the great misfortune once, to be driven through the busy streets of Johannesburg by my mother.  We were going to visit my father who was recuperating in hospital after having had a major operation.  My sisters and I literally took our lives into our hands when we accompanied her on this hair raising trip.  My big sister was the navigator, while my middle sister and I sat at the back praying fervently. 

We stop-started, and screeched, and stuttered our way through Joburg, narrowly missing fleeing pedestrians, while cutting in front of large trucks and buses.  How we ever arrived at our destination in one piece, is a mystery to me.

I spent most of the trip curled up on the floor behind the passenger seat.  I was convinced that everyone was staring at this strange little maroon coloured car, with it's wild eyed occupants.  My mother seemed quite oblivious to anything beyond her white knuckled determination to reach our destination.  What sort of destruction she left in her wake was of no concern to her.  Eventually with a great sigh of relief, we reached the hospital.

Always the eternal optimist,  she got out of the car and said "See, that wasn't so bad was it?"  All that occupied my mind throughout the entire hospital visit was, how can I endure yet another one of those terrible journeys back to my aunt's house?

From that day onward, I vowed and declared that I would never drive like my mother, and so I made a concerted effort to copy the way my father drove, which probably wasn't ideal either, seeing as he had moments when his concentration completely deserted him.  He spent a lot of time craning his neck this way and that, in order to see what the crops looked like, and what had been planted.  My mother was always admonishing him "Keep your eyes on the road, and stop looking at the mealies" to which he would reply, "Well then, you look at them." It was always the same, he looked at the scenery, while she looked at the road.

As a small child, I went with my mother to the local little 

village to do some shopping, and on the way home, she took a wrong turn and we started to drive to another town about thirty miles away.  " Why are we going this way?" I quietly inquired.  She gave me a long look, stopped the car, turned it around and said, "Don't tell your father."  This was a great game my parents often played. " Don't tell your father," coupled with,  "Don't tell your mother."  I found all this crazy secrecy, to be a dreadful weight to be carrying around on my small young shoulders.

My young Zimbabwean helper.

Once a week I employ the services of a young Zimbabwean woman to clean my house.  As do so many others from up North, she came to South Africa in order to have a better life, as well as to be able to send money home to her family. 

Africa is pretty much in dire straits a lot of the time. Bad governance coupled with drought and civil wars, has rendered this continent a place where many of the people live on less than an American dollar a day.

My young lady calls herself Brilliant, simply because she thinks her name might be too difficult for a white person to pronounce.  I believe though, that one's name is very important, and so I take great pains in order to get the pronunciation correct, and to refrain from calling her by her"western" name.

In December, she departed a few weeks before Christmas in order to celebrate the festive season with her family.  The cost of travelling back home in a sixteen seater bus, is pretty expensive relatively speaking, four hundred rand from Johannesburg to Bulowayo and a further three hundred from Bulowayo to her home, which is part of what she calls a "Reserve." She proudly showed me on her cell phone, photo's taken on Christmas day.  There sitting on the ground were her mother, brother, sister, her two children and various nieces an nephews.

The shelter they were sitting under, was part of her house to be.  On the one side I noticed about fifteen five gallon containers filled with water.  No such luxury as indoor plumbing. Water has to be fetched from the communal tap, which stands in the middle of the Reserve.  She proudly pointed to a square room a short distance away, which she informed me was the kitchen. Other solitary rooms were pointed out as being the bedrooms. 

I asked her if she had had a good Christmas, and with a big smile on her face she said "Yes, it was lovely.  I cooked rice and afterwards we had biscuits."  I felt very humbled and ashamed because, there I was with a turkey and vegetables and puddings and drinks, while her big Christmas lunch consisted of rice and biscuits. 

On her way back to South Africa, she encountered a huge problem.  At the Zimbabwean boarder, she was informed that the stamp she had in her passport from a previous trip was fake, and she would have to pay five hundred rand in order to proceed on her way.  She was told by the official that the police would be called and she would have to go to jail for six months.  Being a born fighter, she said "Call them."  At this point the bus driver intervened by saying "I can't wait for you. I will have to leave you here." There was nothing more she could do, except pay the bribe.  I firmly believe that the bus driver was part of the scam!  

About fifteen months ago she was called to come home urgently, as her four year old son was ill.  About three weeks later, I got a call from her to say she was back in South Africa again and ready to start work.  As she climbed into my car, the first thing I asked was "How is your son?"  With that, she burst into floods of tears and wailed " I didn't get to see my son."  Apparently, her young son had been bitten by a snake, which caused his leg to swell up to three times it's normal size, resulting in his death. Being in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of Summer, with no mortuary to place the body in until she arrived, they were obliged to bury him almost immediately.  How hard that must have been for her to endure. 

Africa is a harsh continent, and those who live here have to be pretty resilient.  Many have a fatalistic outlook to life in this vast, yet rather beautiful continent of ours.  Drought, coupled with scare water, as well as food shortages, is something we have all learned to live with.    

Church Nigerian style

I am always fascinated by the different ways people do things. I think that my fairly isolated upbringing taught me how to keenly observe life.  I say this because I happened to visit a local Anglican church last Sunday, where the majority of the congregants were Nigerian.  There are an enormous number of foreigners living in South Africa.  When the country became a democracy, our then President Nelson Mandela, opened our borders and the people from up North flooded in. Zimbabweans especially, flocking to South Africa in their millions, in an effort to escape their despotic president with his irrational ideologies.  

Anyway, to get back to my story.  I happened by chance to choose a Sunday when, not only was the priest being installed by the Bishop as the new Rector, but it also happened to be the day the congregation had decided to hold their annual  
monitory drive, in order to collect the much needed money to offset the deficit many churches find they have, at this time of the year.  

A very bossy lady dressed in a black and white uniform came to the front.  Pointing to a large round receptacle standing in front of the altar, she proceeded to half cajole, half chastise the congregation into coming up and placing their "paper" money into it.  

She had everything worked out to the last detail.  First came
the men's forum, followed by the women's association, the local Nigerian community, the choir, the teenagers, the young altar girls in their red dresses, the tiny tots and finally the visitors.  This whole procedure took about an hour to complete.

The men's forum danced their way to the front two by two. Shiny, pointy, black, patent-leather shoes.  New brown leather ones and grey suede, crocodiling their way to the front. All cultures have a distinctive way of dressing and Nigerians are no different.  Traditional dress for the men are fancy pajama-like suits, and so dancing to the front were black and red checks, floral creations with white yokes, white linen with black embroidered trimmings, gold ones, bottle green ones, and glittery diamond shapes on a blue background.  Down the isle they pranced, bobbing and weaving from side to side, to the accompaniment of a man on a keyboard and a woman singing very upbeat songs, which would not be out of place in a Mexican or Cuban bar. 

Then came the turn of the Women's association, who were all dressed in the same black and white uniforms as the bossy lady at the front.  The leader was a young woman who advanced forward with much backward heel kicking.  She shrilly blew on a police whistle to the beat of the music, whilst mercilessly smacking into submission, a small leather cushion attached to her right hand by means of a piece of elastic.  Pow! pow! pow!  She looked as if she was having the time of her life dancing and whistling and beating the cushion to death.  I felt quite envious as I thought of my own staid and controlled existence.  I seemed so 
incongruously out of place there.

On and on they went, dancing and singing and slapping their money into the wide, open mouth of the expectant bowl.  This might have gone on all morning had the Rector not intervened when the bossy lady tried to get the Men's Forum to come up for a second time.

What struck me forcibly was how few women were in the congregation in proportion to the men.  I do however have it on good authority, that women in Nigeria seem to be second class citizens.  The word which comes to mind is chattels.  I was told, that the men can do as they please with their wives. I was also told that the function of the wife it to bare the children, cook the food and look beautiful.  A bit like a trophy wife.  The dresses which Nigerian women wear are something to behold though.  Full length, snugly fitting creations in brightly coloured floral or geometric patterns.  Matching head pieces twisted this way and that to form beautiful regal adornments.

Finally, three hours later, the pageantry came to an end and we were ushered into the hall for refreshments.  I sat down at a table in the middle of the room, only to be told by a man with a large badge on his lapel which said "ASK ME", to go and sit in the one corner with a bunch of old whites who looked as if they had been ferried in from some frail care centre in an old age home.  When I asked why I had to sit there, he said it was because they had prepared special food for the whites.  He seemed a little apologetic when I said I didn't need special food and I was white.  On looking around the hall, I realized that we had all been categorized into men, women, black and white.  So, so sad when we are desperately trying to escape our ugly, segregated past.  I decided that I was not going to have some man in zooty PJ's tell me what to do, so I excused myself and went home.

  

It's not how he died, it's how he lived!

Many people go through life in a state of semi-consciousness, more dead than alive.  Many people also go through life living either in the past, or in the future.  A game often played by people living in the past is called "Remember when?" Remember when we went on holiday to the seaside in 1995? A game which can be played over and over again and always with the same predictable outcome.  A comforting sort of game for those involved in it, but tiresome for those who are not.

Living in the future manifests itself when one is dissatisfied with ones present life, and wishful thinking and daydreaming becomes a pleasant diversion.  This of course can reach a stage where a person is unable to differentiate fact from fiction.  The ideal is always to live fully in the present.

I knew a man who lived life this way.  His entire life was spent in the here and now.  When he and his family went on holiday, he would always say, "I'll take care of the outdoor stuff"  This meant that the trailer would be packed with wind surfers, body boards, snorkels and flippers.  He loved holidays.  In the evenings and weekends, he would spend a lot of time drawing pretty boarders around the outsides of postcards.  These would be sent to all sorts of competitions which he invariably won.  Cars, oversea's trips, fridges, watches, bottles of perfume and sunglasses.  His wife said she had a watch for every day of the week.  His theory was that whoever ran the competitions, would not be able to resist the brightly colored boarders, and choose his card. He was a man who lived life to the full and met every challenge head on, except for the one huge challenge, which eventually took his life.

The memorial service was held at a wedding venue out in the country, and far from the madding crowd.  Family and friends and work colleagues assembled in the rectangular building overlooking the large field of newly sprouting, green Spring grass. Under the blossoming apricot trees, stood tables laden with eats for the "after tears" party.  I have it on good authority from one of my friends, that this is what it is known as, in many of the South African cultures. 

The service itself was a very simple affair.  No prayers, no hymns, just seven people giving their eulogies on the life of a husband, father, brother, friend and colleague.  Each person had the same story to tell.  A man who loved life. A man who had a zest for life.  A man who when he walked into a room, brought the sunshine with him.  A man who never had a bad word to say about anyone.  But alas, as they say in the classics "All good things must come to an end," and this sadly happened when he developed a motor neuron disease, which robbed him of his dignity and finally of his life.

The onset of the disease was slow at first.  The loss of mobility and then the slow but relentless progression from stick, to crutches and eventually wheelchair.  The final straw was when he had to go to work wearing a nappy (diaper).  He tried hard to keep cheerful and make little jokes, but this burden proved to be too much for him, and finally, he gave up one day and hanged himself.

One of his best friends made a comment after the service, which I thought to be very profound.  "It's not how he died, it's how he lived."  And indeed, based on his life, he was a giant among men!