My father’s twilight years in a retirement village in South Africa were spent in quiet solitude reading and reminiscing on the lessons of a long life lived. He died last year three months prior to his 90thbirthday.
Especially during my teenage years, we had a difficult relationship. I perceived him as weak with our mother making all the decisions pertaining to important family and other matters. It was embarrassing when he would at times interrupt a conversation with a completely unrelated topic.
I could not understand why he was the complete opposite to his five opinionated and charismatic younger brothers who each in their way had been very successful. They ran profitable businesses, and farms and the youngest was the headmaster of a school.
The veil of silence
It seemed as if my father lived a life separate from the world around him behind a thick veil of silence. Unsurprisingly my two brothers and I tried numerous methods, especially provocation to break through that veil. In his frustration, he would try to discipline us by referring to the all-powerful family figurehead. “What do you think grandfather would say?” That worked. We did not want to get in grandpa’s bad books.
We spent most of our school vacations and weekends on the grandparent's farm. Some of those happiest childhood memories were the swims in the crystal clear waters of the Pongola River in rural South Africa, milking cows by hand, listening to the stories of the Zulus around a fireplace, and riding through the African veld on horseback.
A family secret revealed
Only much later in life my uncle and godfather, his life slowly ebbing away from cancer, took me aside with the words: “I think you need to know a few things about your father to understand why he is the way he is.”
The family secret was finally revealed
