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Going Back to Say Goodbye:
A Boyhood on the Mine
Kenneth de Kok
Kwela Books
For
Steffen
Nicholas
Daniel
Hilary didn’t beat about the bush, the night she phoned. “It’s spread into his brain,” she said. “It’s more or less everywhere. We think you should come quickly.”
I wasn’t shocked but suddenly scared. I arranged flights.
I didn’t know the new house. It was smaller, sunnier than the home we’d moved to in 1964, when Dad was transferred to head office in Johannesburg, but full of the same stuff I knew from my boyhood. And William was still standing in the kitchen, greyer, shorter but familiar. I shook his soft hand.
The day after I arrived, my mother led my sisters and me into the Hillbrow Hospital. “We’re going to bring him home, no matter what they say. They should never have done that stupid surgery. I’ll sign whatever they want!”
He sat on the edge of the bed while Mom fussed with his dressing gown and slippers and packed his few things. I eased him into a wheelchair and pushed him down the corridor and into a lift. At the front desk Mom told someone she was taking him home. They didn’t seem at all concerned. We waited on the pavement while Hilary fetched her car.
I looked down at him. He was terribly pale and thin. He looked like someone who was going home to die.
I’d seen him just two years earlier. On his way back from metallurgical work in Venezuela, he’d visited us for a week at our place, north of Kingston. He and Carolyn watched the Olympics in Los Angeles on TV while I worked shifts at the hospital. He was warmer and more relaxed than I ever remembered and he played sweetly with Stef, his five-year-old grandson and namesake. We had a good time together.
The airport shuttle bus left from the Days Inn and we got there a little early but he wanted to claim a window seat, so we hugged and kissed goodbye and he climbed aboard. I stood on the tar as he looked down at me. We’d both look away and then look back at each other. Every time we caught each other’s gaze, he smiled. A smile of real affection.
I was deeply moved. I thought that, after all, he must have slowly grown fond of me. For years, we’d been estranged to some degree: politics, the army, dropping out, the push and shove of father and son. I’d left South Africa with bitterness towards him. I thought he’d be smugly content, when, after a few months, I came home with my tail between my legs. But I didn’t. I stayed overseas. First in Holland, and then in Canada.
Hilary drove up to the hospital entrance and we got him comfortably settled in the back of the car. I sat beside him. After a few blocks he said that we were going too fast, it was too bumpy. When I looked at him he gave me a small, self-deprecating smile.
Within a week his thin white stubble and shrunken cheeks had begun to unsettle Mom. He lay curled up on the bed in the spare room, silent except for a soft, whistling sound he made when he exhaled.
One morning she asked me to shave him; it would freshen him up, make him presentable. But when I suggested it might be tiring, she said sadly, “I know. Please, Kenneth. Do it for me. I don’t like how he looks.” She started crying. “He looks so terrible.”
So we set up a basin and I put a new blade in his razor. “Dad,” I said, “I want to clean you up, give you a shave.” He nodded and allowed us to prop him up with cushions.
I had half his face done when he said, “Stop! I’m getting giddy! I want to lie back down.”
I eased him down and then dabbed the soap off his whiskers. Outside, my mother whispered, “Well, at least we tried.”
So for the last few days of his life he presented an odd spectacle to those who came to say goodbye. One side was the clean-shaven man we all recognised: father, husband, brother, friend. The other half was a white-bearded stranger. Someone who’d slid off a canvas by El Greco and into the bed against the wall. An old man with black, red-rimmed eyes who had appeared here, only to die.
He could have said something about what was happening, maybe that he was on his last legs, but he said nothing.
I touched him more in those weeks than I’d done in my entire life. And somehow that meant unequivocally it was over, that there was no hope. For as long as I’d known him, his body had been his alone, clothed, private and smelling of smoke. He was not a touching man and he didn’t invite it. Now he barely noticed.
I rubbed his back, avoiding the jagged shark-bite of the lung biopsy, and washed him gently between his legs. His penis lay folded and naked as a nestling. I was pretty sure I’d never seen it before. My gloved finger tingled as I inserted the Gravol suppositories.
Moments of lucidity became rare. He was visited by his two older half-brothers, gruff, rough men. They jostled awkwardly in the doorway, making placating noises. The eldest said hoarsely, “Hells bells! You’re not looking too bad, my boy!”
My father, suddenly alert, muttered, “Who do you think you’re kidding, Dick?”
And then those old men sat in the lounge in their flannels and ties and jackets and had tea. And they both had wet eyes when they kissed my mom goodbye. They called her “Jeannie”.
Late one afternoon the neighbour’s dog started barking at the back fence and my father yelled, with surprising vigour, “Someone, please, shoot that dog!”
We invited a family friend over, a furniture maker, and asked him to make a pine casket, simple and unvarnished. It’s what Dad once said he wanted and Mom had remembered.
Then we all sat in the garden and felt the warmth of the sun on our backs. We spoke of hospice and autumn flowers and South African woods: tamboti, hardekool, stinkwood, kiaat.
In the afternoons our mother lay down on the carpet by his bed and slept.
My sisters waited. I waited as long as I could. I added a week to my stay, and then another. The doctor couldn’t say and I decided to return to Canada.
On my last afternoon, as my sisters and mother sat in the lounge, I went up the hallway to say goodbye. My suitcase was at the front door. I felt their sadness for me; they had a little more time, they could be surprised, but I had to say a formal farewell, there and then. I wouldn’t see him again.
I should have said, “Dad, I’m not going to see you again. I want to say I love you before I go.” Sat by his bed, held his hand, maybe stroked it. Or something like that. But I didn’t. I stood there and said, “Well Dad, I’ve got to get back to the family. I’m afraid I’ve got to say ‘cheerio’.”
His eyes opened, unfocused and confused.
“Already! It seems you’ve only been here a day or two.” Then he smiled. “How are you getting back, my boy? By boat?”
I said, “No, Dad. By plane.” And I looked at him for one long instant and then kissed him on the top of his head as though he were a small, sleepy boy.
“Bye, Dad,” I said. He
