BOOK EXTRACT: Sisonke Msimang on death and dying – Business Day

The last time they see each other, the night my mother dies, my daughter crawls into her lap and they cuddle on the big couch in front of the big TV downstairs in the big house that belongs to us all. This house has arms long enough to wrap around us all. Bedrooms and balconies and a kitchen big enough to sit in.

I notice that my mothers hands are puffy and her face is tired. I tell her to drink her medicine. Her arms squeeze her grandbaby and she says of course she will. She doesnt. The tragedy has already been scripted. We are living through the last lines of the book of her life and we do not yet know it. Hours later, cradled by her bathtub in the house she loves, surrounded by her children and their children, my mother dies.

My sadness at my mothers death is compounded by my daughters confusion. What do you call this? Sadness squared perhaps. But the two of us are not alone in our sense of abandonment. We are all bereft my sisters and our husbands and my father, who becomes a ghost of himself almost immediately. Heartache multiplied by infinity.

I never imagined what it might mean for my daughter to lose my mother. I thought only about her losing me. This is the problem with the calculus of risk; you never quite get the formula right.

Insurance policies ask what you will do in the event that both spouses die, but tragedys portfolio is complex. I never considered that I would lose my mother at the same time that my daughter would lose her grandmother; multiple losses embodied in one womans unexpected death.

The rituals that followed the vigils and the singing and condolences gave shape to our mourning. But after the early bursts of tears, after the praises have been spoken, and the good days remembered, and the lament cried, and the grave closed, there is no company in grief, says American author Ursula Le Guin. It is a burden borne alone.

After the mourning, as grief set in and hardened, there followed a time of utter desolation. Her death sent me into the territory of panic I had first encountered at 12. I was no longer 12, but I was still terrified by the knowledge that she had been claimed by what James Baldwin describes as the terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return.

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This has been a pandemic of a year but still somehow this miraculous thing has happened to my daughters body. She has stretched and blossomed and suddenly there is this and she is in tears and does not want to grow up and we are staring at one another in shock and grief and wonder. I assume she can bear life and it makes me sad and strangely complete to know that one day I will have outlived my usefulness to the planet, and she will remember me, and, in this way, I too will live.

I had no more answers in the wake of my mothers death than I did when I lay shuddering in my bed in the months after the Challenger exploded. What I had what I have always had is an instinct to survive. And this instinct so clear in the very fact of my daughter and the need for me to keep her safe has been my saving grace.

As a child I wept at the sight of seven men and women burning on the television screen. As a young woman I cried at the sight of a plane crashing into sky and steel. In the months that followed, as war rained on innocents in the aftermath, I marched to mourn the deaths of strangers. In my forties I lost my mother and felt that I would die from the pain of it.

Through it all, I have been fearful and anxious and still I have stared death in the face. Lifes hardest moments do not require courage, they simply require accompaniment. And this I have had in abundance all the days of my life.

Sisonke Msimang is the author of Always Another Country: A Memoir of Exile and Home and The Resurrection of Winnie Mandela. Last week she won the Western Australian Writers Fellowship at the WA Premiers Book awards.

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BOOK EXTRACT: Sisonke Msimang on death and dying - Business Day