OUPA'S TWILIGHT

Ouma died suddenly of a heart attack in 1958 and Oupa lived with Auntie Susie, his eldest daughter, until her death. After Auntie Sue died, Oupa went to live with his second daughter, Nellie, who was my mother.

Oupa came to live with my parents in the early sixties. I was away at University so I didn't see much of him. He was already in his nineties then, but still physically in good shape. He had cataracts and couldn't see very well, but he was used to the house and found his way around easily. He needed no help with his ablutions or dressing.

He had lost the plot a bit and always addressed my mother as Katie. He had a cousin Kate who kept a boarding house in Kimberley when he was young, and in his mind he was boarding there again.

He liked to sit on the stoep and listen to the birds: he could tell each kind of bird by its call. When I was home for the holidays, I would sit with him on the stoep drinking coffee and he told me very interesting stories about his world travels. Not that he had ever travelled very far, but all his life he was a keen reader of travel books, and now he believed that he had been to all those places. His descriptions were so good, you would think he really had been there in person.

He had no clue who my father was, just accepted him as a fellow-boarder. Every day when my dad came home from work, he would introduce himself to Oupa: "Van Tonder", he would say, or: "Papenfuss", and Oupa would say :"Du Plooy", and shake hands. This procedure offended my mother bitterly and gave my father endless amusement.

Oupa was 93 when he got a "cold on the chest". The next day he had pneumonia and two days later he died.