thecages

Now is a time of endings.
Spring(and with it summer's early heat) has arrived in Cape Town, and it is the start of the growing season.

But relationships and lives are ending. The world is fucked beyond repair. And(vainly) I am approaching the end of my twenties.

Three of my grandparents are still alive and are all in their eighties. My father's father is in good health but his twin sister recently suffered a minor stroke, and has moved from her little flat into a frail care room. She seems to have chosen to mark this as the day her independent life ended.

My mother's father and mother weren't so lucky/cursed. Over the last two years they have involuntarily and continuously slid into a fog of memory loss and confusion.

Recently my maternal grandfather developed a haematoma due to prolonged minor internal bleeding and was admitted to hospital for surgery. Upon waking from his induced sleep Alzheimer’s had taken him.
He was apparently aggressively paranoid and fearful - speaking to himself about wanting to buy horses and the strangers who were holding him.
The doctors prescribed medication which control the outbursts but leaves him vague and devoid of a personality.

All of this I am experiencing second and third hand. They, along with two of my mother's brothers, live in Pretoria and so I am disconnected from the actual events.

I have never experienced any mammal's death first hand. No slaughtered sheep, no dog or cat under the vet's gloved hand, no aged relative.
My father's mother died in 2002, a thousand kilometers removed from me.
I have heard the events[1] around a dear cousin's grandmother's death some years ago.
I've seen dead bodies and flaming car wrecks but never a final breath.

Now I am losing - have lost - the member of my family in whom I've recognised my own genetics and personality most.
I've always felt my grandfather to be my strongest link to my line of decent.
The natural selection which passes genes and neural wiring from generation to generation is most evident[2] from him to me.

I last visited with him and my grandmother in December a few days before Christmas and found them, mercifully[3], lucid and talkative.
I now doubt if I will have another opportunity to talk to him when he will be able to understand that it is me speaking and will speak back.
My mother is planning on going to Pretoria one of these coming weekends and I will go with. But I am not expecting miracles, nor disasters - only the natural reality of that day as it will be.


Perhaps his metabolism will allow long established, well constructed neural pathways to function when I next see him and we'll be able to talk about how I'm doing, our plans to visit Canada and whether their avocado tree will bear many fruits this summer.
Or the deterioration of the structure and functioning of his brain and the merciful[4] relief of the medication will leave his breathing body unoccupied, and I will be left projecting my own brain's memories onto his recognisable features; hands, ears and balding head.
Perhaps someone else will be tending that avocado tree.

---

This is what I know of his life.
He was born to a family of missionary Seventh Day Adventists.
All the children had to learn to play musical instruments to be used in church, but this restriction meant that he and his brother had to secretly buy and listen to Jazz and Bossa Nova records.
Upon leaving school he enrolled in a Seventh Day Adventist seminary in Somerset West, at the foot of the Helderberg, to study to follow in his father's footsteps.


The male students would on Saturdays hire bicycles from people in town and pedal to the Strand to go and swim in the frigid water that I've been unable to persuade myself to enter more than a handful of times.
At some point during his studies he found that he disagreed strongly with the Adventists' teaching and left the seminary.
He became a male nurse instead and met my grandmother when she became a trainee nurse.
He had a motorcycle with a sidecar in which they could ride around, but he only bought a car after they married.
They regularly went dancing at a hotel near the Barrage(near Parys) in the Free State and recalled only leaving for home as dawn was already breaking.


They moved to the Jan Kempdorp/Vaalharts district in the Northern Cape where they farmed peanuts and cattle on an irrigated smallholding - though I'm not sure for how long. My mother was born on this smallholding
They also ran a general store as shopkeepers for a while.


With three children, in the mid 50's they moved to Pretoria(Valhalla then Pierneefrand) where he returned to nursing, working for Iscor.
While living in Pretoria two more children were born and he lost his eldest daughter to Epilepsy. His eldest son married as did a daughter(my mother).

In the mid 70's they moved to Phalaborwa where he worked as a radiologist for Foskor, examining the broken bones and cut innards of mine workers. My parents moved there too (from the Strand where he had swum so many years ago) in 1976. I was born in Phalaborwa, the second of ten grandchildren.


He retired from Foskor in the early 80s and he and my grandmother set off in a caravan on a grand tour of South Africa before settling in Pretoria which they had left more than a decade earlier.
Two more children were married while they lived in Pretoria.

In the late 80's they moved to Parys(where they had danced the nights away during their courtship) where they tended a massive fruit and vegetable garden irrigated from the Vaal river.
During the 90's they moved a number of times between their children, now settled in Pretoria, Jeffrey's Bay and(returning to the seminary town) Somerset West.
Their grandchildren grew and developed unfathomable tastes in clothing and music.
Their houses became systematically smaller from their enormous house in Pierneefrand through their dorpshuis in Parys and granny flats in Pretoria, Jeffreys Bay and Somerset West. Finally they settled in a one-bedroom unit in a retirement community in Waverly, Pretoria.

All these lines and circles drawn over decades from sea to river and back have led him and me and our wives in and around one another and the places we've lived.
I know better than to be hopeful or angry or sad[5].

---

The brain needs oxygen. The body lives and the senses produce electric stimuli.
Neurons fire and the information organises itself into a person.
The body deteriorates and starves the brain. The information leaves its electrical host.

Natural selection identifies a replicator which succeeds in producing a new generation.
The replicator dies and the next generation takes part in the next round of selection.

I walk by(or swim in) the same cold water he did. We share sets of genes.

None of this feels like evolution as the information that surrounds us continues to organise itself leaving us no less nor more vulnerable than before.




[1] her last hours were peaceful and clear. She spoke to each of her children and several visiting family members.
[2] to me at least
[3] fuck mercy, there is no mercy in the natural continuation of events - I cast the condition reflected by the I Ching, the reality of events, the organisation of the information as merciful - but it is indifferent to me[i]
[i] as it should be
[4] again with that gentle lie
[5] or vengeful or hopeful or aloof or strong or sensitive or any of those modulating behaviours that my brain has learnt.