Dear News24 readers,
Welcome to Live by Design by Dr Helena Dolny and Mapi Mhlangu.
We are looking forward to engaging with you about life-affirming conversations concerning our one wild and precious lives - creating legacies and dignity for our loved ones.
Here's introducing ourselves as your new weekly columnists.
We are a duo, and every week either one or both of us will write in this space. Our quest is to bring life-enhancing conversations that touch on mortality. Does that sound like a paradox? Life-enhancing and mortality put together in the same sentence. We intend to convince you.
How did we come to this work? Why is it that our role as facilitators of such conversations, our soul work, brings us much joy and we are passionate to share with others?
Mapi's story
I'm a product of my experiences and stories I hear from my community. As a storyteller with more than 25 years of experience, I have witnessed a spectrum of human emotions and experiences, from stories that inspire and bring people together to stories that break family ties and relationships. I have watched people suffering when loved ones die but I have watched them suffer even more when certain conversations have not happened. I'm here to bring you stories that will enhance the way you live your "one wild and precious life" in the words of poet Mary Oliver, while not shying away from acceptance that death will come to all of us - no exceptions.
My commitment to this soul work is deeply rooted in the gift given to me by my mother, Busisiwe Myria Mhlangu. At the time she was dying of colon cancer, I was a young professional in my 20s, managing a team working on the coverage of national elections. You can imagine the strain and sadness of going up and down from Johannesburg to KwaMashu over weekends. I exhausted all my savings on travel and treatments that gave any hope of improvement. Eventually, doctors advised that they had done all they could and it was time for nature to take its course. On the advice of her best friend, we took her to hospital, knowing she would not come back. The last Sunday I saw her she was in a great deal of pain and she passed midweek.
So, what was the gift? It was the conversations with my mother before this time of crisis. She then wrote down all her wishes about what was to happen once she died in a school exercise book.
She specified she wanted to be buried on a Thursday - the day of Umanyano - when churchwomen embark of different church activities. She wanted a blue coffin. She spoke to the person who she wanted to be programme director. She called her friends and shared her bequests. My shero paid for, ahead of time, the purchase of the cow. She specified the menu for the after tears, even gave an instruction that there should be no desserts. She had funeral policies in place. A widowed mother of three women and one son made our family's lives easier. It meant that when the brothers and the uncles arrived and tried to organise differently, my sisters and I could show everyone the exercise book. "Here are our mother's wishes, written in her own hand."
It was such a gift, such foresight, such kindness to our family. We could sit with our grief and not be distracted by family quarrels.
I want everyone to have this gift, and yet, so many people do not want to talk about it or they are superstitious that such conversations might bring on death earlier.
Helena's story
My story is different to Mapi's. It comes more from painful life lessons of what happens when you do not have conversations. My late husband was Joe Slovo - a struggle hero to many and a minister in Madiba's first Cabinet. We married five years after a letter bomb exploded in the office of his first wife, my colleague, Ruth First, and killed her instantly. Joe himself was on the apartheid regime's hit list. There was a good chance that death by assassination would be his fate. That possibility had an upside. It meant living life with an intensity, knowing that the joy of love and daily living might end abruptly.
It did not happen that way. Our love story of "until death do us part" was one of living with cancer for the last three years of his life.
You would think that three years would be time enough for conversations. Well, no. The first thing Joe did was cancel working with a biographer - no time for looking back. He would focus on fully playing his part in bringing to fruition his life's work, South Africa's first democratic elections in April 1994.
He died eight months later. He only did his will three days before he died. It was as if he were superstitious that if he acknowledged his upcoming death it would bring it on sooner. In that last week, we insisted he be specific about funeral wishes. These were heart-wrenching conversations. We pleaded, if he did not make his wishes known, his comrades might override family wishes. If indeed he wanted to be buried in a simple pine coffin, he needed to make his wish known.
Shortly after he died, I learnt I had a stepson, already in his 20s. I had known Joe for 18 years and been his wife for the last eight. Why this secret? Why had he never spoken? It is hard to learn of secrets after the person has died and conversation is no longer possible. And is hard not to be rattled by questions such as, "How well did you really know this person if you are only discovering this now?"
That is my story. We suffer when loved ones die. We suffer even more when certain conversations have not happened.
What's the good that came out of the bad? I discovered my gift that I am comfortable sitting with people as they are dying, and I became more and more interested in what it means to live and die well.
My book, Before Forever After: When Conversations About Living Meet Questions About Dying, was published in 2017.
Mapi and I met in 2004. Her stories are in the book. In 2019, we started a not-for-profit, LoveLegacyDignity. Our quest? Life affirming conversations about mortality - linked to whatever is coming up in the news that is pertinent to such discussions. That will be our offer to you each week in this column.
Before Forever After. Helena Dolny. 2017 Staging Post.
