Gillian Slovo remembers a very different funeral of her mother, Ruth First, who was killed in a bomb blast
THE morning after her death, I woke early. Not from her typing but from the lack of it. I walked with my father by the seaside. We didn’t talk. As the day began, we drove to the hospital, to see Bridget, who had been caught in the blast. Her eardrum had burst, her eyes had been affected and she was under strict instructions from the doctor not to cry. We talked, trying to keep our eyes dry.
We didn’t have to organise the funeral. I have endured the death of one of my mother’s best friends since then, have watched her children planning their goodbye. It was not like that for us. Everything — the speakers, the transport, the singing — was done by others, many of them strangers to me. We sat in her house until the time was ready. While ANC women kept on cooking, the doorbell rang as others came to visit. We, her mother, Joe and her three daughters, living under the same roof for the first time in years. The fierce bonds that had always tied us together and the competitiveness for family attention that had always been there, our constant companion. And she was not there to arbitrate.
The day came. We were put in large black cars, driven to each venue. The first, a kind of non-religious chapel. Outside, a crowd of people singing; inside, the dark interior. A group of mourners waited beside the coffin. It was closed — on my father’s request.
I was grateful then that I did not have to see her in front of those embarrassed, uncomfortable men. And yet would it have helped to see what she looked like after she died?
When I think of it, I see what my father saw after they called him in — her legs and, untouched at their end, a pair of elegant, undamaged high-heeled shoes that were her passion. He, who had witnessed death by violence before, didn’t go any further. I would not have either. And yet, perhaps, if I had seen her, some part of my horror at what the explosion must have done to her might have been laid to rest.
The cemetery was an alien thing — a walled enclosure with little caskets cut out of stone, each holding another person’s ashes. Ruth was to be buried among the other South Africans who had been killed in Mozambique. We stood in the dryness of the parched earth as speeches jolted over us. This was the mother I didn’t want to mourn — this heroine of an epic struggle.
I remembered her talking at the memorial for her friend Hilary. She spoke of the public Hilary and the private one — of Hilary’s flamboyant self, expressed in her huge hats.
So many funerals.
But at her funeral there was no reference to her wardrobe, she who had allowed herself to be taken to prison only after she’d packed silk underwear. Her death had made her public property. They spoke of her achievements, not of who she was
If I had been asked what I wanted for her dead body, I would have chosen cremation. And yet the burial, as lines of mourners threw spadefuls of brown earth on to her coffin, was, for me, the essence of her funeral. I need only to look at the television, to see those countless other burials, that same singing, that same spirit of defiance, to remember hers. At the time I noticed other things as well — the young boy who pushed himself into line, shovelling dirt with vigour, her funeral a backdrop to his fantasy about heroism and the struggle.
When it was over she lay there — one white woman among 13 black men all killed by the same enemy. And then we left.
She lay there and we kept moving.
* From Death of a Parent, published by Virago