How my mother—a former social worker who had worked with nonwhite people—and my father—a mining refrigeration engineer who had gone to the politically liberal (that is, anti-racial-discrimination) University of the Witwatersrand—experienced the farm’s raw version of the government’s 1949 institution of apartheid, I can only vicariously imagine. In truth, my parents’ daily worries were probably subsumed by the uncertainty about ever recouping the enormous loan they had procured from the Land Bank to pay for everything from farm equipment to the laborers’ first year’s pay. However, my father’s big dreams must have carried him through, as evidenced by the many enthusiastic discussions he had with his brother, who had left mechanical engineering to farm, about modernizing tobacco and wheat farming by employing scientific analyses, methods, and reasoning.
The farm was harder for my mother, I believe, whose entire life since teendom was geared to leaving the hardscrabble country existence she knew only too well from growing up on a Kalahari sheep farm. Moreover, she had to contend with the Steenekamp women of my grandparents’ and her own generation, who looked on her as a foreigner with strange ideas about everything from raising children to serving beets raw. And then there was the loss of amenities: in Cape Town we had electricity; on the farm candles and lamps and a coal stove for hot water sufficed. (Our cooking stove mercifully ran on natural gas.)
My mother had dreams, too: she regarded the farm as a canvas for her creative spirit. As soon as we moved in, she planted a willow tree at the back of our house, and a bougainvillea against the stark, whitewashed wall by the front door. Visitors driving up on our dirt road were greeted by a flower garden and the beginnings of a lawn in front of our house. Just inside our other “front door” that opened into the long hallway that led to our bedrooms, she placed a wall hanging made out of a hessian bag emptied of seed wheat and encouraged us to pin plants, flowers, insect carcasses, and mouse skeletons on it for display. In the absence of fresh flowers for the combined living-dining room, she made an arrangement the size of my four-year-old brother out of dried branches, pods, veld greenery, and other found objects that struck her fancy. She encouraged us to follow her example and put together our own creations for our bedrooms.
Oblivious of the political, financial, and technological constraints on our parents, my siblings and I embraced our new life with gusto. Our cousins formed a ready-made peer group whose games of building houses out of sticks, sliding down the grassy earthen dam wall in a cardboard box, and robbing birds’ nests of eggs and fledglings were far more gripping than the in-retrospect mundane hide-and-seek games we used to play with our Cape Town neighbor kids across a span of two measly city backyards.
By the time we moved to Die Kraaines, there were four of us, five-year-old Lana and I—then seven years old—having been joined by two brothers, Klasie, four years old, and Carel, almost two. The brothers shared a room, we sisters another. When another brother and sister arrived a few years later, they moved in, too, maintaining the gender lines. When I was fifteen years old and my boyfriend visited from Johannesburg, he bunked with the boys as well.
When Carel was still a toddler, we oldest three set out on what we considered hair-raising adventures facilitated by the merciful paucity of adult supervision in those days. When he was a bit older, Carel was a regular member of our expeditions. Our exploits included the discovery of a cave in a rocky outcrop two miles from our house into which we would let ourselves down with ropes we carried from home, and where, after a disappointingly short drop, we would come upon the bones of a jackal still bristling with a few patches of fur. At the same rocky outcrop, our six-year-old cousin Katrientjie once accidentally put her hand on the miniature paper-lantern hive of a swarm of wasps. After being stung multiple times, she lost her grip on the rock face, tumbled six feet to the ground, and broke her arm, a string of events that necessitated eight-year-old Lana and six-year-old Klasie, fast runners, to race back for help, while ten-year-old me took charge on the injury site. Until help arrived, I held Katrientjie’s head on my lap, spoke whatever reassurances I could muster into her ear, and squeezed juice from an orange on her lips and into her mouth with the notion that the sweetness would stop her from fading in and out of consciousness.
The shaba on the pap, or the gravy on the grits, of our adventures, though, if measured by the frequency of its retelling, must have been the slaughter of thirty-nine deadly puff adders. The puff adder is a venomous viper found almost everywhere on the African continent. Its venom causes severe cell destruction that leads to extreme pain and swelling followed by widespread necrosis and, within twelve to twenty-four hours, death. Today a person bitten by a puff adder can be treated with a life-saving antivenom, as long as it is administered within a few hours after the strike. Without treatment, which is still not widely available in less populated areas, a victim will likely die within a day. Even people treated with antivenom often lose one or more limbs to gangrene, depending on the speed of treatment, the quantity of venom delivered, and the site of the strike.
We started learning about snakes as soon as we moved into the Old House. Whenever one of our family members or a farm laborer killed a snake, the person who killed it would give us a lesson over the mashed-up remains. The curled-up one that my aunt found sunning itself on the back step was a black mamba, even though it was actually brown—it got its name from the black color inside its mouth. The skinny one that surprised my cousin Hendrik by dangling from a branch overhead while we were climbing the fig tree and was killed by my grandmother’s gardener with a rake was a green boomslang, or tree snake—there were brown ones, too. The shiny coppery one that lifted the front of its body as high as the bucket by the water tank and spread the skin behind its head into a hood was a cobra. The only snake we saw alive was a molslang, or mole snake, and since it wasn’t venomous we were allowed to pet its shiny black scales and crowbar head.
We never laid eyes on the snake that I remember best from the time we still lived in the Old House. One morning one of my grandfather’s laborers brought his toddler daughter to the house for help. She had been bitten by a puff adder the day before. Despite the sangoma’s muti, the traditional healer’s medicine, the little girl’s arm and hand were swollen beyond recognition. Though it looked terribly sore, she did not even cry. Her eyes were open, but she did not flick away the flies sucking the bubbled spit from the corners of her mouth. My grandfather drove her to the doctor, but she never came back. She died before the doctor could even send her to the hospital in Brits that served the black population.
In the days that followed, the grownups would tell us to put on our shoes before we left the house. They proceeded with a warning to look out for puff adders. My father gave us a dramatic explanation that almost caused me to stay inside permanently. “Puff adders are everywhere,” he said in his ghost story voice, “but they’re lazy and won’t come after you. So it’s up to you not to scare one or step on one. They’re difficult to see—they blend in with the shadows under the trees. Keep your eyes open for the shine of snakeskin. If the puff adder notices you first—it smells you when it flicks its tongue—you’ll recognize what it is from the way it coils into an S and pulls up its head this high.” He made a wave for the coils and drew a line with his finger just below my knee. “You’ll hear it suck air to inflate its head and hiss it out again.” My father mimed the snake’s puffy head with his cheeks and imitated the sound with a spit-spattering hiss. “If that happens, run home as fast as you can to get me or Mamma or any other adult so we can kill it.”
On the day of the record-breaking killing, though, vipers were far from my mind. I was eleven and just about to go off to boarding school. My oldest brother, Klasie, now seven, and I were out in the veld together, about two hundred yards from home, test driving the stilts we had made that morning by nailing jam cans onto thick sticks of wood, when we spotted, protruding from a gap the size of a pencil box in a four-foot-tall pile of rocks, a bulge of snakeskin. We could see the glea
m of black chevrons on a grayish brown background.
When we noticed a snake in the rock pile, Klasie and I wasted no time trying to identify it. We hopped down from our stilts and ran home, yelling the whole time for our father and Ou Isak. Pa, we realized when we got back home, was out in the tobacco fields. Ma was home, though, and hurried back to the rock pile with us to have a look.
After verifying that the snake was real and, indeed, enormous, Ma took action. She told us to keep watching the snake, which hadn’t moved at all since we first noticed it, and went home to find Ou Isak so that he could get a shovel and a pick-axe and guard the snake with us while she called my father’s older brother, Oom Koot, who had a gun. Despite the growing crowd of spectators, the snake did not change its position. Eventually Oom Koot arrived and identified the snake as a puff adder. His wife, Tannie Wientjie, who had come along for the excitement, did not really want to look at the snake, but could not resist a peek through her fingers. “It would make a lovely handbag,” she said. By that time Pa had joined us. With all the bystanders clumped together on some wide flat rocks out of the bullet’s range, Oom Koot took his shot.
The instant the bullet penetrated the snake, its skin burst open and out came what seemed like hundreds of foot-long baby snakes that scambled down the rocks and onto the trampled grass around the pile. The ground was alive with sinuous, wriggly miniature puff adders. Mixed in with the living ones, pieces of those hit by the bullet were still curling and twisting. We were farm people used to killing animals, so most of us sprang into action. Everyone—except Tannie Wientjie, my mother (who was pregnant with the baby that would be Boshoff), and I (who had killed a few things before but had decided I didn’t like it, or was I scared?)—grabbed a stick, a large stone, or one of Ou Isak’s farming implements and started killing baby snakes. Those of the participants who had sticks flipped the baby snakes from the grass over to the flat rocks, and those with stones, picks, or spades bashed or chopped them until they were dead. Over the killers’ laughs and squeals and yells and the gritty, percussive scrape of tools on rock, the nonparticipants shouted warnings to be careful, since even newborn puff adders are venomous enough to kill an adult human being.
When the snake slaughter at the rock pile was over, we lined up what was left of the mother as well as the dead baby snakes. The killing ground was littered with snake pieces. We laid them on the ground, end-to-end to approximate the length of a whole one. After the reconstruction, we counted thirty-eight babies. The mother made thirty-nine. No one had a camera, except Oom Krisjan, who was working at the car repair shop and filling station he owned and was therefore not available to snap the scene. By the end of the day the snakes were no more. Ou Isak had taken the mother to the tobacco drying barns to roast and had burned the not-worth-eating babies, so neither skins nor skeletons survived.
The story, however, lives on and has entered the lore of a fourth generation in our clan, which is now without our parents but has grown to almost forty people by the addition of the six siblings’ husbands, wives, children, and grandchildren. Our children and their cousins claim that the number of snakes has multiplied every time they have heard the story told. However, we siblings who were there stand by our count of thirty-nine, even if a handful of these were composites.
Fluit, fluit, my storie is uit—shout, shout, my story is out.
Dementia Field Notes
8-24-2011
I could not combine the up and sideways movements of our bathroom tap to make cold water come out. Instead fetched cold water from the kitchen in the plastic jug.
5-16-2012
At La Frontera I was unable to interpret the beer stein the server put before me. I knew it was a beer stein, but couldn’t absorb the fact that it was upside down. I saw it as right side up with a tight-fitting glass lid, which I tried to take off. I asked Peter how to get it off, and he turned the glass around. Then I understood. We were with friends.
5-24-2012
Here at the vacation house in Zion National Park I have trouble reading the diagram for the stove plates. I meant to switch on the kettle and instead switched on the pan of oil. Fortunately Newton saw it and prevented a disaster.
After my retirement in August 2011, I needed almost six months before I felt ready for what I had looked forward to for most of my working life: preparing an almost-done novel for publication and completing a second one, into which I had already poured years of time and research. However, my last years at Gender Studies had left me fearful that I might not be able to edit a three-hundred-page novel and resume another; at work, writing had come to drain my mental energy to the point where I had none left for my family or home life.
Just about every aspect of my university job had involved writing. The program emails, office circulars, meeting reports, letters of recommendation, and other official letters had been quite doable just about up to the time of my retirement—they were relatively short, self-contained pieces. However, longer research-based documents—which I used to love—had become very difficult. After thinking about my retirement writing projects for a month or two, I decided against revising my books-in-progress until I had a better sense of whether research-based writing and editing for my own purposes would be less anxiety-provoking than it had been at work. I instead started writing an essay about the changes with which I am struggling as the result of my encroaching dementia. While I had learned a bit about dementia in the lead-up to my diagnosis, I did not possess enough knowledge of the brain and how it works to write the kind of essay I liked writing, namely part personal and part research-driven. I would have to educate myself. By then I had been recovering from my work-related stress and exhaustion for half a year. I felt it was at least worth a try to see if my head would work any better than before.
It did. The time I had taken off after retirement, as well as the fact that my new writing was on a topic I had chosen and about which I was passionate, resulted in my focus being somewhat sharper, though I was still not able to do without laborious notetaking. The pages grew in slow motion, but grow they did. When the first essay was done, I wrote another. For reasons I did not then understand, the project was becoming increasingly important to me. With the hindsight of four years, I now think of it as Gerda’s Last Stand.
About four chapters in—the chapters you encounter here are not in the order I originally wrote them—my better-than-expected progress became its own puzzle. Looking back at the work I had completed, I asked myself, “How come I can still write? Could I be faking dementia?” Since the indignities accumulating in my daily activities, which I had been recording in my journal, as well as the conversation-inhibiting lacunae in my speech are classic markers of early dementia, the discrepancy between those failures and my preserved writing ability are part of my story, too. I wanted to understand why. Here is my report, the results of my self-imposed, self-designed course in introductory neuroscience.
Is It Possible for Dementia Patients Who Have Lost Their Independence in the Performance of Activities of Daily Living (ADLs) to Retain Deeply Engrained Knowledge Structures and/or Intellectual Skills?
This report consists of five parts: (1) What is memory and how does it relate to “truth”?; (2) Enquiry into the truth of “The Tale of the Thirty-Nine Puff Adders”; (3) Why can I still write, and are there any other dementia sufferers who similarly lose their abilities in some areas of their life while retaining them in others?; (4) Post-hoc email commentary from the two snake-killing eyewitnesses and one earwitness; (5) Post-post-hoc email commentary from the senior snake-killing eyewitness and the not-yet-born earwitness.
Part I
What is memory and how does it relate to “truth”?
Research sources: Peer-reviewed neuroscientific journal articles available on the internet, popular science magazines, and self-observation.
Results: When we use the term memory, we usually have long-term memory in mind. However, events stored in our long-term memory will already have passed through two
earlier stages of memory making: first, the sensory stage, which consists of registering a perception and keeping it in short-term memory long enough to judge it as a keeper or a fly-by-nighter; and second, retrieval of all associations related to the perception that have earlier been stored in long-term memory, combining those and the new perception into a revamped information package, testing the worthiness of the updated batch, and—should the package pass the “value added” test—laying it down in the brain areas available for long-term memory, or memory that often lasts years or a lifetime.
As its name implies, short-term memory is not long for this world. Accordingly, the brain real estate available for keeping it around is limited: enough for retaining only four to six chunks of information for about twenty or thirty seconds. A memory’s life span can be somewhat extended if the perception lends itself to being broken into chunks and you repeat the chunks in your head—a phone number, for example—thereby resetting your short-term memory clock. However, not all perceptions can easily be chunked. Even a basic perception generates a vast amount of information: cognitive representations, such as concepts or previous experiences; sensory data, such as visual images, sounds, touch, smell, or a combination of these; and emotions ranging from disgust to pride to shame to happiness. Information of this complexity will be lost after about half a minute unless the perception seems important enough to warrant further attention.
The part of my memory that is most affected by my dementia is the part of short-term memory known as working memory, or the ability to hold a small amount of information in my head while I manipulate it. This morning, I got dressed and picked earrings studded with pink diamanté to wear with my outfit. I used the mirror in our closet to put them on. After I had gone to the upstairs bathroom to put on makeup, I noticed that I had lost one of the earrings. I backtracked down the stairs and to the bedroom looking for it. It lay on the shelf by the mirror in the closet together with the winged nut that secures it behind the ear. My attention had drifted after I had put the first one on, and I left the second one behind. In the same way, when I take out the garbage in the midst of cooking dinner, I could a minute later be watering my new plants outside while the broccoli boils dry. I have changed from an efficient and goal-directed person to someone who drifts from task to task, sometimes striking a blank between deciding to fetch the milk for my coffee and reaching the fridge one step away. In situations like this, realizing that I can’t remember what I was up to, I stop in my tracks, wring my hands Lady Macbeth–like, and ask myself, “What am I trying to do?”
Memory's Last Breath Page 3