Injury to the temporal lobe by disease, trauma, or, most often, stroke can produce a language disorder known as Wernicke’s aphasia, a condition characterized by an inability to understand what someone is saying and an inability to read. Injury to the right lobe can result in an inability to recognize and appreciate music and other sounds.
The input role of the occipital lobe is above all associated with seeing. When the occipital lobe isn’t functioning as it should, a patient experiences disorders of perception, such as impaired color vision or the inability to recognize objects. Extensive injuries result in blindness. Injury to the right occipital lobe results in an inability to see in the left visual field, and vice versa for the left lobe.
The input role of the parietal lobe is associated with touch and is responsible for perceiving, analyzing, and assembling sensory information from the body. The parietal lobe is the site where visual, auditory, and haptic, or touch-based, information combine to make sense of the world. The left parietal lobe is the area where letters come together to form words and where words are put together in thoughts. The right lobe enables understanding of the spatial nature of the world, including the ability to recognize faces and shapes, be aware of body states and deficiencies, and know directions.
Injury to the parietal lobe can lower the ability to recognize touch sensation from the opposite side of the body. Injury to the right lobe could also result in not being able to recognize familiar objects by touch. Injury to the left lobe could result in not knowing the meaning of words and the inability to do arithmetic calculations.
For the moment, as with the other input lobes, my doctors blame my losses in parietal lobe functions on the output failures in my frontal lobe rather than injury to this input lobe itself.
Learning so much detail about how my daily deficits relate to the material brain cast my dementia in a different light: the dispassionate glare of the scientific method. I had a dysfunctional memory because groups of cells in my brain had died. It was not “my fault” that I had become less reliable and did not pull my weight in the daily underpinnings of running a household. I could see the cause of my failures as white spots on an MRI. Simultaneously, I marveled at the huge, dark blob that showed how much of my neocortex was not yet affected—the blob still included presumably intact cell structures for appreciating new knowledge and the delight it brings—a delight that lasts as a happy feeling, even after the facts have slipped away.
In George in 1983, my mother was settling into her new home. Her real estate agent recommended a young man as a lodger. Neighbors suggested a woman who could clean twice a week and a jong—Afrikaans for “young man,” the equivalent of the dismissive use of “boy” for black men of all ages—who was looking for a gardening job. With the help, Susanna soon had her new place pulled together: the mahogany table from the farm with its six riempies chairs* reigned in the dining area; the dark wood of the Welsh cabinet showed off her Royal Doulton rose-pattern china from the creamy center to the old-gold rim of each petaled edge; the built-in shelves spilled over with her books and art materials. On the table a curiosity cabinet of found objects—a piece of driftwood from a Cape Town beach, an ostrich egg shell, a handful of peacock feathers—awaited transformation into one of her trademark floral arrangements. But first things first: it was spring outside and the yet unexplored environs of the garden and neighborhood beckoned.
On a Thursday morning, when the “garden boy” came, the Old Madam, who was provided for until the end of her life, and the middle-aged jong, who was grateful for the job he had found on his afternoon off from the carwash, worked together in a strange harmony: they tackled the overgrown shrubs, the tangled straw of last season’s cut flowers, the pebble-strewn area that would become a lawn. Susanna showed him what to toss and what to keep, and even heaped garden debris on the wheelbarrow herself.
When the man left in midafternoon, Susanna returned to the inside cool of her living room and rested in the decadent comfort of her dusty-pink rocking chair. She dozed off right away. A knock at the door startled her out of her nap. A man stood there, cap in hand, asking for coffee and bread. This was not unusual, especially in the platteland, or rural parts. The high spiked walls and electrified fences of the well-to-do suburbs had not yet reached George. Susanna told the man to wait and turned toward the kitchen to fill the kettle and cut two inch-thick slices from yesterday’s loaf, but before she had even made it across the living room, a lightning storm exploded in her brain. The colors were glorious, winking neon red love-me-love-me-nots, Veronicas firing blue bottle-rockets into the night, Namaqualand daisies dispersing the rings of Jupiter with yellow joy.
A few kilometers away in his office in the business district, Susanna’s lodger, too, was experiencing a light storm in his brain: initially unformed flashes of white and gray behind his eyes were turning into the zigzags of battlements like those edging Cape Town Castle. He knew what it was; he had less than an hour before one of his regular migraines would pin him to the toilet bowl for hours of relentless vomiting. He told his manager he had to leave and drove home.
At the house he parked his car and hurried inside. The door was open, and a trail of blood led him to where my mother lay unconscious on the floor. He took her to the hospital, vomiting out the car window along the way. He would spend the next few hours in a bathroom by the emergency room entrance while someone put “Mrs. Steenekamp” in a cubicle, a team of nurses and doctors swarmed around her, and someone called her daughter—the number my mother had given him in case of an emergency was Lana’s.
Some of us siblings dropped our lives and carpooled or flew across the seven hundred miles to George. I was not among them—and not because I was too busy. With three of my siblings already on their way, I decided to save my trip. Accordingly, my story of what the others found when they got there is not an eyewitness account, but it may capture the main threads as effectively as any alternative family legend.
At the hospital, everyone was relieved to hear our mother had not been raped. When my siblings surrounded Susanna’s bed, her face lit up, though she could not really see them. Her vision was at best a blur of movement against a screen of static, but the doctor said it would improve. After being somewhat reassured by our mother’s usual stoicism as well as clear signs that she recognized everyone, the siblings went to Susanna’s house to sleep, but not before attempting to erase the map of our mother’s ordeal by scouring the pool of blood from the living room carpet where she had fallen. They scrubbed the wine-dark trail from the dining area where she had dragged herself, and mopped the puddles and smears from the kitchen tiles where she had eventually collapsed after the man—who had hungered for much more than coffee and bread—had sliced his axe through her scalp, cleaved her skull, slipped the blade through her dura mater, and slid it into the gray and white matter of her occipital lobe. He fled with her radio, leaving her for dead.
When Susanna was discharged from the hospital a week later, I flew down from Pretoria with her then four grandchildren in tow: my own two as well as Lana’s pigeon pair, two girls and two boys between the ages of three and six. What could I have been thinking? But my gut feeling turned out to have been right: what my mother needed most was to be surrounded by the happy chaos of young life. When the grandchildren’s arguments about who got dibs on the second pink reclining chair got loud and physical, Susanna abandoned her own chair and went to her bedroom to nap. At mealtimes she reveled in the higgledy-piggledy, and when it got loud and physical she intervened with moral tales intended to instruct and delight. In the mornings when she felt her best, she solicited the children to draw or paint with her. When the children tired of that, we would set out for a drive crowned by a nature walk to collect treasures: seed pods split and curled like the horns of an impala, rocks that glowed like jewels when you licked them, flowers and bones, feathers and bits of glass that had “suffer[ed] a sea-change / Into something rich and strange.”
Before the children and I left for hom
e, I extracted my mother’s promise that she would not open the door to anyone unless she had first verified their identity. She said she wouldn’t, but I suspect that she continued her life just about exactly as before, locking when she remembered, going out into her garden whenever it called to her, venturing on long solitary walks to collect the flotsam she found so irresistible.
On the juridical front, the matter was concluded with the characteristic efficiency with which the apartheid government meted out justice to blacks: in just over a year, the attacker had been caught, found guilty, given eighteen years in prison. Because he admitted his guilt in court, he was spared from the gallows. It was he who chopped the “Old Missus” with an axe, he confessed. He was sorry. It was the dagga, the witblits, the devil.*
After the attacker had been sentenced, learning of his fate had no observable effect on Susanna. When I pressed her on how she felt—by phone from our home in Johannesburg—she said she hardly ever thought of him or the attack. She mentioned that it felt strange to think that someone was in prison because of what he did to her. She was far more interested in talking about her improving eyesight, her drawing and painting, her reading and meditation.
Despite her outward cheer, there were subtle signs that Susanna Before and Susanna After were different: for example, she never made the floral festoon that she said she was about to start arranging after the children and I returned home.
Soon after Peter and I had emigrated and my mother’s move to George, she asked me to “teach her how to write.” We concocted a plan whereby she would write stories about her childhood and I would edit them and provide comments. So started a precious communication between colleagues. (I had not yet published anything at the time.) In her stories, my mother referred to herself by her childhood name, Susanna. (As an adult she had become Susan.) I loved the way her given name bridged our separate generations.
As a new immigrant, I was at the time very conscious about names—in the United States mine had become a big stumbling block. It seemed to me that, unlike people who live in multilingual countries, Americans would not even try to pronounce my name. (When I eventually made close friends, I saw that this was not universally true.) Not hearing people other than Peter say my name made me feel invisible. It affected my sense of self. On an associated level, I understood something of how the farm laborers and domestic workers of my childhood must have felt when they were given a “white” name to replace their unpronounceable original. My namelessness also made me think about old people who had nobody still alive who called them by their name. I was surprised about how much the loss of my name affected my sense of self.
With these thoughts in my mind, I suggested that I address my mother as Susanna in our “writing class.” She was delighted, so we did it. From that time onward, I frequently thought of my mother as Susanna, even though I addressed her as Ma face to face. After her brain injury in George and later, as her dementia became obvious, I remembered how much she loved being Susanna during our intense long-distance closeness. Since my mother was already confused about who I was, I squashed my impulse to give her back her name. For this reason, as I write about her now, I refer to her as Susanna, except where the nature of our relationship must be stated for clarity. It is my homage to all the selves that Susanna accumulated in her life beyond being somebody’s something: a friend, gardener, scholar, philosopher, artist, and writer, to name a few.
A dozen years after Susanna’s brain injury she had, via a number of other houses or retirement centers, made her way back to Pretoria and was living, with Lana’s help, in her own house in a retirement community. Other than ongoing problems with her vision, she showed no obvious signs of brain damage, though she did from time to time exhibit odd behaviors that we chalked up to her lifelong eccentricity and the fact that she was getting older. At the age of seventy, she was still well enough to travel. Accordingly, for the summer of 1995, she set out to visit us in Salt Lake City.
When I arrived at the airport on the date scheduled for Susanna’s arrival, there was no sign of her among the passengers at the baggage carousel. I had her paged, coaching the announcer on the exact pronunciation of her name—people have trouble with Steenekamp. After numerous pagings, she still failed to materialize. Growing more uneasy by the minute, I enquired at the airline’s desk. They were not allowed to give me any information, not even whether she had boarded the flight. After I explained her age and the distance she had traveled, the woman at the desk told me Susanna had not boarded, though she had been listed as a passenger on the flight. Sick with worry, I tried to call Lana from a pay phone, but had no luck making an international call. I went home, connected with Lana, and learned that my mother had left as planned. By then, the next plane that came in from her connection city was due. I hurried back to the airport. This time, I spotted the beacon of her all-white hair among the travelers descending the escalator in the arrivals area.
My joyous welcome lasted only a few seconds before my relief turned into anger. As if she were a teenager who had broken her curfew, I started interrogating her: “Where have you been?”
In a tone suggesting that my obvious annoyance was totally inexplicable, Susanna said nonchalantly that she had been looking around the stores and missed the flight.
“Why didn’t you call?”
“I don’t know how to. I knew you would come for me if I caught the next flight.”
Trouble soon reappeared. After we arrived home, Susanna seemed literally unmoored. While out on walks, which she insisted she could do on her own, she often lost track of her whereabouts and had to knock on neighbors’ doors for directions. Another time, she urgently needed a bathroom while still blocks away from home. She knocked on a door to ask if she could use the occupants’ bathroom. Fortunately, in a city chockfull of serving or returned Mormon missionaries, Susanna’s accented modulation of English did not have the door-in-your-face effect it might have had in other large American cities. Her natural charm and defenseless look—more marked as she got older—probably helped, too.
The good outcomes of her wanderings confirmed Susanna’s belief that the world was a good place. Even after her axe attack, she had clung to this. Should I have wanted to stop her, it is not likely she would have listened. Her father had walked the mile to and from his vegetable gardens every day when he was already in his late nineties and totally blind. Who was I to fight those genes? At home, her insatiable drive to make art—as if she were racing the clock before a deadline—took over our living room, where she worked at the single-bed-sized study desk I had acquired for my exclusive use. By the end of her visit, she had completed enough paintings and sketches to bestow one on each member of our family and every friend who dropped by. My painting, a twenty-by-twenty-four-inch landscape featuring a quiver tree in the foreground, still enlivens a wall in my study. I thrill to the presence of a tree so evocative of our family’s visits to my Kalahari-based grandparents.
In between bouts of sketching and painting, Susanna wrote a journal that would turn into a memoir of her life as a child. By the time she had to go home, she had filled a legal-sized notebook with her memories and thoughts. Once she had typed up the novella-length product on my computer, she shared it with me. It now circulates in our family as bound copies of Die Mooiste Plekke: ’n Meditasie (The Most Beautiful Places: A Meditation). As she writes in the book, it owes its inception to an abstract pencil sketch she had made by scribbling lines across the page and then accenting shapes that stimulated her imagination. “The story of my life can be read from beginning to end in the forms my hand involuntarily created,” she writes. “Somewhere in the middle of the composition the picture story starts to materialize.”
While I had heard my mother’s stories of her past throughout my life and read the handful she wrote down soon after our emigration with the idea that I would “teach her to write,” I had never experienced anything like the outpouring of thoughts and feelings that radiated from every page. With—to me—star
tling awareness of story structure, she organizes her narrative by using her pencil sketch as if it had been a plotting tool: each of the four selves that had materialized in the sketch gets its own name. Switching between the first and third persons, my mother tells each self’s story and accounts for the transformation from each one to the next. First comes Susanna, the child who grew up on the banks of the Grootrivier, or Orange River. Her family lived at Kafferswart, a settlement north of the river. “On school days, my father used to awaken me and Pieter early in the morning and gave us bread and coffee,” she writes:
In winter it was still dusk-dark when we walked to the boat, where my uncle and cousins were waiting. Uncle Aalwyn rowed us across. On the other side of the river the school bus took us a further nine miles to the school at Karos. In 1934, flood waters swept along everything in its path, including the little garden with corn and beans Susanna had planted. Their Jantwak house on the riverbank is also gone. The floodwaters had hurtled everything away, including the boat. For the rest of the quarter there was no school. But there were new islands of sand next to the red dune skirting the northern bank to explore.
Susanna’s halcyon days of endless play ended when she left for boarding school at the age of eight. When she was nine she heard her father telling the story of her birth. It ended when “the woman caught Susanna between Truia’s legs just as she was about to drop on the floor.” For the first time, it occurred to Susanna that she “had emerged from the shameful, private place between her mother’s legs” in the same way lambs drop from a ewe. For many years she would feel uncomfortable when her mother addressed her by her pet name, “my little lamb.”
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