In 2001 my mother started to become ill and she and my father needed me. I loved helping them, doing things for them. I felt that I was finally paying them back for all that had gone before. As my mother’s health deteriorated and the doctor’s in Zimbabwe failed to come up with a diagnosis, I became more and more involved in my parent’s lives and drew closer and closer to them both.
It was a bitter blow when the doctors told us that my mother needed medical care that was not available in Zimbabwe. Without it she was not likely to live for more than another six months. I jumped up to the plate and took over. I contacted my brother who was living in England, explained the situation and suggested that if he wanted to see our mother again, he would need to fly over as soon as possible. She was deteriorating rapidly and was suffering from more and more frequent periods of confusion.
My brother phoned us back an hour later to inform us that a charity, Zimbabwe Rhodesians Worldwide Assistance Fund was willing to pay for my mother to fly to England to see her son and his family and to seek medical treatment there. We didn’t hold out much hope that she would get better, but we knew she needed to see her son and meet her three young grandsons.
My father took some convincing, as he had a particular aversion to the cold, but in the end he saw that there was no choice. She could not fly to England on her own and to keep her in Zimbabwe would be condemning her to death. So off they went, leaving me to pack up their home and sell up their property. I immersed myself in it, using the activity as a shield between myself and the misery that was taking hold inside me. My aunt and uncle were there for me once more, but were also due to move back to England at the end of the year.
Again, this gave me something to take my mind off my own miserable life. I was never happier than when I was helping someone else. This was all part and parcel of feeling worthless and needing to be there for someone else to justify my own existence. And there was just so much to cope with. Not only the clearing of my parent’s home and my aunt and uncle’s home, but also the eventual diagnosis of my mother’s illness.
She had cirrhosis of the liver. Yet she was not then, nor ever had been, a drinker. It did not make sense. Added to the cirrhosis, there was damage to one of her heart valves, so she not only needed a liver transplant, but also a heart valve replacement. Neither organ was strong enough to survive the surgery on the other, but the risks of operating on both at the same time were too high, so a decision was made to merely try to stabilise her, thereby giving her more time.
My parents at this point were staying with my brother and his family in England, whilst my aunt and uncle had moved in with their daughter. I was the last member of the family left in Zimbabwe and I finally took the decision to move to England with my sons.
This decision was not without its problems. The boy’s father, despite the fact that he did not help to support them and rarely saw them, did not want me to take them away from him to another country, so far away. Because of various political issues in Zimbabwe, the boys also did not have passports and their entitlement was unclear. But I eventually managed to get things arranged and after some other political complications, yet another story, we flew to England in March 2002.
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