Understanding André…

Growing up on an almond farm, the authoritative paternal figure who commanded my respect also happened to be the biggest nut. My father was no fool – he sailed to this country with nothing but big dreams that flourished in the business world and on the sports field – but he did play the fool with abandon, consistently prompting fits of laughter amongst our quartet of van D’s.

Ever since I can remember, André has always been an oddball (I attribute this to his Dutchness). For all his innate talent, drive and dogged discipline that led to his worldly success, he’s also never failed to entertain with his comical quirks and eccentricities…

He took us on exotic family holidays that were punctuated by belly laughter as we witnessed his endless Fawlty Tower-esque moments: lifting his tog bag up by one strap while he was standing on the other so he pulled his own feet out from underneath himself and face-planted on the ground at reception; clumsily falling down steps and over chairs and off bicycles and even out of boats when he wasn’t paying attention; speaking to waiters by using his half-cut bread roll as a talking head; addressing us with monosyllabic sentences and monkey-like enthusiasm as he shoved half a banana in his mouth and offered up the rest of it with: “You? Ba-na-na?”

I remember him doing everything with gusto. When my inflatable island had to be packed away we found him lying face down on top of it in the driveway; arms and legs splayed as his torso was being swallowed by a deflating mass of blue and yellow plastic. When we accidentally threw a key into a public dustbin on a beach, he dived face first into it so his body disappeared upside down in the trash while his gangly legs protruded in an awkward balancing act. Once, when I was a varsity student and out one night, my parents popped into my digs unannounced and my amused housemates found André in my room, wearing the cap and Wonderbra that he’d found on the bed, practicing his golf swing with an invisible club…..

He was always a clown and we were always in stitches. If I was looking for my dad I’d invariably find him digging in the dirt or climbing up a tree to solve some practical issue on the small-holding. His endearing weirdness earned him nicknames like Mr Bean and the Crazy Dutchman; yet André’s inherent dualism made him the ultimate living paradox (I feel like the word oxymoron would be appropriate)…

While his goofiness and physical comedy was marvellous, his physical prowess was something we marveled at, too. In his younger years his string bean physique and agility saw him score countless goals on the hockey field by catapulting himself through the air and throwing his body down to slide across the grass while he slammed yet another impossible goal as the provincial team’s centre forward. The media aptly named him The Flying Dutchman.

His willowy frame belied a physical strength and vigour that this civil engineer channeled into building a whole stableyard (for my mom and I) and a whole squash court with his own hands (in which he would then spend endless hours thrashing his body around the court, to emerge sweating profusely and smiling broadly). He was a machine.

It is a kind of tragic irony, then, that the disease that will eventually kill my father is slowly shutting down his body’s basic mobility…

André has MSA: Multiple system atrophy – a rare and degenerative neurological disorder that causes symptoms similar to Parkinson’s disease and dementia. It affects his speech and his body’s autonomic functions like breathing and muscle control. There is no known cause and it is a progressive and ultimately fatal disease. He is seventy-five.

If I could euphemistically rename his MSA diagnosis I’d call it Marvellously silly antics, because that is what I’ve associated with my dad for most of his years. It’s something I’ve come to learn, in my thirties, that probably the most invaluable thing to have in this life is a sense of humour about things; to not take anything too seriously (after all, none of us are getting out of here alive…). And I realize now that he was inadvertently showing me this all along – through both his silliness and also his stern, abrupt and fiery moments that sometimes scared the hell out of me. Both sides showed me that there is nothing more wonderful than to make people laugh, and nothing more horrible than to make them feel small. Laughter, I’ve learnt, is such a delicious way to taste life and forge a connection between souls!

With a tangible cloud of sadness we witness the crumbling of this generous family man, brilliant businessman and agile sportsman as he is reduced to an old-before-his-time, meekly mannered grandpa whose once stoic emotions now flow freely and frequently (he often cries when saying hello or goodbye). We had to sell his car and ban him from driving nearly two years ago as he had become a hazard on the road – in the parking lot, even! (That didn’t stop him from stealing my keys and taking my car for a joyride one day when I wasn’t looking…).

He falls a lot and has to use a walking stick now – but even with that aid he still loses his balance and topples over sometimes (he’s fallen into a public pool fully dressed, walking stick and all…). I’m not sure how much longer until he’ll need to use a zimmer frame and eventually a wheelchair. His body is deteriorating and his mind is emptying; but I sense that strong-willed soul who still wants to be with us in the physical dimension. And he is still making us laugh with his silly antics that used to be reserved for stress-free family holidays but have now become a part of everyday life…

I often find myself stepping back to observe a situation or interaction for its inherent comedy (read: ridiculousness). Humour really helps everything and I’ve found that life is beautiful in all its laughableness:

André has always been a bit of a weird egg, which is an appropriate expression as a lot of his weirdness revolves around food. He lives for it. True to his orderly Dutch ways, he takes one apple and one lemon out of the fruit bowl every single evening and places them… next to… the fruit bowl: lined up and ready for consumption the following morning. But rules are made to be broken and sometimes I find him standing in the kitchen shoveling a large bag of veggie crisps in his face for breakfast. He habitually rolls oats and soaks them in too much water, slurps them out of the bowl with his hands like it’s a mug, and sometimes starts to prepare another batch of oats if he forgets that he’s actually just eaten breakfast…

If there are berries in the house, he will find them and he will shove them in his mouth like a starved castaway. We buy an oversupply of berry packs and hide some of them so they don’t vanish within twenty minutes of arriving in the house. I now call him Berry Monster. The hand-to-packet-to-mouth action is always on total autopilot and the trail of food left on the floor behind him ensures that we will never lose his whereabouts.

On a weekend away I offered him breakfast and our conversation went like this:

“Dad, would you like some eggs and salmon and avo?”

“No.”

“You don’t want that?”

“No.”

“Okay, so what would you like?”

“Uhhh….. Eggs and salmon and avo.”

“Great choice… coming right up!”

Understanding André has always been a laugh but it has now become an art: a focused and thought-filled process by which we have to decipher what he means when he speaks. He uses fewer words and makes less sense as the days go by. Sometimes he’ll use a single word and from that we will construct the sentence that we think he’s trying to express. It is sad, but beneath the sadness we can find moments of silliness and laughter. He’ll start to say something that I try to figure out and, as if he knows he could have said it better, adds: “With other words….” before trailing off again; and I laugh to myself and think: Yes, please use other words! But they never come.

I miss his call and receive his voicemail message:

“Uhhh….. leave….. ummm….. left a message after the tone. Thank you.”

When I call him back he seems confused about where I am and what I’m doing. He says he’s glad I phoned. And that there’s not much happening there. Then he puts the phone down.

I go home and find him sunning himself outside sans shoes and shirt, with just a little ‘lappie’ over his nose to prevent it from burning. I’m relieved to see that it’s not a bandage from a fall. As I’m asking him about his day, he gets up and walks inside, closing the door and leaving me to talk to myself:)

I spend the night at home and when he wakes in the morning I ask, “How did you sleep?”

He replies, “No, no tea please.”

Later he walks in on me sitting on the toilet and with wide eyes he exclaims, “OH!” and closes the door. He says he didn’t expect me to be home.

We go for a drive and he says something very jumbled about starting….

I gently respond with, “I don’t know what you’re talking about Dad…”

He replies, “Neither do I…”

As we drive he reads the words on the car’s side mirror out loud: “Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear.”

I open his electric window; he closes it. I open it again and he closes it again. Open, closed, open, closed… we continue to play fight like this as we both find it childishly amusing.

We arrive at our favourite place for lunch and I say, “Let’s take a photo together at the entrance!”

He points at my phone and exclaims, “Selfie!”

While we eat I ask him about the most profound life lesson he’s learned in his seventy-five years. He smiles to himself as if replaying an old memory and eventually strings together, “When I was drunk… in England… on hockey tour… and down on my knees… and they were driving me… like a horse…” I burst out laughing. At least he remembers the good times!

His short-term memory is failing rapidly, but his long-term memory is still excellent and he informs me that I should eat the skin of kiwi fruits as it is packed with vitamin C.

After lunch he hands me the bill.

We go to the movies and he says, “You get the tickets… I get the toilet…”

He has started to lose control of his bladder. For quite a while he’s had to pee very often and he likes to unzip his pants even before heading to the bathroom, but it has come to the point where he doesn’t always make it there in time. He now has to wear nappies. It would seem like the most humiliating thing but he takes it all in his short, hobbled stride. (No more striding and diving across hockey fields to score impressive goals; the goal now is to make it to the toilet in time without tripping and falling over his own feet.)

We watch a war movie (André is only interested in watching movies about the war) and at one stage I feel the soft touch of his hand on my arm as he leans across to inform me that Dunkirk is on the coast of Belgium (I know what he means). My heart melts a little as I see his keenness for the movie and our experience of watching it together and I know it is moments like this that I will treasure.

One night we watch an old classic, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which he thoroughly enjoys. Witnessing him laugh out loud at the crazy patients and their shenanigans in a mental institution makes me laugh even more at the irony.

On other occasions, when I’ve got the choice of movie wrong – like taking him to see Miss Saigon – I get a comical mix of reactions. At one point he gets emotional, but then starts sighing and checking his watch. Later in the film I see him looking down and staring at his crotch.

When it ends he says, “I never knew it was a musical.”

I reply, “But it brought you to tears; it was brilliant hey?”

“It was brilliant.”

“So aren’t you glad you watched it?”

“No.”

As we walk out I don’t have my hand on him for a few seconds and he nearly falls down the stairs. I catch him just in time, guide him carefully, and we take a slow walk to the car with our arms interlinked. On the drive home I overtake a slow-moving car and smile as André audaciously points and exclaims, “That guy is a slow poke!”

He comes to kiss me goodnight and I say, “Bye Dad.”

He replies, “Bye Dad.”

I quietly observe André as he spends his days sleeping (on his bed, the couch, in the sun, at his desk… anywhere, really); staring into space; and busying himself with trivial things like sorting out his collared shirts (he still wears his work clothes every day) and removing a railing in his closet with a screwdriver. I ask him why he’s doing that and he says “Well… that’s another solution for….. for, um….. for looking at that…..”

He gets up slowly and walks past me with a smile and a wave before disappearing into the garage and emerging with a hammer. I feel a sense of amused fondness as his inner handyman gets to work.

One morning I’m looking for my dad but don’t see him in the house… I open the garage door to find him standing there holding a feather duster, along with an array of random gardening tools. He looks at me with surprise and exclaims, “van Duuren!”

Amused, I ask what van Duuren is doing and he says, “Well, it doesn’t do anything.”

One day he tells me that he’s found blood in his urine so I take him to see a urologist. I sit in the doctor’s office and grimace as he takes my dad behind a curtain and asks him to lie down and bear with the discomfort while he feels his prostate gland. He says it is slightly enlarged but there are no signs of recurring bladder cancer on the sonar. He’s not convinced of doing a cystoscopy because of the effects of the anaesthetic on my dad’s already-compromised brain.

After finishing the examination he asks André if he needs his daughter to help him get dressed. I laugh as my dad immediately says yes and sits on the bed smiling like a schoolboy while I put on his shoes and tie his shoelaces, knowing full well that he is still able to do this for himself. The doctor then asks my dad to pee into a cup and I laugh again and say, “I’m not helping you with this one!” It turns out I should have, as he ends up peeing all over his pants and the bathroom floor and emerges without one drop inside the cup. I help him at home later and bring the sample back to the hospital… luckily no infection is detected.

Back at home I’m looking for the Rooibos tea bags but all I can find in the kitchen cupboard is a stash of cannabis-filled syringes and I feel like a parent shaking her head with a wry smile at discovering her child’s wayward habits. My dad asks me to come to the dining room table where he points at the wooden tabletop and tells me I cannot draft a joint… I don’t even know anymore if he’s talking about some engineering term or a spliff…

He walks around like he’s searching for something so I ask him what he’s looking for. He means to say that he’s lost his bifocals, but instead he says what sounds like the Afrikaans swear word, “My fok-alls I haven’t got…..”

Later I find him creating order by rearranging books and photo albums on the shelves according to their dates.

He asks me to fix the computer screen, again… I plug it in, again. His eyes light up like I’ve performed a magic trick as he asks, “How did you do that?” He spends hours sitting in front of that screen, looking at his Lotus spreadsheet… and reading an ancient information booklet on how to use the spreadsheet….. (I may be a technical wizard at fixing computer screens, but I can’t help him with MS-DOS programmes from the eighties…).

André has always been a little obsessed with numbers and spreadsheets and he works away at them diligently. He asks me to verify the calculations he’s jotted down on the cover of a Times magazine because, he says, “I can’t get this. My brain is….. completely….. shattered at the moment.” He sits for hours crunching numbers and it makes me smile sadly, knowing that he’s working away at something completely irrelevant…

But as I watch him it makes me wonder… is this not what we all do in life, anyway? Humans are funny beings. We spend our lives working away at numbers and documents and spreadsheets and all forms of paperwork to contribute to something that ultimately means nothing. We toil like ants, scurrying around, building and making and fetching and carrying and attaining and achieving and busying ourselves until we die. We’ve become human doings. But when we leave this world we leave with nothing – only that essence of who we are – our being. It makes me think that we’re all a bit mad in the head – and that that is actually okay as long as whatever we’re keeping busy with, makes us happy. Numbers seem to make my dad happy, so my melancholic smile turns into a peaceful one as I watch him work away with pen in one hand and calculator in the other.

My brother and I are spending precious time with our dad when we can. We took him for dinner one night and André inhaled his meal and then started fidgeting with impatience as he waited for us to finish. Eric jokingly asked him, “What? Do you need to get back home at a certain time so you can stare at the ceiling?” and we all burst out laughing.

Luckily my dad still has a great sense of humour about things. A close friend of mine joined my folks and I for lunch, after which she commented on how wonderful it is to see him laugh with so much heart; and to see him look at my mom and I with such fondness in his eyes – beaming – like he’s proud as punch.

I’ve started playing a lot of chess with my dad as he used to be an avid player and he taught me the game as a young girl. It’s great to see that he still remembers how to set up the board and mostly knows how each piece moves – although he makes some very careless decisions a lot of the time, not surprisingly. Eric says he feels like it’s an unfair advantage to be playing chess with someone who has dementia and we all giggle again. I keep getting my dad’s horses and chuckle at the irony of art imitating life here. Eventually I capture his king with my horse… sometimes even with my pawn.

He takes out his queen very early in the game to capture my pawn, not realizing that she’s left wide open to immediate capture as I take her with my castle. André looks shocked, shakes his head and exclaims, “Ah wooow! Yaasus!” I tell him he’s making stupid moves and that he needs to watch where he’s going or he’ll fall – and again I realize the game is reflecting real life here.

Life is a game, ultimately, in which we need to be aware of each of our moves and their consequences. We also need to play; to not get too serious about the game. Sometimes my dad’s inner joker comes out and he copies every single move I make so that the board becomes a mirror image of black and white pieces. I shake my head and laugh as I wonder in which ways I am a mirror image of my dad…

On a cold winter’s night I took my folks out to watch a movie at the mall. André asked if it’s about the ‘oorlog’; I told him it was Mamma Mia. This would be a hit or miss… it turned out to be an adventure. We all enjoyed the film but when I tried to start my mom’s car afterwards, it sputtered to nothing. So at half past ten on a Friday night I was stuck with my parents in the parking lot at Somerset Mall in the freezing cold while we waited for the AA to arrive. My dad started farting. We were literally being Dutch-ovened by a Dutch man in the car. My mom told him to go and take a slow walk in the traffic. I broke into a fit of giggles and buried my nose in my scarf as I complained that I didn’t know what was worse: staying in the car with these two old fogies or standing outside in the five degree cold!

An hour later we were still sitting in the car listening to André trying to say something but all that came out was a bunch of broken words: “Um….. in fact….. when too expensive….. the uh, the uh….. or, too expensive….. and too….. um, too expensive….. for the flight….. uh.” He gave a deep sigh, scratched his ear and opened the door to get out of the car.

Eventually, after midnight, a huge flatbed truck arrived and a dodgy driver told me to keep my foot on the brake because he was missing some hook!? He also said we could stay inside the car for the trip, which I’m pretty sure is illegal, but I was too tired to care. My dad would not have been able to climb up into the front of that big truck anyway.

So there we were, riding home together inside a broken down car on top of a flatbed with my foot on the brake, like the bloody Brady Bunch. When the truck stopped outside our house, my dad went to open his door and I had to slam my arm across his chest and stop him from getting out as we were still raised metres high in the air…

He’s fallen enough in his life. It used to be astonishing when he did it purposefully to score goals on the hockey field; funny when he did it clumsily in some inept social situation; but now it is just scary. I had to hold back tears when I saw him the other day with two swollen purple eyes and a big gash in his forehead.

I once took him to see a clairvoyant who told me that she sees two benevolent beings by his side – angels who protect him. I believe it. Somehow through all of his falls, my dad hasn’t broken anything or done any serious damage to himself. He just gets up and carries on, as if he’s missed a shot at goal and wants to continue with the game. The Dutchman is still flying, just in a less graceful way.

One day he walked home from the nearby shopping centre with his packets of groceries and fell on the tarmac inside the retirement village. He picked himself up and arrived home covered in blood but obviously not too concerned about it: I found him sitting on the couch, blood dripping down his face whilst reading a blood-stained newspaper and stuffing berries in his mouth with blood-soaked hands.

This is the man who in 1980, when my mom was heavily pregnant with Eric, arrived home with his four front teeth missing after being smashed in the face with a hockey stick – and smiled at her like it was a joke. Then two months after I was born he drove straight into a moving train and was thrown through the air in his car, but he walked away unscathed.

He was born with a cleft palate and was essentially a starving baby during the war. In his late sixties he beat bladder cancer. I feel like his angels have always worked overtime…

André is a delightful enigma to me. I can’t find the words to capture his essence, but I have been in awe of him and laughed with him – also at him;) He has always done everything with intensity. I’ve watched him go from being a fervently religious man to embracing a more spiritual view; but always emotionally affected by a greater power (we’ve never been able to be inside a church together without sobbing). He’s always had a voracious appetite for books, health, sports, life; and – now especially – food.

Years ago he gave me some advice that I carry with me to this day. “Remember that wherever you go, you take yourself with you,” he said to me. So simple and yet so deeply profound, I’m sure a thick spiritual book could be written on it, like the ones that line his bookshelves.

I’m learning so much more about my dad now as I watch old home videos from the eighties with my folks. As I get older I become more astutely aware of how much he has done in shaping my life and who I am today. My gratitude for what he has afforded me is eternal. I don’t think I realized just how much of a rock he has been for our family…

Now, he sits on the couch and asks, “What day is it vandaag?” (he mixes his languages frequently).

“It’s Saturday, Dad.”

He frowns as he asks me, “What’s my condition again?”

He’s not happy with my answer of MSA. He prefers dementia.

“Wh… wh… wh… what is the story?”

“I’m not sure, Dad. The story about what?”

“About….. uh….. the dementia.”

Then he remembers and raises his index finger as he states matter-of-factly, “Nobody speaks to me because of dementia.”

I give him a loving smile and say, “But your family speaks to you, and we love you.”

He gives me a resigned smile in return and says, “Yes.”

I don’t recall my father ever telling me he loved me when I was growing up; now he says it to me all the time. It’s almost like the more he slips away from his body and mind, the more connected he becomes with his soul.

We were warned that one of the effects of this disease could be aggression – which he initially displayed but which soon subsided, thankfully. Now he is quite the happy chap most of the time. When he laughs he does it whole-heartedly: with his eyes tightly closed and his mouth wide open as he gives it a full-bodied guffaw. It’s great. It makes me think of something I read in Mitch Albom’s book Tuesdays with Morrie, where the dying protagonist and college professor says to the author: “Dying is only one thing to be sad over, Mitch. Living unhappily is something else.” Even though my dad is slowly slipping away from us and is oftentimes mired in confusion, he seems to be living quite happily.

It must be heartbreaking to watch your life partner degenerate but I see my mom doing her best in such trying circumstances. She’s being a champion at caring for her husband as he essentially regresses back to a childlike state. It is quite thought-provoking to visit my dad every one to two weeks and notice his deterioration each time; and to see my two-year-old niece, Stella, around the same time intervals and notice her progression. Never before have I been more aware of the circle of life.

My dad keeps asking when he can come and see the apartment I’m renting in Sea Point but he keeps forgetting that there are far too many stairs for him to climb. He becomes increasingly confused about things as the days go by, so I hope we’ll be able to understand each other for enough time still (how much is enough time…?). On my last visit home, while my mom was away for a few days, I looked at the notes that one of his carers had written in his file and noticed a spelling mistake: He is trying to have a confusation with me. I wonder if that was in fact an error. How perfectly apt.

…..

I know that understanding André is not nearly as important as spending time with him; as acknowledging him and loving him.

Also, being grateful for this time we have left with him. As the professor Morrie said to his interviewer: “It’s horrible to watch my body slowly wilt away to nothing. But it’s also wonderful because of all the time I get to say goodbye… Not everyone is so lucky.”

…..

On Father’s Day I go home and my dad apologizes to me for forgetting my birthday, which had been three weeks earlier. He then comes to me with the Father’s Day card I wrote him, and says, “I think you are fantastic. I love you.”

I literally feel my heart muscle expand inside my chest cavity.

And then he says,

“You must write.”

Paulo Coelho said that to write is to cry in silence. Perhaps that is what I’m doing here.

I love you, Dad.

Thank you for the laughs, always…..

 

 

(Postscript: André was the first person with whom I shared this written piece. Before I even started reading it to him, he laughed. I asked him why he was laughing and he replied, “Why not?”

I thought, what a great philosophy for life! And what a perfect ending for this essay.

He laughed and cried throughout the stories, and there were times when his happy laughter was so interwoven with his sad crying that I couldn’t tell what he was feeling.

I think he was feeling it all…..)