Why I Am So Obsessed With Even Half-Year Birthdays.

Today, the 13^th of December, I turn 54 and half years, as I was born on 13^th June 1958, which I think was on a Friday the 13^th. Anywhere, I do not believe in superstition, and that includes witchcraft.

You may I ask me why I should be so conscious of the half year in my life. Well, I must confess that the day I saw my father lying peacefully in his coffin, having succumbed to the cancer of the colon on February 29 1988, at the tender age of 67 – for he was still very strong and enjoying his beers and indulging his hobby of cycling – I told myself that I must outlive him. Hence my obsession with adding even a half year to my life.

The other reason why I am so obsessed with half year birthdays is that my mother, uMaHlabangani, is still alive and kicking, looking like a teen virgin though she is now an octogenarian (in her eighties). If you could call her number and she answers the phone, you would think you are talking to a schoolgirl, for her voice is strong and smooth. This is despite the fact that she has borne the burdens and pains of this world which would make most mothers wish “they had never given birth and their breasts never given suck”, as our Lord Jesus Christ once hinted.

Of course she has lost five adult children within a period of ten years. And seeing her weep every time her child’s coffin was lowered into the grave has always been the saddest and most painful moments of life. And during such times I have always prayed that I should not die before she dies as I would not want her to weep like that over my dead body. With each death of my sibling, I have come to believe that children must bury their parents and not vice versa. The pain of seeing a parent burying his or her child is hard to bear. And some of them never really get over the pain as they die in mourning.

I remember my friend Dingaan Dlomo who died in 1998. His mother died a few months later.

In 2007 during my one-year teaching sojourn in Dundonald, Mpumalanga, I witnessed the anguish of a mother whose only son, aged 21, had succumbed to AIDS. Everyday she would walk to the cemetery to sit by her son’s grave. Realising that she was actually running out of her mind, I decided to talk to her. She told me she could not believe that her only son was gone forever. And she started crying. I told her what was happening in the world concerning AIDS. I told her every family had been affected by the scourge and that I had actually lost five siblings.

Tears running down her face, she looked at me and uttered, “But isn’t God punishing us parents and not the dead children; for it’s us the parents who feel and remain with the pain”.

For a moment I thought of my mother, and silently prayed, “Lord let me bury my mother!”.