Today I feel a heaviness because of all the strange contrasts that fill our lives right now. I am sure the American election, which has brought so much division in the world, has only exacerbated these emotions, but it is more than that. Over the weekend at Zazen, we looked after Aletta, a 30 year old. She was a mom with two very young kids, a kind gentle husband, beautiful family, and she was Afrikaans, which made it feel even closer to home for me. She died yesterday. After I sat with the family and her best friend, I came to Recovery where we celebrated a healthy man’s 99th birthday. It felt so wrong that he got 69 more years than Aletta. She didn’t even get to be there for her son’s second birthday. My heart ached trying to digest this intense sorrow and jubilant joy in one morning.
In South Africa, we are used to the contrasts. Just think of the location of the second biggest Porshe dealership in the world, towering over the sprawling Clay-oven informal settlement in Bryanston. According to the Gini coefficient (in case you do not know the term, the Gini coefficient or index is a way the clever people measure inequality. It shows the divide between rich and poor) South Africa is the most unequal society in the world. There are people who easily buy a pair of jeans for the same amount their domestic worker earns in a month, and I wonder what seperate lives we live apart from our financial disparity?
The one thing that does strike me when we discuss socio-economics, is the divide between community and isolation. With our higher income, comes our higher walls, and I know that the privacy and security are great, but we don’t talk about the seclusion that comes with it. There is much more laughter and joy in Sebokeng than Sandown judging by the taxi queues in comparison to the stark faces of single drivers in luxury vehicles. If we speak about these issues, other opposites come to mind like humility and pride, and generosity and greed. Near us is Waterfall Corner, where tenderpreneurs and politicians frequent the restaurants, sitting in their designer suits, showing off jewellery and weaves, wasting money on expensive alcohol and food they don’t even enjoy. They remind me of George Orwell’s pigs walking upright between the other animals. The same restaurant guests then get into their fancy 4x4s, ignoring the car guard after he had to witness their vulgar display of cash. In the same parking area, the guards will share their lunches and laugh together, forming friendships, connecting and finding hope.
Other contrasts that fill my day are hope and despair, truth and lies. We see how professionals often lie to patients, giving them hope when really there is none, or putting them through unnecessary interventions because telling the truth is too hard. Then we see the incredible grace when there is truth, acceptance and dignity in humble honesty. Don’t we all owe each other that?
I think faith and doubt weigh heavily on all of us at the Lodges. We have a patient who has an awful cruel cancer; multiple myeloma. Juanita is young and treating the cancer is not the challenge, it is to keep her healthy enough to receive chemo. For months the family had faith that she would get better and would eventually be cured, but after many hospital admissions and seeing her deteriorate daily, I could see doubt slowly creeping in to conversations. Eventually they gave up hope, but instead of despair, which is the opposite of hope, they just had total acceptance and gratitude that the next weeks will be gentle and pain-free and real. In these moments, there is a lot of grey, not just black and white. This was neither a victory nor a defeat, a matter of strength or weakness, or success or failure. It was just life happening to Juanita, like it happens to so many of us.
Why do we feel the need to be so polarised, to think that life needs to be simple and in neat little black and white boxes? Some things are most certainly concrete and absolute, but if we are truthful, most things are not. Life is generally quite fluid. We lose so much if we limit ourselves. We deprive ourselves of a wealth of relationships and experiences when we cancel people who do not agree with us about everything. Our humanness becomes blunted if we allow ourselves to only feel and experience what we think is right or agreeable, or only socialize with people who think and look just like us. Maybe we should dare to have conversations outside of our own beliefs and our own culture. Maybe we can allow ourselves to laugh while we grieve and not feel guilty. Maybe we can let parts of our lives have order, and also make allowances for chaos. Maybe we can love and be indifferent at times. Maybe I can learn to accept that I can simultaneously celebrate with Mr Dinham that he managed to live a beautiful life for 99 years, and mourn and cry that Aletta didn’t.