Anything is Imminent

Every time I open my twitter feed I expect to find the news that Nelson Mandela has died.  We are an entire nation on death watch. 

Even the ever so proper Brits have joined this macabre pastime – the UK government has reportedly asked to hold a memorial service for Madiba at Westminster Abbey, which the Queen has requested to attend, should South Africa agree to the request.  While this is an epic event, as if granted this will be the first time an African and non-British citizen has been honoured in this way, I feel a tad uneasy about the fact that Nelson Mandela is still alive while we are planning his funeral.

Perhaps I’m being sentimental; the man is 94 and if rumours are correct he is on life support.  As his daughter was quoted as saying, “anything is imminent.” I couldn’t have put it more nonsensically myself.

I met Madiba once, as a brace-faced 13 year old on a charity fundraising cycling tour.  Somewhere in my parents house on a VHS tape I’m captured in teenage awkwardness, hunched over with spotty, embarrassment as I shake hands with one of the greatest legends of our time.  My tiny claim to fame means that I’ve always felt a sense of ownership over Madiba.

I started worrying about his ailing health more than a year ago, when I was living with an amazing 93 year old British dame, Myvanwy.  We were watching the news, subtitled for the hard of hearing, when the titles spelled out that “South African President Nelson Mandela has horses eyes.” “Dear Lord,” I thought, “what a terrible affliction to suffer at such an advanced age.”  In truth Madiba had been ‘hospitalised’ for a non-equine related complication, but the typo gave me a real turn.  I started preparing for the inevitable departure of the ‘Father of our Rainbow Nation.’

But if living with the elderly has taught me one thing it is that old people know they are going to die. All humans know death is inevitable but we choose to forget that we could be returned to ashes and dust at any fragile moment. The properly geriatric have dealt with this ugly truth over 80 odd years and face it with a rheumy eye. 

Myvanwy was particularly practical about death.  At 93 she knew that her days where numbered; she was reluctant to splash out on a new Spring wardrobe and found the 10 year guarantee on her new garden shed laughable.  She was never morose, simply practical and accepting that she was in the Dying Season of her life.  In fact in a poll of her bridge group everyone in the 80+ bracket was starting to feel a little worn out, to quote a 95 year old “ I feel grey and tired, like a piece of Blue Tack (Prestick) stretched too thin.”  Death as a topic did not depress them because at that age it had visited each and every one of them individually, taking spouses, parents and sometimes unfairly children.  They were a battle weary group, unafraid of death, but quite welcoming of a nice long kip, beyond the tedium of living into their 90’s.

I’m sure Mandela feels the same way.  I imagine he’s slipping in and out of consciousness listening to the bedside squabbling and is probably quite pleased to be hatching the Great Escape.

We as a nation are hanging on, hypnotized by the spectre of death, because once the Father of the Rainbow Nation is dead we, the children, will be forced to grow up.  We’re not worried about Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela, but we are rather concerned about ourselves.  As William Saunderson-Meyer notes in his Jaundiced Eye Column:

A giant is about to depart, leaving political pygmies to divide his cloak and squabble about who is rightful heir. The media will be wall to wall with plaudits, the world will groan with grief.

Saunderson-Meyer ends his column with an extract from William Henley’s Invictus, a poem that saw Mandela through the darker days of his imprisonment.  Saunderson-Meyer suggests it as a fitting epitaph for a great man.  I say it should be the battle cry of those of us left behind.  In his lifetime Mandela has been good and bad, for no heroes are ever only one thing, but above all he has been courageous and generous. 

I still check my twitter feed with trepidation.  The world needs heroes and we’re not ready to let this one go, but I remind myself that a frail, old man in a hospital bed needs his nation to be brave.

In the fell clutch of circumstance

I have not winced nor cried aloud.

Under the bludgeonings of chance

My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place or wrath and tears

Looms but the horror of the shade,

And yet the menace of the years

Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.