Getting old is difficult, my mother used to say, but the alternative is worse. She should know. When she was 17, Elsie's father dropped dead in front of her. She never forgot what she called the sound of a death rattle. As the baby of the family by many years, she was the only one of her siblings still living at home with her parents and she was also the only one who was there when her father died. In addition to that, she had been living for months in a house in which her parents were not speaking to each other and communicating, if at all, through her. After his death, Elsie told her older siblings about this state of affairs, but they would not believe it. She was alone, with her own mother, Paulina, with the secret, the one who made things up.

Years later, when her mother died, Elsie was far away, living in Rhodesia with her husband and two young children. Paulina died a few months after the death of her only son, Hymie, who died young, in his 40s. Whereas both her husband and son had died of heart attacks, Paulina was said to have died of a broken heart. Elsie flew to Johannesburg for the funeral but she was not really part of things. For the rest of her life she railed against the fact that when Paulina's possessions from the old house were distributed amongst the siblings, nothing was set aside for Elsie, who was too far away. Years later, when she saw the jardiniere she had loved as a child cracked and in poor shape on the stoep of a cousin’s house, she fumed. Not only had she been forgotten, but the memories she had were disrespected too.

When I think of my mother's life and death, her suspension between those two poles – too close when her father died, too far when her mother died – seems to me to tell another story. Elsie was the afterthought in a big family: her siblings were Cecilia (known as Tilly), Ida (known as Ada), Hyman (known as Hymie), Annie (known as Hannah), and last of all Fanny (known, appropriately enough, as Babe). Ten years later, as a mistake and an afterthought, along came Elsie (known as Elsie). They couldn't even find another name for her.