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Mister Wong
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Mom was a really good buddyI love women, I must admit. So much so, that every single night for the past 40 years I have taken one to bed with me.
Most of my best friends are women and when I was in the corporate world and inherited a department populated by men, I exchanged just about all of them for women in the interests of getting jobs done and drastically lowering the potential for me to leave work one day with knives embedded in my back.
I have also learnt at least a little about women. Especially the golden rule about not ever mentioning only one or two as being particularly special because that will most certainly push a few “Hell hath no fury” buttons among the others.
So, to be on the safe side, if you have to pay a personal tribute to women, better stick to your mother. Particularly if she is dead.
This is important because a tribute to a dead mother will not arouse any significant jealousy among those few women who feel that they should have been the subject of this form
of tribute.
My most memorable moment with my mother was on the day I came close to killing her.
It was in the mid-1990s when my mother was 87, almost completely blind and suffering from lung disease from a lifetime of smoking and yelling at children to get up or they would be late for school.
She had been trying to die for about a year and a half, eventually calling all of her children about her and asking us whether we were praying for her to get better.
When we assured her that we were on our knees every minute of the day praying for her well-being, she snapped, “Well, stop it, all of you, your prayers are swamping my prayers and I really don’t want to hang around anymore!”
So, we started praying rather halfheartedly for a comfortable and speedy end to this feisty daughter of an Irish concert pianist mother and Scots diamond mining father.
She went in and out of comas for months and we children stood vigil by her bedside to let her know in her lucid moments that we were there.
That we would be with her when she died.
One morning, as the sun rose over the KwaZulu-Natal South Coast sea, she woke, lucid and chirpy and asking who was with her.
I told her it was me and she asked whether the monkeys that had given her and my father uphill for years, were fooling about on the roof of the house.
Before I could answer, my incontinent mother broke wind with as much gusto as a drunken cowboy on baked beans.
To quickly cover up her embarrassment, all I could think of doing was to answer her question about whether monkeys were on the roof and I said, “Not anymore, mom.”
She started giggling, then laughing and finally bordering on what sounded like a combination of choking, hysterics and four Boeing 747 engines in full reverse thrust.
Her nurse came flying into the room with panic-stricken wide eyes and it took me about five minutes to convince her that my mother wasn’t convulsing, simply laughing – something she hadn’t managed for a long time.
The story got back to my sister and three brothers who now refer to me as the sibling who tried to kill their mother. “Matricide Moerdyk”, they call me.
At the end, I wasn’t with her when she died, but playing golf at Sun City. It was on the 14th hole that the club manager came rushing up to me in a golf cart to say that my office had called to tell me that my sister was trying to get hold of me to tell me that my mother had passed away.
Naturally, the three members of my four-ball insisted that I should take off immediately and head for home.
Remembering that my mother was a sports fanatic, having played in the finals of the South African women’s tennis championships in her day and also having been a very competent and competitive golfer, as a token of my respect for her I insisted on finishing the game.
I said a silent little prayer to her and was delighted to have finished the final four holes with three copybook pars and a birdie. She would have been so very proud.
My mother taught me so much. Important lifeskills such as not raising contentious subjects with a spouse before 10am.
Not letting your right hand slip under the golf club grip too much because you would end up duck-hooking your drive.
And how to bowl a googly.
She was a really good buddy. And to think that I only heard her break wind once.
