During this period, I was visiting White River regularly, mainly with the kids. Niels and Carey had a fantastic home there. They’d actually had a terrible fire a few years earlier, and the original farmhouse had burned down, but they’d rebuilt it. Niels is an incredibly gifted builder.
Their three sons—Christopher, Danny, and James—were all born within a year of each other, and Mikey was less than two years younger than James. So, in general, the kids got on really well when we went down there, and everyone had a great time.
At the same time, my mum was in frail care at Macadamia Village, an elderly facility just down the road from them. It sounds terrible, but I found it really difficult to visit her. I loved my mum dearly, but she had slowly degenerated into dementia and could no longer recognise me or the kids. Going to see her was a depressing experience. It particularly hurt that my children would not remember my mother as the kind, vibrant, intelligent woman I had grown up with. Instead, they would remember this husk that she had become. Dementia seriously sucks.
Then, around mid-2008, we went down for a weekend. We arrived on a Friday evening, and the atmosphere had completely changed. I asked, “Hey, what happened?” It turned out there had been an awful home invasion. It had been a tennis evening and after the guests left, only Niels, Carey, and James were there—and that’s when they struck. Around 15 masked men stormed into the house.
Christopher was away at university in Pretoria, and Danny was at the Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts in the UK. The intruders tied up Niels and James, then frog-marched Carey around the house, forcing her to point out where the valuables were.
This went on for about two hours. Eventually, they loaded everything into Niels’s Land Rover Defender. James, who could speak Zulu, understood they were debating whether to kill them.
In the end, the right-to-life faction won the debate. They left their victims tied up, packed everything into the Defender, and drove off. Lying there terrified, Niels, Carey, and James heard the vehicle stop before it reached the top of the drive. Their first thought: Oh my God, they’re coming back to finish us off. But luckily, they didn’t.
After some time, Niels and James managed to untie themselves and Carey, then called the police. It turned out the gang had accidentally kicked the low-ratio gear stick into neutral. Unable to figure out how to fix it, they abandoned the vehicle—along with most of what they’d stolen.
The insurance covered the rest, but it was the final straw for Carey. She decided the family had to leave South Africa. Niels had kept his Danish passport, inherited from our Danish father, and the three boys also had Danish passports. Carey, born in Australia, had an Aussie passport.
The only logical place for them to move was Copenhagen. Luckily, they were cash flush after subdividing and selling off most of their property in White River. Niels had never made money from his businesses, but he’d always been lucky with property—just like me, I guess. They’d bought that farm for next to nothing in 1995 and sold of bits of it and by 2008 they had made double-digit millions.
They had enough to buy an apartment in Copenhagen, where property prices had crashed after the financial crisis. Another stroke of luck.
The boys moved first: James, the youngest, had just finished school; Christopher had dropped out of university; and Danny had completed his studies at LIPA. Niels and Carey spent a year or two travelling around France, planning to renovate an old castle—a plan that never came to fruition.
Suddenly, I realised I was the only member of my immediate family left in South Africa, apart from my kids. My mother couldn’t be moved, so I continued to visit her from time to time, staying at the house because it hadn’t yet been sold. In fact, I remember one weekend—at Carey’s request—we buried a small statue of St Joseph upside down at the corner of the house. Carey, who dabbled in the occult, had read somewhere that this would help sell it. Sure enough, the house was soon sold. Go figure.
In early 2009, I got a call from the care home: “If you want to see your mom alive, you’d better come now. She doesn’t have long.”
I drove down and took time off work. After three days at her bedside, I told the staff, “Look, I have to go home.”
They replied, “We’ll call if she takes a turn for the worse.” Two weeks later, they did: “This time, we really mean it. You’d better come.”
My mother had been clear in her living will: no life support, no burden on her children. When I arrived, she was on no medication but was not conscious. A kind lady from the local Anglican church, Mary Rose, sat with me. I think I arrived around five in the evening. My mother passed away at nine. I was holding her hand. I managed to get Niels and Briony on the phone so they could say goodbye. There was a brief flicker of recognition when she heard their voices on the phone I held to her ear, but she wasn’t conscious. Still, I was there the moment her soul left her, and I’m glad I was. I wish I could say there was some meaningful interaction, but it was more like the husk of the person she’d been finally letting go.
The next day, she was cremated with no ceremony. I was given her ashes in a small wooden box, which I placed on the passenger seat for the drive back to Johannesburg. I was speeding—my usual habit—and of course, I went through a speed trap. An immaculately uniformed, polite black police officer pulled me over and said, “You were speeding.”
“I know,” I replied. “I’ve had a tough couple of days. That’s my mother there on the seat next to me.”
He looked at the box and said, “I’m very sorry for your loss. You can go.”
I drove off, thanking my mother for having my back even from the afterlife. So many emotions washed over me: grief at her passing, relief that her suffering was over, and guilt for feeling that relief.
Back in Lanseria, I placed her ashes in my large gun safe—the one I’d had since my Illovo days. It held all my treasures, and now my mother’s remains as well. There they stayed until early 2010, when we held an official memorial.
Niels and Briony attended, but by then, they were no longer speaking. They’d fallen out over many things, and she was just the latest on a long list of people they’d once been close to but now eschewed. I would eventually join that list, though that was still far in the future.
My mother’s ashes were interred at St Charles Catholic Church, in the rose garden beside my father-in-law, Malachy. Two truly exemplary people. She was a wonderful, selfless woman who deserved better. But in the end, she’d checked out long before her body gave up—probably ten years earlier.
So, Mom, wherever you are, I love you dearly. I should have visited more, but I was there at the end. I hope that brought you some comfort.