Princess Teddy and her sisters

Princess Teddy is a tortoiseshell cat in her late teen years. She has a soft and smooth coat of black, white and ginger, all three colours startling and definitive. Her face is black, split by a white stripe down to her nose, with one ginger and one black ear. She has two immaculate and very white back legs, and a white tummy. The rest of her is striped or mottled black and ginger, apart from one white front paw.

She knows that I think she is altogether beautiful and she basks in my approval. She moves like a cat in a cartoon, utterly feminine. She floats on "tippy toes" and arches her back with her tail in the air, bending herself round corners and looking up at me with an expression she knows will get her instant cat crunchies. She has a high pitched miaow and is frequently vocal, especially if I bend down to lift her seemingly weightless little body for a cuddle, although once up, she tolerates the affection with calm. She knows she is regal, every inch of her is of royal blood.

She is frequently to be found - and I do so with irreverence - on a chair under the table cloth descending from my veranda table; or next to a Lladro porcelain statue on an oak table indoors, which is a lady riding side saddle on a dressage horse. Teddy sleeps innocently and with as much elegance next to it.

Her sister, although not from the same litter, could not be more different. I found the two kittens at a local pet shop. Lex is charcoal grey from top to toe but has long Siamese bones and a small, pointed face. She is quiet and unassuming but regales me with sudden affection about once a week, after which she ignores me completely. She dictates her own supper time, out and about on some errand of her own until after eight o'clock in the evening, and some nights she does not appear at all. Teddy is always in or around the house and follows me most places.

Lex has to be respected as she is timid and shadow-like. Teddy puts up with being teased, her expression either astonished or indignant. Lex trusts me completely but her delicate face is wraithlike. If awoken, she stretches out her long charcoal legs and points her toes - like most cats, she spends much of her day asleep.

Besides these teenagers I have Puck, my daughter K's cat originally, who was put into my care when K's two dogs made her life untenable. Puck is a slightly more than middle aged tabby of somewhat limited imagination. Although one can be persuaded that she is slightly stupid she does seem to understand every word. She is ultra affectionate, never happier than when she is leaning against a human.

It took more than a year for Puck to stop swearing at the kittens. They now ignore each other completely but there is no more bad language from Puck, who inhabits my veranda with great faithfulness and never leaves the garden (I often see Teddy or Lex disappearing over the picket fence, tail up).

Tragedy Next Door

There is a tragedy going on next door. At the New Year the little girl next door fell into their swimming pool. She was pulled out by her father, quite blue, rushed to hospital, and resuscitated. She is not quite three years old.

Now, after lying in a coma in hospital for some three weeks or so, she is at home, but non responsive. She is no longer comatose but vegetative. This distressing situation was compounded by the arrival of their next baby, who is now about a week old. The little girl who fell in the pool is brain damaged and seemingly hopeless. This poor family is undergoing the limits of torture, seeing their precious child damaged but alive, non responsive, non comprehending, helpless. She can neither see nor communicate, her life has been curtailed, they are enmeshed in a situation that must be unbearable and they have a new infant to deal with. One cannot imagine their unhappiness; it must be despair beyond bearing.

Yesterday was very hot. I could hear, from my veranda to theirs, that little girl crying. She is being nursed fulltime by a qualified carer, as the mother quite rightly has to care for her new baby and cannot cope with both.

I do not know the family well but we have chatted from time to time. My heart goes out to them. This is worse, I think, than losing a beloved partner who did after all live out more than his three score years and ten. F was denied more of his life but this child, this little soul, is at the beginning of hers and she is condemned now to exist in a blighted state that will be a life sentence for her and her parents.

Her crying was an unnerving kind of roar; I could not bear to listen to it but retreated indoors. And thought, at least F and I were spared the tortuous rigours of his being a helpless invalid; we have something to be thankful for. The old cliche of counting blessings ...

It is hard to imagine that there are any blessings going on next door, apart from a new and perfect baby girl, but this in itself must be anguish; a change of circumstances in their previously happy family life so bizarre, so sudden, and so cruel it is hard not to question where God is coming from. Why should they be so punished? And what logic is there in the bringing back to life a child so damaged that from now on she cannot comprehend anything at all?

Ricochet

Being widowed is a ricochet business. It is about creating oneself anew. Which is a process both appalling and invigorating and one yoyos between these two emotions, with various shades of grey in between.

But with the passing of time comes - not healing - but confidence. I know that I will never get over the hateful shock of F's dying, of his suffering, at his helplessness in the end and the grotesque state of being he was subjected to. It still whams back at me if I let it, but I am getting more adept at shushing my mind. And what I am seeking is peace. I need peace in my life and I am getting better at establishing it.

Perhaps if my husband had had a more conventional death I would not have found it so difficult. If he had died suddenly, going from an apparent state of health into something like a heart attack out of the blue, or if he had died slowly of something like cancer and we had had time to get used to the idea - these are two extremes but they both make sense to me.

But no, F went into hospital seeking a solution thousands of people had found and walked out with, whole and well; he had gone in for an ablation we had read was little more difficult for the patient than the extraction of a wisdom tooth; the Internet was full of glowing reports from people who had fibrillations and were delightfully cured.

We chose the hospital with care, we researched their records, they were the ones with the most practice and success. There were no failures in their records.

F entered that hospital ward very ill but we were assured that he was no worse off than many others, that they could handle his problems. No-one was to know that from that point his journey would be downwards into one complication after another.

Anyway: that word, "anyway." Resignation, Let's get on with it. One cannot change the past. All the old cliches, all the old axioms designed to help one move forward - I am good at them now. Lots of practice.

But peace, that's what I think (now) I am beginning to find. Peace and good cheer - Christmas card wishes, the things every human needs, not only in December.

Halycon

The death of an old friend, Out of the blue the news that he had lain down for a nap and never got up. Can't believe it. Memories are still of a vibrant young man playing tennis, with a powerful serve. We used to gather every Wednesday evening at our tennis court, a crowd of us. We would play until after midnight, winter and summer - winter in the Highveld is freezing at night. We used to wear warm tracksuits and a glove on our free hand. Game after game with laughter and good exercise.

F was a prodigous builder and he had built a tennis house, a thatched, round area with a comfy chairs and a small kitchen, sliding glass doors looking on to our tennis court. Such parties we had there - not only Wednesday evenings but champagne breakfasts, or Sunday afternoons, with children running round like kittens underfoot. What I remember most is our laughter. We were a group of comfortable friends; we played tennis, went out for dinner, took boats onto Hartebeespoort Dam, had braais.

On the shores of the dam, at a place called Cosmos, F had renovated a small thatched cottage and there we were most weekends, with friends dropping in for lunch. We had a small motor boat and used to take it upriver, between tree-lined banks from which legowaans (alligator-shaped reptiles) would slide into the water and once, I swear, we saw a python swimming in the water. Our children would swing from a tree on the bank below our house; the ground fell steeply away into the water and there were large trees everywhere. It was only a small place but we loved it. Again, my main memory is of laughter and fun. The friends were lovely - and now one has died.

Not only that, but another member of this group has cancer, and his death is imminent. He is younger, the son of dear friends - F and I were somewhere in the middle of these generations. His father died some years ago in America and not long before F died, we visited his mother in Rhode Island.

Life and death is catching up. My memories of those Cosmos and Muldersdrift days are of us in our thirties, with small children and an endless capacity for fun. We had no thought of death, we played and laughed and worked hard. Husbands went to work morning to evening, wives took small children to school, and cooked things; we - I - questioned little.

I was busy with three children born within three years and a husband whose energy was boundless. We were happy, but just how carefree we were, we ignored. Only nostalgia reveals the invisible boundaries of our fun. We gave no thought to its ever ending, to people dying, to moving on. We had no knowledge of grief, we were innocent as puppies.