Have I Lost You?

 As usual, I have a number of topics I feel like writing about. Today, however, I am compelled to write  about just one.

Yesterday, just over a month after suffering a stroke, Dr. Diana Ferrus passed away. She had been hospitalised for a while, and was moved to a rehabiltation centre for further treatment. On Facebook, I followed the regular updates by her family, and believed she was recovering well. The news of her passing, yesterday, came as an awful shock. 

I think I met Diana in about 2010. I can't remember the details, but it was at an event where we both performed - she, her poetry, and me, my music.  I loved her work. I realised that, even though reading them was a profound experience, her poems were best enjoyed by watching her live performances. I know many people who are wordsmiths, who have impressive vocabularies, and who can make the dullest subject sound interesting, but Diana's gift with words was on another level. She had the ability to use just a few words, in a few lines, to say something deeply moving and thought-provoking. 

I love the way she wrote about everyday experiences and lifted them to something special. I love the way she tapped into different human experiences, often of things foreign to us, and made them real to all of us. Her Afrikaans poem about her father's jacket, "Die Jas", comes to mind. As does her poem about how enslaved people who died on ships were just flung into the ocean: "My naam is Februarie".

I'm finding it hard to write, because I'm still dealing with the shock and sorrow of Diana no longer being around. It still feels unreal. 

Diana was a riveting storyteller, and, whether it was about her childhood, her father's incarceration as a WW11 POW, or an incident that had happened to her the previous day,  she kept her audience captivated. Amidst her seriousness, her sense of humour crept through, and she'd have us in stitches. 

I loved listening to Diana. In conversations with a small group of friends, I always wanted to shush everybody when she was speaking, because she carried such gravitas, like a sense of nobility. She was knowledgeable, and she felt injustices deeply, as evidenced by her poems. When she spoke, I never wanted her to stop, because it was like being addressed by an All-Knowing One, A Wise One. 

And it wasn't just the content of  her speech - she had a really beautiful voice, like rich, dark, liquid chocolate. I loved it when she broke into song, in the middle of her poems.   

I could see, in recent years, that she was growing tired. Her post-retirement performance life was busy, and she sometimes mentioned in her Facebook posts that she needed to rest. What broke my heart was her references to how people took performers for granted.  

One of my points of creative collaboration was when she asked me to sing some of my originals at her book launch, in about 2011. A memorable creative intersection was in 2014, when I put music to one of her older poems, called "Have I Lost You?" I am so glad I got to perform it one night when she was in the audience.  

Diana, I cannot believe you're gone. The world is a lot less magical without you.  

     L-R: Diana Ferrus, Errol Dyers, Me, and my cousin, Derek Ronnie. (2014) Photo: Gregory Frantz 

   

Written on 7 Jan 2026

In an hour's time, I start getting ready for a brunch date with a friend. I've been wanting to blog for SO long, and it feels like now's a good time. If I don't finish in time (I take a long time to edit my writing and find photos), I'll finish later. 

It's the last few days of our month-long summer holiday, with the new school year starting on Monday 12 Jan. I am happy to have had my teaching contract renewed for another year. No job is perfect, but this is where life has placed me, for now, and I  am grateful for this opportunity to make an impact at a school so rich in history and aligned with my political views. 

If you're not South African, you might find that statement strange. What do political views have to do with one's workplace? Almost 32 years into our post-apartheid democracy, there are still many issues to be addressed. Living in South Africa and pretending all our current problems are unrelated to apartheid, but solely the result of bad governance by the ANC, is both naive and incorrect. I would not survive in a context where the past was conveniently forgotten, to appease the historically privileged. 

But that's not what I want to write about today.    

Interestingly, I find that the state of my health is playing a more central role in my life choices. I had a medical check up a few days ago, and while my blood pressure had stabilised, my heart rate was still a problem. I've now been put on a tablet to address that. 

Some changes I've made, in recent months, include weekly walks in nature (my ultimate goal is daily walks), switching to a plant-based diet, cutting out most of the sweet treats I used to love, starting my day with a glass of lemon water, and generally pacing myself better. My guiding principle for living as stress-free a life as possible (a key element of blood pressure and heart health) is knowing myself. The next step is honouring myself, because life has shown me that it's possible to know yourself and still self-sabotage, as you live the way you were raised to, which is to consider everyone else's needs but your own. Finding the balance is important. Difficult, but important.   

Of course, a lot of this is much easier when you're on a four-week break from work. Once I'm back, the likelihood of slipping into patterns that don't serve me is strong, and that's the challenge I'll face next week.  I do think, though, that in the 28 months that I've been in this job, I've sorted out quite a bit. The difficulty for me is that I am prone to being a workaholic, and living alone simply exacerbates it. When you live with someone else, there's a sane (ideally) person around you, reminding you that there's more to life than work. When you're on your own, it's easy to come home, have a snack, then launch into schoolwork for the next few hours, until your stiff neck makes you realise it's almost midnight, and you should probably shower and get to bed. That's the harmful and life-shortening pattern I plan to break. Or, in modern-speak, disrupt.

I fully appreciate that living alone has pros and cons. I love living alone, but it means I always have to go somewhere for any social interaction. It sounds silly, but it's the truth. When you live with even one other person, you have a built-in little society inside your home. 

Going to work every day also provides social interaction - sometimes too much! - which I really do value. During last year, I got to know my colleagues better, and forged bonds with people who had similar life values and approaches to education.  So yes, having a job is about so much more than earning a salary - and teaching is like a few jobs rolled into one.  

(I didn't  finish this on the day I wrote it, but I'll post it as is. )

Ok - time to get ready.