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