Reeva: A Mother's Story (2 page)

I’ve never heard of the Blade Runner. We are country people and we didn’t sit glued to the TV for the 2012 London Games where I learn he made history by becoming the first amputee sprinter to compete at the Olympics: our TV screen is permanently tuned into Tellytrack, the channel dedicated to horse racing, the sport which has always been Barry’s life. I had never heard of him before Reeva started talking about him on the phone – and that was scarcely three months ago. She still hadn’t spoken of him to her father, which meant that she was unsure about the relationship. With Barry, she’d keep quiet about a relationship until she felt confident that it was stable. But this man whose face I’m looking at for the first time in the newspaper, this stranger, has hurt our child, shot her, not once but shot her repeatedly until she was dead, shot her in the hip and the head above her right ear and in the elbow, shot her with Black Talon bullets that ‘open up’ when they enter the body, destroying flesh, bones and internal organs.

This is the unbearable thing: thinking of Reeva behind that locked toilet door, waiting for God to save her. She was a strong, strong Christian and she would have been waiting behind that door, petrified, believing God would save her. Only later would I realise that God had to take her because the injuries to her head were so bad. One bullet blew the brains out of her skull. If she had survived, she would have been in a coma, and she could not live without her brilliant mind, her vibrant faculties.

This image is the thing Barry and I agonise over. In our worst imaginings, we picture how scared she must have been to retreat behind that door, and lock it, with no one to protect her. As parents who’ve always doted on our child, there’s no escape from a wretched feeling of helplessness as we relive our daughter’s last minutes on Earth, envisioning her cowering from a shower of bullets fired by the man she loved. As her warm-hearted Xhosa language teacher Mrs Ntlangu says to me, ‘No one deserves to die by a gun, but I really hate it when someone shoots and carries on shooting a person to death, an unarmed helpless person.’

The pain only gets worse. I don’t know how I will get through these next few days, surfacing every morning knowing I will never hear my daughter’s voice again, never see her smiling elfin face, never watch her throw back her head and laugh throatily, never send my little love fairies via SMS to make her feel better when she’s ill, never again hold her when she cries. How can I accept she has just gone? Gone for ever.

Nothing anyone can say will help. Friends bring their children to be with me and comfort me. Claire, my friend of thirty years, comes over with her daughter Shelly. Tara Laing, a racehorse trainer, brings her son Ewan and he brings his little blanky, his soother, which he gives to me. The children sleep next to me for comfort. People don’t know how to commiserate with words in such a desperate situation, but the children’s cosy physical presence gives me some solace.

My brother-in-law, Michael, helps us to think about the funeral. In fact he and his wife Lyn and daughters Kim and Sharon organise it for us. They’re wonderful people. Michael is under immense stress, acting as spokesman for the family. The enormity of the media frenzy is something our normal, low-key family has never experienced. We feel surrounded by chaos and it is impossible to start grieving. Michael and Kim go through the steps of organising the funeral arrangements, ticking boxes on the list of options, almost on autopilot. Do we want roses? Yes. Do we want this kind of casket? Yes.

After an autopsy her body is flown home from Johannesburg to Dove’s Funeral Services in Port Elizabeth and we, all her family, wait one by one to see her and say our private goodbyes. Eventually it is my turn and I walk slowly into the room for what I know is the worst moment of my life. I can only see her pale face. Her body is swaddled in sheets and a white silk scarf is swathed around her head to cover her injuries. I am told not to move anything. She is waxy and lifeless, but she still looks beautiful, she is still my Reeva. I kiss her and whisper, ‘I love you so much, darling, and I’m going to miss you. We will meet again.’ Oh, how I wish that meeting is soon – and then my legs give way and I fall to the floor. People pick me up and carry me outside.

I insist they take me back in to her. It is too hard to walk away for the last time.

The funeral ceremony is held at 11 a.m. on 19 February at Victoria Park Crematorium Chapel, in Walmer, just five days after she met her death. Port Elizabeth is known as the Windy City, but the day of the funeral is unnaturally still and calm. Often, if someone has been killed, and the circumstances lead to a criminal trial, the body is not released for some time. An investigation normally delays a funeral. I remember people remarking how quickly we were allowed to reclaim her. I’m not compos mentis – I think by now I’ve been prescribed sedative medication to help me cope with my grief – so I don’t try to understand why it is happening so swiftly.

How I sit through the funeral of my own daughter, I don’t know. I don’t remember much. I’m travelling through mist and fog. I’m not really here. I remember little snapshots. The memorial hall of the crematorium chapel jam-packed with people. Reeva’s pale wooden casket covered in St Joseph’s lilies, a symbol of purity. There’s a long red carpet down the central aisle. Friends embrace me and whisper words of comfort. We have Psalm 23, the Lord Is My Shepherd. People are invited to stand and share their memories… Strangers from her life in the bright lights of Johannesburg take their five minutes to claim Reeva as their ‘best friend’; who are they all? Others, who I know well, also feel emboldened to speak. I recall my grandson Nicholas saying such beautiful things about her and how much he loved her as they grew up together, as close in age as siblings. It is hard for him to get through his speech, but I am proud of him… I remember the bereft look on the face of my niece Kim’s teenage daughter, Gypsy, who also stands up boldly and tells how she was going down the wrong path but Reeva encouraged her not to waste her life and helped her turn herself around. Other young people to whom she made a difference express their devastation over losing her. It is all a painful blur. Reeva had a magic heart of gold and she was close to so many of them.

A minibus full of nuns and teachers from St Dominic’s Priory School draws up outside and her former classmates line up in an arc formation around the chapel door to embrace her in death as she had them in life. That is such a beautiful tribute. Many of them wear their old school uniform, those well-worn navy-and-gold striped blazers, and these are friends who are nearly thirty! ‘Everything about her – the reception she gave everyone – was amazing. She was so vibrant,’ one of her former classmates says to me. ‘I remember she tried to be a part of us. She made the time to learn my language, Xhosa, which meant the world.’ Another young man tells me, ‘She was all love, warmth, hugs and smiles, that is how we remember her.’ It is very touching.

So many people come to pay their respects to Reeva. People she has reached out to in all walks of life come two hours early to make sure of a seat in the church; friends from her years growing up in Port Elizabeth, like Wayne her first love; friends from Johannesburg where she moved to pursue a career in modelling when she was twenty-two. Friends like Kristin, who studied law with Reeva in PE and also moved to Johannesburg; she comes half an hour early and finds the chapel full. Fellow mourners squeeze up on the pew to let her sit. Poor Kristin. Her former high school is right next to the crematorium and she often used to see the puffs of black smoke rising up from the chimney, never imagining she’d so soon be inside, saying farewell to a close friend in the prime of life. Francois Hougaard, the South African rugby union player and briefly a boyfriend of Reeva’s with whom she remained good friends, arrives nattily dressed in a suit and dark glasses to pay his respects. Her lovely longtime ex-boyfriend Warren Lahoud – the man we thought she’d marry – comes with his mother Cecilia. Gina Myers, a make-up artist, attends with her parents Cecil and Desi and sister Kim, the family with whom Reeva lodged for the last seven months. TV presenter Pearl Thusi and the DJs, musicians and models who starred alongside Reeva on the
Tropika Island of Treasure
reality programme, arrive as a group. Nelson Mandela Bay deputy mayor Nancy Sihlwayi attends the service on behalf of South African women after attending a protest against gender violence outside the Port Elizabeth High Court. Former Eastern Cape premier Nosimo Balindlela expresses her sadness with moving words: ‘This child is the daughter of Africa. She was humble and even from listening to her friends speak of her, she was just such a loving and caring girl. I am deeply saddened by this incident.’

Quite a number sit in their cars outside. Some because they can’t fit into the building; some sit privately because it is too much for them to witness the finality of Reeva’s cremation. One friend, whose wife Reeva had sat with for many days when she was dying of cancer – talking to her, painting her nails, spending time with her – pays vigil in his car outside. He is overwhelmed.

The Order of Service is printed with a portrait of Reeva – so young, so beautiful, only twenty-nine – next to the poignant poem,
God’s Gift, A Child:

‘I’ll lend you for a little while a child of mine,’ He said.

‘For you to love the while she lives.

It may be six or seven years or twenty-nine or three

But will you till I call her back take care of her for Me?

She’ll bring her charms to gladden you

And should her stay be brief
–

You’ll have her lovely memories as solace for your grief.

I cannot promise you she’ll stay

Since all on Earth return

But there are lessons taught down there

I want this child to learn.

I’ve looked the whole world over

And in my search for teachers true

And from the throngs that crowd life’s lane

I have selected you!

Now will you give her all your love

Nor think the labour vain

Nor hate me when I come to call, to take her back again?

I fancied that I heard them say, ‘Dear Lord Thy Will Be Done

For all the joy the child shall bring, the risk of grief we’ll run.

We’ll shelter her with tenderness
– we’ll love her while we may

And for all the happiness we’ve known, forever grateful stay!

And should the Angels call her, much sooner than we planned,

We’ll brave the bitter grief that comes,

And try to understand.’

The funeral takes place at the same time as Oscar Pistorius – there, I’ve said his name – appears in court in Pretoria charged with her murder.

The irony is that on any other occasion this gathering of some of South Africa’s most gifted and admired young people would be a celebration of something. Reeva would have loved the gathering together of so many of her dearest family and friends, but she is not here to see it. Her absence is why we have all come together. The reality of her death is hard to come to terms with. We’re doing what the poem urges, braving the bitter grief and trying to understand. For us, it is a debilitating family tragedy, a shocking personal loss which we have to start trying to come to terms with under the spotlight of a global audience fascinated by a looming criminal trial that will seek to determine the truth of what really happened to our daughter. The impartial words of the news bulletins that keep replaying on radio and television sound clinical and alien, impossible to relate to the fate of our bubbly, cheeky, vivacious, loving Reeva:

We can confirm a twenty-nine-year-old woman died on the scene from gunshot wounds. A twenty-six-year-old man has been arrested and charged with murder…

Friends of the slain model express their shock…

Coming up: a report on the gruesome end of a tragic love match…

Reeva is famous now. All over the world people express their love for her and their outrage that such a crime could be committed against an innocent, loving young woman. She is alive in the global consciousness as a vibrant personality whom people want to embrace and hold on to as a symbol of all too common a form of injustice. Her image flits across the TV screen and smiles down from shelves of magazines. But she, the Reeva who was simply our beloved child, is dead. She’s gone and never coming back. It is hard to absorb our very personal loss and the irony of the context in which her death is being discussed and debated.

There is a constant feeling of surveillance as the press continue to follow the story of how a beautiful model in the prime of her life and career could meet such a violent end at the hands of a national hero. To be honest, I hardly notice the presence of the cameras. I am just trying to get through each day, but every so often I have to endure the low antics of some member of the press and that makes our life so much more difficult. We have enough to deal with, trying to bear our loss, and then you have these other things: reporters sneaking through your front gate and into your home to join the grieving families that are here, and going so far as to pretend that they knew Reeva and they were her friend. We hear of social network sites set up by fans of the man who killed her to ‘take his side’: Team Oscar. There are rumours that he has reached out and made contact with us. Whose business is that but ours? It is true his representatives proposed a meeting, but it is too early. I don’t want to speak to him. What could I possibly say to him? I don’t even want to look at him, you know? He’s taken the most precious thing that we had away from us.