The Weight We Take Turns Carrying

How We Cared for My Father Across Distance, Time and Different Lives

My Dad was very tall.

That is one of the first things I remember about him. Not his exact height, although I could probably find that somewhere, but the feeling of having to look so far up to find his face. When I was small, he would carry me on his shoulders, and from up there I felt like I could touch the sky. I am the youngest of five children, and my four older siblings will die on the hill that I got a considerably softer version of our father than they did. He had mellowed and the rules had drastically loosened so whatever stern version of my Dad they remembered had apparently become rather indulgent by the time he got to me.

I was his baby and for a very long time, he was simply my Dad.

Stella's Daughter is named after my mother, but it was never intended to be a place only about her. It was built from a life that has contained more than one kind of love, more than one kind of loss, and more than one relationship that changed me, and while my mother gave this place its name, I am Walter's daughter too.

"I am Walter's daughter too"

Like my mother, my father came from very humble beginnings. He grew up in a small village near Chinhoyi in Zimbabwe, a place we returned to almost every school holiday to visit my grandparents, and one that still holds some of the most beautiful memories of my childhood.

My father was an amazing athlete. He ran track, and his athletic ability opened doors for him to continue his education and earn his qualifications. I would like to point out here that I clearly inherited this athletic prowess from him, and I will be accepting no further questions on the matter.

He went on to work for the same company for all of his professional life, happily! He was one of those extraordinarily loyal people for whom forty-plus years at one company was not evidence that somebody had forgotten to update their LinkedIn profile. He was proud of his work so he stayed, built a career and a life and raised five children.

And when he finally retired, the company gave him a bicycle, the type that was affectionately nicknamed Black Beauty in my country. I still giggle when I remember the incredulity and horror on my mom's face when he brought it home on the day of his farewell party.

He had earned his retirement, though. There was every reason to imagine that what came next would be the gentler part, and that he could happily fulfil his lifelong dream of being a farmer and raising pigs and turkeys (he was very specific).

Instead, not long after he retired, he began getting sick. At first we did not know what was wrong. He was in Zimbabwe then, going through multiple doctors and tests and the uncertainty, and yes, dread, that comes before an illness has a name. Eventually he saw a specialist, and then came the kind of news every family hopes will always belong to somebody else: multiple myeloma, a cancer of the blood.

He would live with it for almost fifteen years, and over those years the illness would affect our family in ways I don't think any of us could have anticipated when we first heard its name.

When he was first diagnosed, my Dad moved to live with me in South Africa so he could get the specialised treatment he needed, including chemotherapy and, later, a bone marrow transplant. Within a day of arriving, my cat immediately fell in love with the gentle giant and wanted absolutely nothing to do with me. My cat had great instincts.

My Dad was still very much himself in the practical sense and could drive himself to and from treatments when he needed to. My Mom, who was based in Afghanistan at the time, was an integral part of his care financially and in every other way she could be from where she was, while relying on me as the person on the ground.

I became an expert in myeloma jargon, cooked, went to appointments, provided regular family updates, knew the visiting hours and the ritual of putting on protective gear head to toe before entering his room. It did not occur to me then to call myself a caregiver. He was my Dad and he was sick, so I did what needed doing.

For 2 years I watched him fight with everything in him, and when the doctors declared the bone marrow transplant a resounding success and he could go home, I was elated but not surprised in the least.

“A father cannot go and live in his

daughter's marital home!”

My Mom retired that same year and it looked almost like a return to ordinary life. Then my mother died and my Dad somehow held us all together as we grieved. Looking back at those months now, when so much of the rest feels blurred around the edges, he is the one clear and steady memory I have.

For years after that he was remarkably independent. He lived alone, had his routines and his life, his pigs and turkeys and although the cancer was there in "maintenance mode", he was not spending every day being a sick man.

Eventually, as life would have it, the illness changed again and living alone was no longer possible. Since the rest of us had already scattered to numerous corners of the globe, my sister, who lives in Zimbabwe, was the only practical answer to the question of where our father should live, although I honestly cannot remember whether we formally asked her or whether we all simply knew.

The cultural answer was considerably more complicated. There were relatives with loud voices who spoke of tradition: “A father cannot go and live in his daughter's marital home!” they yelled, yet offered no solutions besides that extremely useless insight. But customs do not take people to chemotherapy or make sure medication is taken correctly or create another viable home simply because the available one makes somebody uncomfortable, and my Dad being a man of great intelligence was well aware of this.

So he packed up his bags and happily went to live with my sister and her husband, who cared for him with incredible love for the last years of his life.

While I had cared for my father nearer the beginning of his illness, when he was still capable of considerable independence, my sister inherited a later Walter. She had the years when his body became less reliable and had to deal with the complexities of navigating treatment of a relatively rare disease while living beside the progression of his illness in a way the rest of us simply could not.

The rest of us, therefore, had to contend with caring for him in different ways. My role was now reversed as I became the caregiver from a distance and designated researcher, while one of my brothers became an expert at sourcing drugs from India, since locally they were either unavailable or impossibly expensive. We were all in a WhatsApp group that in the beginning would get tenser than a hostage negotiation, mostly about money, because serious illness has a price, and in places where treatment requires cash in hard currency that price is not theoretical; it arrives as a number, needed by Friday, and somebody has to pay it.

There is very little beauty in that part of caregiving, so perhaps unsurprisingly we do not tend to speak about it beautifully. People can contribute enormous amounts and still feel that somebody else should be doing more, while others can develop an almost supernatural ability to disappear the moment money enters the conversation, going so completely silent that you occasionally find yourself checking whether they are still alive.

The person providing the physical care can feel unseen by the people financing it, and the people financing it can feel unseen because their contribution arrives as a bank transfer rather than through the front door carrying groceries. Resentment can sit beside love without cancelling it, just as exhaustion and guilt can exist alongside both.

My Dad lived for many more years than his doctors had originally predicted, and by the end of his life, I realised that the five of us had not really shared one experience of caring for him, so much as inherited different parts of it. Geography decided more than any of us would have chosen, and whichever version of our father each of us received depended partly on where we were and partly on when it became our turn to hold him.

I think that distinction matters because we tend to speak about caregiving as though it describes one particular kind of act, when in our family it took many different forms. Sometimes it meant sitting beside a hospital bed wearing protective clothing from head to toe, and sometimes it meant rearranging your home so that a parent could live with you. Sometimes it meant having difficult conversations because there was no particularly graceful way to discuss the cost of keeping someone you love alive, and discovering in the process that caregiving does not magically turn a family into its most generous, patient and emotionally evolved version.

Sometimes it meant living thousands of kilometres away, knowing there was very little your physical body could do from where you were and trying instead to turn money, phone calls, research and worry into something useful. Sometimes it meant being willing to appear disrespectful to your elders because, on this particular occasion, you actually did know better.

We did all of it imperfectly, with arguments, frustration, exhaustion and the occasional WhatsApp message that should probably have been allowed to marinate in Drafts for a week or two, but somehow we kept finding ways to carry the part that was ours.

My Dad once carried me on his shoulders, and for years that was one of the ways I understood him: enormous, strong and safe. Long before I knew anything about hospitals, chemotherapy, bone marrow transplants or impossible conversations about money, I was simply a little girl sitting on my father's shoulders, feeling like I could reach the clouds.

I could never have imagined then that there would come a time when we would have to learn how to carry him. But none of us could carry all of him, so we each carried the part of Walter that geography, circumstance and time placed in our hands. I understand now that, in families, we spend our lives taking turns carrying each other.

My mother gave this place its name, but I am Walter's daughter too.