Annabella: The Life and Death of a Rose
Stella Mpisi
Copyright 2015 Stella Mpisi
Cover Design Copyright 2015 Stella Mpisi
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In memory of my dear mother, Rose Mpisi.
You will always be an inspiration to me. I thank God to have blessed me with such a beautiful, intelligent and loving mother. May your Soul Rest in Peace.
Rose Mpisi
12 June 1961 - 13 February 2003
Mother was different from all the other women of her generation
She had a good sense of humour and always had a welcoming smile on her face
She made each of her daughters feel special; she loved each of us individually
Mother worked really hard to make of us the best women that she could
She never hesitated to correct us when we were wrong
She never hesitated to comfort us when she knew we were heartbroken
Mother’s faith in God always amazed and inspired me
Even when we lacked food on the table, she would thank God for life
Through her deepest sorrows and troubles, she seemed to always be at peace
Mother constantly encouraged us to remain optimistic
She believed that optimism helps us see the bright side of the toughest situation
So despite the pain mother went through, she never gave up on life
Mother’s face was always embellished with a calm and serene expression
Her smile spoke a million words, but her month barely made a sound
She kept her sadness locked up inside of her to keep us sheltered from her pain
Mother’s greatest gift to us was the gift of faith in God
She taught us how to pray and how to listen to the Lord
If it weren’t for this gift, I would still blame the world for taking Annabella away
Optimism
Optimism. If I had to use one word to describe my mother I would use the word “optimism”. To me mother was the embodiment of “optimism”; she wasn’t just optimistic, but she was “optimism” itself.
The week after my mother’s death was the hardest week of my entire life. At night I could barely sleep and during the day I walked around like a zombie. Nothing could save me from the hole in which I had fallen so deeply; a hole of melancholy, of confusion and of anger. The melancholy came from the loss of a dear being; the confusion was due to the fact I didn’t know what to do; and the anger was a result of the intense collision of the converse emotions that had invaded my heart the night of her death. I was only living by compulsion for deep inside of me I desired nothing more than death, but I lacked the strength and courage to put an end to my own life. My mother used to tell me that death hurts the living more than it does the dead, and as I remembered this, I realised that her own death had confirmed her theory for I couldn’t imagine a pain greater than the one I felt.
After mother’s burial, I sat on a bench in her garden of roses while my older sister, Josephine, spoke to our guests inside the house. I began to reminisce as I admired the beauty of the roses that had already blossomed. Mother had taken good care of them; she had taken good care of me. It was then that I realised that mother was gone forever…
The day of father’s sentencing had arrived. Being the only eyewitness of the incident, I had testified against him in court. Testifying against my own father had been very difficult to do, but punishing my mother’s murderer was something I had felt obliged to do. I had had to somehow ignore the fact that my father was a murderer, the murderer who had killed my mother before my very own eyes. At only twenty one years old, I knew that I would probably never forget the frail smile mother had had on her face before father had pulled the trigger and shot her in the head.
Father received a sentence of life in prison for first degree murder. He had pleaded guilty, but he hadn’t given a reason for what he had done and I didn’t know if I would ever be able to forgive him. I felt betrayed and damaged, and after my father had been locked away, I had completely stopped talking. I had been living with Josephine and her husband, who she had married about three months before mother’s sudden passing, and I hadn’t spoken to either of them for two weeks. I barely ate, and every time I saw meat, I remembered mother’s corpse lying in a pool of blood in front of me. After a month of drastic weight loss, I was hospitalized. I hated life and everything about it. I longed for death, but death didn’t come. I couldn’t bring my body to the point of intentionally going after death, but my mind had already expired. Nothing mattered to me anymore. The image of my mother’s lifeless body was stuck in my head and the sound of my father’s gun resounded in my ears. I kept imagining my mother alone in her coffin with no one to talk to. I wanted to join her so that she wouldn’t have to be alone. I didn’t want to pray even though mother would have wanted me to. I was angry at God. If He was as faithful as mother had said He was, I didn’t understand how he could let her die in such a brutal manner at the mercy of a selfish man.
Optimism was no longer a part of me. Optimism died the day mother returned to her Creator…
Annabella, oh, Annabella, I come to you with love
Annabella, sweet Annabella, please hear me from above
Annabella, oh, Annabella, I’m in so much pain
Annabella, sweet Annabella, for I’ll never see you again
Dear mother, I apologise for my silence
But I feel traumatised by father’s violence
The image of your corpse can’t seem to fade away
And I think about your murder each and every day
At night I close my eyes in an attempt to fall asleep
But I miss you dear mother, so all I do is weep
During the day I think of your smile and your beautiful eyes
But then I remember how you left us; I remember how you died
Father has been punished; he’s been locked up for good
But that won’t change anything; life still isn’t going the way it should
My life has become nothing but sadness and melancholy
I don’t even talk anymore; am I going crazy?
Mother, I’m lost and I don’t know what to do
I don’t pray anymore after what God has put us through
I don’t mean to blame Him or to use His name in vain
But doesn’t He know that I’m hurt because I’ll never see you again?
The roses of your garden have blossomed and show such beauty!
They remind me of your smile and of your humility
I’ll fix things dear mother; I promise to persevere
I’ll love you forever and I’ll always keep you near
****
Will
Will. Mother often told me that where there is a will there is way, but my reality proved her wrong for I had the will to move on with life, but there seemed to be no direction for me to take...
Sitting on the floor, I contemplated what used to be mother’s garden of roses. Everything had died; none of the flowers had been able to resist solitude. I was furious that nobody had bothered to take care of the garden while I was in hospital. The house had been abandoned to itself. The furniture was covered in dust, the walls of the living room were still stained with blood and the garden had died. I spent the whole day in the house, l
ost in deep nostalgia. Everything felt so dark and melancholic and the memories of mother’s death suddenly became vivid. What use did the house have if it had become a crime scene? What use did the garden have if it had lost its beauty because of the carelessness and insensibility of human beings? What use did the good memories have if their place of birth had become marginalized? Nothing. Nothing could change the damage that the inhuman death had caused; nothing could replace the emptiness that was eating into my heart; nothing could erase the horrible memory of a human head being instantly torn apart. Nothing could bring me back to being the cheerful Mary-Rose I once was. Mother had left the house to both Josephine and I, but it felt like a curse rather than a blessing…
With time, I decided that I needed to meet new people; I wanted to go to a place where no one knew what had happened to me. Being in a familiar environment wasn’t ideal for me at that particular period of my life because everyone around me treated me with pity and sympathy, and all that it did was remind me of what had happened. Josephine reluctantly respected my decision and offered to give me a small sum of money to help me leave the country. I had chosen to leave South Africa and visit mother’s country of birth for the very first time. For me, discovering my mother’s origins, origins that she herself hadn’t been quite familiar with, was something that I needed to do. I hoped that going there would help me regain my confidence and that I would find people who would understand my pain and who would not judge me for it. Imagining a place that I didn’t know was intriguing and for the very first time since mother’s death I felt excited.
Before leaving, I went to visit mother’s house. It looked worse than it had the previous time I had seen it. There was nothing green in the garden and the house was pest-infested. I sat on the living room floor and I suddenly began to relive the night of the murder in my head: mother whispering the “Hail Mary” as she stared at father straight in the eyes; father tapping his foot on the living room carpet as he stared straight back into mother’s eyes; the sound of my own sobs as I looked at my parents; and finally the sound of the gun shot and the bullet penetrating into mother’s head. I was terrified but I did not leave. I took mother’s portrait that hung on the living room wall and I tried to clean it but the stains of blood wouldn’t fade away, so I buried the portrait in the place that used to be mother’s garden of roses.
“Where there is a will there is a way”, is what mother often said. Perhaps she was right after all for my will showed me a possible way…
Annabella, oh, Annabella, I come to you with love
Annabella, sweet Annabella, please hear me from above
Annabella, oh, Annabella, I’m in so much pain
Annabella, sweet Annabella, for I’ll never see you again
Dear mother, I have decided to go out and live on my own
I want to live a normal life in a place I can call home
A new country is what I’ll look for; a new country is what I’ll find
Happiness is what I hope for; normality and peace of mind
The house isn’t the same and your garden is dead
In my absence everyone deserted it and your roses weren’t fed
The furniture is dusty and the walls have stains of blood
The house is filthy and the appliances have all become dud
My heart is still in pain and my eyes aren’t dry
Thinking of your death still makes me cry
I apologize on father’s behalf; I’m sorry for what he did
I don’t want to live in anger; no, God forbid
I buried your portrait; I can’t take it with me
‘Cause it will be a constant reminder of my misery
It’s hard to forget what happened; it’s hard to let go
But I’ll get there someday; it’s a fact, it’s what I know
****
Courage
Courage. Courage is not the absence of fear but it’s the capacity to face danger despite fear. Courage is a quality mother seemed to master even when father pulled that trigger. All I needed was a fraction of mother’s courage in order to face life in a new country. All I needed was a fraction of it…
The flight from Johannesburg to Kinshasa was about four hours long. Mother was born in the Democratic Republic of Congo before she was adopted by a British family who took her to England when she was less than a year old. When I stepped out of the plane, the air was humid and the equatorial heat was fierce. The energy of the city was unexplainable. During the drive to the hotel, my eyes were glued to the window as I admired the scenery of women selling on the side of the street, children in school uniforms buying oranges from a young boy not much older than they were, taxi drivers hooting to get the attention of potential passengers, and the colourful patterns on the clothes that some of the women wore. It was magical.
We arrived at the hotel in a neighbourhood called Gombe. The room was majestic and when I looked out my window and saw a fantastic view of the busy city, my heart felt at home…
About four months after my arrival, I started a teaching job in an English pre-school. For the first time since mother’s passing, I felt happy. Nobody knew my story, and for once I could live my life without the sympathetic stares of people which were constant reminders of the tragedy. No matter how many times Josephine begged me to return to live with her and her husband, I remained firm on my decision and I loved every second I spent teaching my small class of eleven children.
About a year after my arrival in Kinshasa, Josephine sent me a letter that was addressed to me that she had received in the mail. Over the phone, she informed me that the letter was from our father and that I didn’t have to read it if I wasn’t ready to. As much as I wanted to ignore the letter, my curiosity was overwhelming; but what I read made me wish I had never opened the seal in the first place:
Marie-Rose,
I’m writing to you from a jail cell. Never would I have imagined being in this situation. I am so sorry for everything I have done. Night and day all I do is think about what my actions have done to your fragile heart. I regret that you have had to live the consequences of my actions. You have the right to hate me. My whole being disgusts me. I know that I deserve everything that I’m going through and that I don’t deserve your forgiveness but I really hope you can forgive me. I wish you a long and happy life and may God bless you.
With lots of love from your father,
Thomas Spencer
Inevitably, I cried after reading the short letter. Soon, anger began to intensify inside of me, incredulity made its way to my mind, sadness took over my heart and my whole physical being became numb. I wanted to scream but no sound came out of my mouth, I wanted to cry but my eyes were dry, I wanted to break everything around me but I didn’t have the strength to do so…
I had decided to leave Kinshasa a few months after reading the letter from father. I had realised that running away from my problems wasn’t the best solution. I had been living in a fantasy world in Kinshasa, and father’s letter had brought me back to reality, a reality I needed to face.
The first place I went to when I got back to Johannesburg was mother’s house. In the garden, at the surface of the place where I had buried my mother’s stained portrait, there was a red rose that had come from nowhere. Its beauty stunned me. Its thorns sparkled like diamonds, its leaves were of a royal green and its petals graciously moved in the breeze. I tried to uproot the rose but it firmly remained in the soil. I wanted to try to dig out the portrait but the precious flower stood firmly in the ground.
Courage. Being courageous most certainly never meant that there would be no fears; but perhaps I had been courageous for the wrong reasons. Perhaps I had only been courageous enough to run away from my situation instead of courageous enough to face my reality and move past it. The rose in mother’s garden had shown far more courage than I ever had. It had blossomed out of nowhere and it had grown into the most beautiful flower that I had ever seen without any help…
****
Forgiveness
Forgiveness. Mother once told me that forgiveness is not meant to benefit the person you are forgiving, but to benefit yourself for it frees your soul and appeases your mind. In order to move on with my life, I knew that I had to find the courage to forgive my father for what he had done…
As father walked into the visitation room in the prison, I was in shock. His blonde hair that had always been so neatly coiffed was discoloured and long, he had lost a lot of weight and he looked ill.
“I’m so happy to see you. You have grown up so much.”
“Thank you.”
“How are you?”
“I’m coping.”
“I’m so sorry Mary-Rose. I am so sorry”
“Why did you kill her?”
“I was angry. I was bitter. I lost everything after the divorce. I don’t know what I was thinking. I wasn’t thinking. I’m sorry Mary-Rose.”
Without saying a word, I stood up and walked out of the room. I could hear father call me, but his voice sounded so distant and I never looked back. I couldn’t digest what father had said. Mother hadn’t deserved to die at the mercy of such an egoist man. At that point, I wanted to sleep and never wake up again.
“Forgiveness is never easy”, is what mother used to say. It takes a strong heart to forgive such cruelty. I guess my heart wasn’t as strong as I had hoped it was. After visiting father in prison, I found myself in a very dark place. My memories of my first few months spent in the rehabilitation centre are almost inexistent…