The plain wooden tombstone on my sister’s grave simply says: “Rania Ceaser / Born 22.07.1955 / Died 20.02.2021”. What it doesn’t say is: “Here lies a mother, a sister, a wife, a grandmother, a matriarch, a family historian, and a person who meant so much to so many in Rocklands, Mitchells Plain, even though, in most cases, she did not have much to offer materially.”
We received the news about her passing just after 11am on Saturday morning (20 February 2021) as we were preparing to visit my mother-in-law who was celebrating her 81st birthday. We had to change our plans because we had to make sure that she would be buried before sunset, in accordance with Muslim rites.
While the news came as a shock, it was not unexpected because my sister had had health issues for a while now.
In fact, one of the last conversations I had with her about two weeks ago via video call was when she told me that I should write about the many times she thwarted death. She reminded me of a few years ago when she suffered a haemorrhage and the doctor told her how lucky she was that it did not affect her brain. She also had an incident when her tongue turned blue, but she survived. More recently, she survived COVID-19 and spent two weeks recovering in the Brackengate COVID-19 facility before being declared free of the virus. She had another test last week, but it was negative.
I was worried when she tested positive for COVID-19, because of her frail health. She had just about all the comorbidities that one can imagine. She had asthma, she was slightly underweight, she was 65 and frail.
Last Sunday, she asked me to arrange an Uber on Tuesday morning so that she could go to hospital for a check-up. But on Monday morning, my other sister called me to say that they had taken her to hospital because her lungs were weak.
My last conversation with her was on Friday morning when she told me that the doctor had found a blood clot on her lung and this contributed to her struggling to breathe. Our call was cut short and I tried several times to call her back, but was unsuccessful. I even tried on Saturday morning before we got the call that she had passed away. It seems the blood clot was too big and her lungs too weak to recover.
Rania was my oldest sister and became the matriarch of our family after my mother passed away. But even before that, she had to go work after passing Standard Seven to help support the family. I remember one of her first jobs was at a butcher where she learned about all the different cuts of meat. She did a variety of jobs until she married and stayed home to raise her children.
She was always supportive of my activities and encouraged me, even though she did not always understand what I was doing, and continuously told me that she loved me. This was the way she ended all our calls, especially in recent years.
When I was still young, she nurtured my love for music and reading and would always take me to concerts when I was a teenager. Many of my earlier memories of watching live music involved going with her and her then husband, to concerts at the Three Arts complex, some featuring overseas artists who were breaking the cultural boycott, but I was too young to know about that at the time. She also made sure that I went to the library.
When I became involved in the struggle as a young man in the early 1980s, she opened her house in Rocklands, Mitchells Plain, for youth and other meetings, offering sandwiches and coffee to everyone, even though she could barely afford it.
She welcomed all my friends and accepted them without prejudice, even though they all came from different backgrounds.
While she never became active in organisations, she attended some of our big meetings in the Rocklands Civic Centre, including the launch of the United Democratic Front in August 1983 and a rally we organised in support of Dr Allan Boesak a year or two later.
Her support for me extended to the rest of my family. She took an avid interest in the health and wellbeing of my daughters and always encouraged them in their careers.
But this was the way she was. Her family – in a very undefined and unrestricted way – was the most important thing to her. Her sons were her life and, by extension, their children became her life. She took in some of her grandchildren at our old family home in Rocklands when she felt that their parents were not able to provide for them properly.
I remember how devastated she was when, more than 25 years ago, her second oldest son was killed in a gangland shooting in Tafelsig, Mitchells Plain. He had just turned 20.
I leaned on her a lot in recent years as I tried to construct some semblance of my family’s history. She was our unofficial family historian and would always be able to point me in the right direction whenever I needed to know anything, whether it was from my father or mother’s side. A large part of our history has died with her.
On Saturday afternoon, we said goodbye to her at the family house in Rocklands and, despite the COVID restrictions, we managed to do it in a dignified manner.
While some women were washing her body inside the house, the rest of us waited patiently outside. Later, her body was brought out and people were allowed to walk around it to say goodbye. We were allowed to do this because hers was not considered a COVID death.
We made the Janazah prayer in the street outside the house, which was appropriate and the way my sister would have wanted it. The whole street was able to participate or, at the very least, observe.
Just after 6pm on Saturday, we laid her to rest at the Muslim cemetery in Constantia which, ironically, is in a space from where coloured people had been forcibly removed in the 1960s and 1970s.
During my last video call with her, she told me that she was worried about me and that I should reach out to my mother, who had passed away more than 30 years ago. She said my mother had been there for her throughout her period in hospital and had helped her to survive COVID.
“Mommy might not be here anymore, but she will always be here for us. You must speak to her and ask her for help,” she said.
Somehow, I suspect that Rania will also always be there, looking out for all of us in her extended family and community. May she rest in peace. I will miss her.
(Written for this website on Monday, 22 February 2021)
Rania at the Cape Town Festival at the Castle of Good Hope in 2017.
Rania’s most recent WhatsApp profile picture.
