Authors: John Carlin
Sheila and the children were obliged to move to a smaller home and she to find work for the first time in her life, as a school secretary, disrupting their domestic stability and giving her less time to attend to the child who needed the most care. The quality of the medical attention he received suffered too. She could no longer afford to pay for her son to attend a private prosthetist, sending him instead to a public hospital to have his legs adjusted to fit his growing bones. They had been a comfortably-off white family in a country where to be born white had always been a guarantee of material security. But after her husband left, Sheila Pistorius had to make every penny count.
It was lucky for her, as it would be for her son twenty years later, that the extended Pistorius family had money and were prepared to part with it to help their own flesh and blood. The home they moved into was bought not by Henke, but by his wealthy brother Arnold. Pistorius’s paternal grandmother helped out with money too. They would struggle, but they would not starve. Sheila had so little faith in her husband that, with what turned out to be eerie foresight, she approached Arnold and his wife one day and asked them, please, in the event that she should die, to take care of her children. They assured her they would. When the time came for Pistorius to go to Pretoria Boys High it was Arnold, not Henke, who paid the bills.
She thanked her brother-in-law, but most of all she thanked God. A devout and active Christian, she sang in her church choir, traveled to Jerusalem to visit the holy sites, and taught her children to love and trust the Lord. Life could be hard and cruel at times, as Jesus had found, but God the Father was benevolent, He had a plan. ‘Things happen for a reason,’ she would tell her son. There was a divine method and a deeper truth behind the apparently random suffering one had to endure. God was her rock and she was her son’s, and he absorbed her teachings, attending church services and praying daily as a boy and for the rest of his life. She was the center of his childhood universe, instilling in him the conviction that he might be different from other people but he could do anything, she told him, to which he set his mind and body. It was to her, not to his father, that he would later attribute his fierce drive to succeed.
While he saw his father less the older he became, his mother was the one who taught him not to feel self-pity, not to show weakness when he was teased, as sometimes happened at primary school, about his artificial legs. She also instructed him to brush off the curious remarks of strangers with jokes, saying his feet had been bitten off by
a great white shark, or pointing out the advantages of having artificial legs. You could slam a nail into them, as he sometimes did to shock unsuspecting new acquaintances, and it did not hurt.
Sheila practiced what she preached, refusing to make any distinction between her treatment of her disabled son and her other children. Hence the story he would tell journalists a hundred times when he became famous of how in the morning, when he was preparing to go to school, she would tell him to put on his legs in exactly the same tone of voice as she would order his elder brother to put on his shoes. That he should consider that story to be the most eloquent illustration of an upbringing during which he was encouraged to deny the limits of his condition says much about the centrality of his mother in his life, and how assiduously she sought to make amends for having brought him into the world not fully formed. But limits there were, and during those periods, sometimes lasting for months, when as a small child the cracks and blisters on his stumps were too painful for him to go to school, it was she who nursed his wounds and comforted him, sitting by his side with his head on her chest, stroking his hair.
Sheila’s refusal to let her son’s disability hold him back physically or mentally was the engine behind his remarkable triumphs on the running track. She never imagined that he would become world-famous, but she did know that the funny little wooden legs he wore when he was small would inspire curiosity and sometimes mockery. In her determination that he should never feel awkward or ashamed, that he should always stand proud, she drummed one lesson into him. Never, ever forget, she would tell him, that people regard you the way you regard yourself. He listened well and acted on her words. What she failed to foresee was that by hiding the truth from himself and others he might gain in self-image in the short term, but might lose out by failing to face up to the truth of his disabled body, hampering
his capacity to develop as an emotionally healthy human being. It sometimes meant pushing himself harder than he really wanted to; it meant smiling and looking strong when inside he felt sad or weak. His success in concealing his vulnerabilities from others built up the outer layers of his self-esteem, but he paid a price in terms of the turmoil generated by the impossibility of reconciling the person he wished to be with the one he was. The striving always to be regarded as normal, at peace with his disability, contained an element of self-delusion, causing him anxiety and stress.
But the tension between his two evolving personas was not something a child so in thrall to his mother would have been consciously aware of, and he absorbed her lessons, doing as she did when people asked her how she coped with having a son with no feet – denying that there was a problem, always putting on a brave face.
Sheila Pistorius played the part convincingly. As her son would only fully understand in adulthood, there was a dark side to her own life that she tried hard to hide, the consequence of the anguish she suffered in an unhappy marriage and, later, as a single mother raising three children with barely enough to make ends meet. Among friends and acquaintances she was resolutely good-humored, revealing little of this inner grief. Everybody viewed her in the same light as the headmaster of Pretoria Boys High. Other teachers there who met her were left marveling at how ‘alive, compassionate and genuine’ she was, ‘how bubbly and cheerful’. Her son would describe her in just such terms when the time came for journalists to write profiles of him.
Maybe he really did continue to believe into adulthood that all had been well at home; maybe the habit of denying uncomfortable truths had become second nature to such an extent that he failed to register that his mother often drank herself to sleep. She was an intermittent
and solitary alcohol abuser who found relief from the pain she feared to confront not only in God but in the bottle. Sometimes she drank so much that she would fail to wake up in the night when her two younger children cried out for her. In such circumstances Carl, the eldest of the three, would take charge and play the role of father, hiding their mother’s condition from his siblings.
Pistorius was able to persist in seeing in his mother not the wreckage of a life of misfortune or bad choices but a hardy survivor and a moral guide. The lessons she imparted to him all boiled down to the same thing, which he set out in the introduction – on the very first page, in the very first words – of his autobiography,
Blade Runner
, written five years before he shot Reeva Steenkamp, at a time in his life when his overriding preoccupation was to run as fast as he could. Sheila wrote a note for her son when he was five months old which she intended him to read when he was an adult. The note, as set out in his book, said: ‘The real loser is never the person who crosses the finishing line last. The real loser is the person who sits on the side, the person who does not even try to compete.’
She would remain the voice of his conscience for the rest of his life and it was uncanny that she should have come up with a metaphor so prescient – and unspeakably sad that she should not have lived to see her son run and compete and cross the finishing line in first place, all over the world.
She spent the last fifteen years of her life trying to ensure his life would not be the vale of tears it seemed predestined to be, but she could not spare him the tragedy of her own death.
Eight years after her divorce, eight years of maternal self-sacrifice and constant struggling to make ends meet, Sheila Bekker fell in love with and married an airline pilot. Pistorius had had mixed feelings when the relationship began a year earlier, but he grew to like and
trust his mother’s suitor and felt that if she was happy with him, he should be too. The wedding took place in November 2001. Within a month she fell ill. The doctors found that she had a severely damaged liver, but they got the precise diagnosis wrong. They thought she had hepatitis and prescribed medicine accordingly. She reacted adversely to the drugs, was hospitalized and rapidly declined. Henke’s reaction revealed that he had his faults but that he was not an ogre, that, as some of the female members of his family in particular would say, there was a loveable and decent side to his nature. His relations with his ex-wife had always remained superficially cordial. He had abandoned her and she had been deeply hurt, but for the sake of the children, as she would tell herself, she never let any ill feeling show. Now that Sheila badly needed help, Henke sought to provide it, turning to his old friend Gerry Versfeld for advice. They discussed the possibilities of a liver transplant and Dr Versfeld put him in touch with experts in the field. But it was too late.
When it happened it came as a surprise, for, true to character, she had not told her children how ill she was. Pistorius was in the middle of a history lesson in his second year at Pretoria Boys High, on March 6, 2002, when Bill Schroder came into the classroom and told him to come out immediately and meet his father at the school gates. He and his brother, Carl, jumped into Henke’s Mercedes and he drove off at speed, more distraught than they had ever seen him, to the hospital. They made it to her bedside with ten minutes to spare. Other family and friends were already in attendance. But it was a wake more than a farewell. She died without recognizing them, in a coma, tubes riddling her body, at the age of forty-four.
Pistorius was fifteen and it was as if he had lost a part of himself. Grief-stricken, and for the one and only time in his life questioning his faith in God, he briefly sought relief in marijuana. He was
rudderless and, for all practical purposes, an orphan. The spasm of paternal attentiveness when the emergency had arisen remained just that. Until he started running seriously two years later he saw his father at most once every six months. Going to live with him was not an option; boarding school now became the closest thing to a home. In the holidays he would stay with his mother’s sister, his aunt Diana, or with his uncle Arnold’s family who had adopted his younger sister Aimée as their own. Aimée had moved in with her father in Pretoria after her mother died, but that had lasted barely two months. Unhappy sharing a roof with her father, she conveyed a discreet message to her uncle Arnold and his wife, Lois, through their daughters, that she would like to come and live with them. They agreed and she became a member of their family, a fifth daughter. She was still living with them when Reeva died.
Aimée and Carl cried at their mother’s funeral, but their brother did not. After he returned to school following her burial he told very few of his classmates what had happened. But the next morning he woke up in floods of tears. Losing one’s mother at fifteen is sad enough in any circumstances but for Pistorius she had been his life’s crutch and moral example. She had shaped his personality, his strengths as well as his weaknesses, and even when she was no longer present she would continue to steer the course of his life to a degree that would only become fully apparent much later, after the next great disaster struck.
There was another side to her character, apart from the drinking, that Pistorius preferred to forget but that left a deep imprint on him. Sheila was terrified of crime. She lived in fear of an intruder breaking into her home, often jumping up in bed when she heard a sound in the middle of the night, then rushing to the phone to call the police. She would wake up her children, take them into her bedroom, lock the
door, and wait until the police arrived. Her fears were not unfounded. When Henke left, the family had moved not just to a smaller home but to a rougher neighborhood. There were several break-ins at her home, to which she responded by taking an ominously extreme precaution. Every night she went to bed with a loaded pistol under her pillow.
5
Stone walls do not a prison make
.
RICHARD LOVELACE
,
TO ALTHEA, FROM PRISON
C
AGED INSIDE
the home of his rich uncle Arnold during the year-long wait for his murder trial, the sounds, images and smells of that night tormented Pistorius. He would gladly have given up all the riches and every last ounce of the glory he had earned to turn the clock back and undo what he had done, but it was irrevocable. He had fired those gunshots; he could not unfire them.
There were occasional moments of respite from the horror of memory, when he was able to shut off the screams inside his head and repress the nauseating stench of blood in his nostrils, but the remorse never left him. He had one consolation: knowing that his family understood, forgave and would stand by him, no matter what. His uncle Arnold and his wife Lois, their four daughters and sons-inlaw, other uncles and aunts, Carl, and, most of all, Aimée – they, along with other members of the extended but close Pistorius family, were always ready to sit silently with him, prodding him gently towards the understanding that his old life had gone forever and he had to find the strength to build himself anew.
Before Pistorius, no one could have imagined that a double
amputee would rank among the fastest 400 meter runners in the world. Thanks to the celebrity he had gained, the little-known discipline of Paralympic sport, which he had ruled over from the time he won his first gold medal at the age of seventeen, had come to grip the public imagination. Thanks to him, the world at large had learned to regard disabled athletes – and, by extension, all disabled people – with a new respect, and they in turn had begun to view themselves with a new dignity.