Chapter 4 – Addiction, Death and Grief

My brother asked our mother for help a few months after I was admitted to Kenilworth Clinic. He claimed it was the first time he had tried heroin – on the very same day I was admitted. Now, he was caught in the grip of addiction. We naively believed that one round of rehab would fix everything. That he’d recover, we’d return to normal life, and the chaos would fade. But we were so terribly wrong.

The months and years that followed were marked by a home life of shouting, violence, and escalating aggression. Our days blurred into a constant cycle of overdoses, hospital stays, detoxes, relapses, broken promises, and wild mood swings. I tried to support him as best I could – writing letters of encouragement, visiting him daily in rehabs with our mom, even spending Christmas with him one year at Stepping Stones in Noordhoek. We still fought like siblings, but I had long since grown used to the rollercoaster of his moods. 

I also tried to support my mom. She was completely overwhelmed, clinging to hope while trying to hold a sinking ship together. We attended Nar-Anon meetings, and I would help coordinate the logistics of yet another rehab program. One of the hardest moments was his arrest for credit card fraud in 2001. We visited him in jail and later attended his court case.

Friends would call in the middle of the night: he had overdosed again, and now it was up to us to clean him up and decide whether to take him home or to a doctor. Again and again, he’d enter rehab, come out healthier and hopeful, and then relapse within weeks, or days.

Then the stock market crashed, and Ossi lost everything. He had sold his company, ITIQ, for a fortune and invested all of it. Almost overnight, our financial reality crumbled. We downscaled our lives, gave away Sassy, and moved into a home with a main house, a flatlet, and a studio. Ryan and I shared the flat. My mom, Ossi, and Nick lived in the main house. Margaret, our cleaner and nanny, lived in the studio. She was family now.

One morning before one of my final matric exams, I found a sight that I truly wish I could forget. My brother lying on his bed with a light blue plastic bag tied tight over his head. I ripped off the bag and I hysterically called my mom.  The minutes before the ambulance arrived felt like hours as we desperately tried to wake him up and/or resuscitate him. In the panic I don’t even think we could tell if he was alive or already dead. The paramedics seemed to walk in slow motion as I met them in the driveway and showed them where to go, and I vividly remember them jabbing him with an injection like in Pulp Fiction (but not in the heart!) and then taking him to hospital. I had to still go to school for my exam so I only heard later if he made it.

After that, my mother made the impossible decision: to send Ryan to Noupoort Christian Care Centre. Just months earlier, Carte Blanche had exposed Noupoort for its brutal treatment of addicts. But nothing had worked, and she saw this as a last resort.

Sometimes love becomes so desperate that it looks like cruelty to outsiders. But when you’re drowning in chaos, even the harshest hope feels better than none at all.

Every time the phone rang there was more bad news. Something else had happened. Four moments stand out most vividly from that period:

1 – He was taken to Groote Schuur Hospital and while things were touch and go – the gentleman in the bed next to his died. The wails of the family next to us were unbearable for us to witness as we waited for my brothers fate. He had charcoal all over his mouth that night.

2 – When he tried to kill himself with a plastic bag,

3 – When he wrote off his car driving and I woke up to find him in his bed covered in blood

4 – When he had been locked in his room by our mother as she waited for guards to collect him for Noupoort.   I was told to guard his window so he didn’t jump through the glass. I hadn’t liked the idea of Noupoort and he would alternate between speaking softly and earnestly, looking at me in the eyes while tears streamed down his face, begging me to let him escape so he didn’t have to go there.  While I struggled with my inner voices he would jump back into addict mode, aggressively threatening me and practically spitting with hatred ; hardening my resolve to keep guard.

He left for Noupoort, and a vague sense of peace, and hope, returned to the house.

My best friend Claudia left South Africa on the 29th January 2002… I used to spend almost every weekend at her house in earlier high school years. Her mom had been diagnosed with cancer earlier that year and passed away. Our group of friends would often end up at Claudia’s house after parties, and her mom’s passing was a loss felt by all of us.  She now had to move to Scotland to live with her dad and I felt like my heart had been ripped out of my chest. I still vividly remember the day she left and I was saying goodbye to her at the airport. It was the longest teary goodbye, and she left…. only to be stopped by security because she had a compass on her. She ran back to give it to me and we had one final hug before she walked off again, I leant right to hug the person standing closest to me but in the midst of my tears I hadn’t realised it was actually a vending machine

By early 2003, many of my friends had scattered on gap years abroad. I was still finalizing paperwork for a UK visa. I had dreams of working on a ranch in the States or on a horse farm in the English countryside. London won, mostly because my friends were heading there too.

By then, Ryan was doing well. We visited him at Noupoort, where he had been put in charge of caring for rescue pit bulls. He loved it. When he came home, he was chubby, smiling, reborn. He became a devout Christian, and I sometimes joined him and our mom at church – not because I believed, but because the words were uplifting.

I passed my driver’s test on April 10, 2003, first try. I was elated. Driving felt like flying.

But the joy faded fast.

I came home with giant smiles on my face, only for it to fade the second I saw my mother. Ossi had gone for tests earlier that week as he hadn’t been himself lately. The results were back. He had a very aggressive brain tumour that was inoperable and was given 6 months to live. We were all absolutely devastated.

I cancelled plans to travel and instead started working at a local Toy shop in Hout Bay. Chemotherapy was rough on all of us, but mainly Ossi. I can’t believe that is a treatment for disease. He started to look like a completely different person. He lost all his hair and gained lots of weight. It was heartbreaking to see the effects the treatment and tumour was having on him, and devastating to watch him fading away before our eyes.

I started studying Travel and Tourism Diploma at Varsity College in 2004. To this day I still am not sure how the woman got me to sign up to study tourism when I went there to sign up to do a UNISA Psychology course. But I really enjoyed learning about the world and excelled, for the first time in my life achieving over 95% for all my subjects. It boosted my confidence in myself and anchored a love of travel.

In July 2004, I got mugged on Noordhoek beach with a friend. We had been walking from Chapmans Peak side and were approaching the ship wreck when we decided to turn around and head back. As we turned around we saw two men who had been lying on the beach get up and start walking toward us.

The one man reached behind his back and brought out what looked like a HUGE carving knife. The biggest knife I have ever seen. As they got closer to us, the one man went for my friend while the man holding the knife came for me, I sprayed him in the face with my pepper spray but he didn’t stop and kept trying to stab me as I backed deeper and deeper into the sea. Then he grabbed my hand and dragged me forward onto the beach until I fell to my knees. I was crying and begging for my life, not daring to look up at him, and fortunately he just picked up my bag and ran.  I had nightmares for months after. Every time I closed my eyes I would see them coming toward us, and then me begging for my life. I would wake up filled with terror. I felt so ashamed at how I had reacted. I always thought I would be kickass and just knee someone in the balls if they dared try attack me. I was not as strong as I thought I was. When would I stop feeling scared? I struggled to go anywhere by myself for months, parking at college near Rondebosch Library was a huge challenge for me as it meant a walk under the railway line. I would sit in my car for ages, waiting for someone who looked ‘trustworthy’ to walk with.

Life was hard. Ryan and I were fighting constantly. We had moved again, this time to a smaller house where I lived downstairs and he lived upstairs. He was still depressed and unpredictable.

It was so so difficult to see the man Ossi had become, we had needed to hide his car keys and sell his car. It devastated me that we had to treat him like a child. But he would go out and get lost and not know where he was or how to get home. Sometimes he would forget how to use his phone. It was for his own safety and the safety of others.. but he could not understand and was often very frustrated with us. While he had made it past 6 months, the brain tumour had not shrunk much with treatment and was taking its toll on his personality and ability to be cognisant and function independently.

My mom had asked me to drop out of college due to money worries and so I could help more with Ossi and Nicholas. I compared my own situation to my friends who were all living it up overseas in various countries, living these epic life experiences. Life wasn’t fair.

I then started noticing something deeply disturbing in my romantic relationships. Once things became physically intimate, I was overwhelmed by anxiety. My brother’s face would flash in my mind. I didn’t understand why. Waves of childhood memories started trickling back. They weren’t full pictures, just flashes. Feelings. Glimpses of terror.

One day, I confronted my mother. I told her that Ryan had sexually abused me when we were children. She dismissed it, saying I was being silly and that “all kids fiddle.” Her words gutted me.

Minimizing someone’s trauma doesn’t erase it – it just adds a new layer of pain on top of the old one.

In September, I drunkenly kissed a close guy friend I had known for years. Things turned serious quickly. At first, our intimacy was fine – but soon, sex became agony. My mom took me to see Dr Eve (Dr Marlene Wasserman). I saw her for one to two years. That therapy helped me begin healing at least from the pain and intrusive visions.

Fighting between my brother and I had escalated terribly after my sexual issues had cropped up. I confronted him about our childhood years and we had a massive physical fight. His mood swings were still out of control and I gave my mother an ultimatum to kick him out. I refused to live in the same home as him any more but she refused to tell Ryan to leave.

Diary – 25 January 2005:
“Ossi moved out today. Just left. Carina came to take him away. I’ve tried calling. No answer. That man is not Ossi. Everyone’s fighting. My mom is drinking too much. She’s dating a guy twenty years younger who acts like trash. They’ve even tried cocaine together. Cocaine – after everything we’ve been through with Ryan???”

We moved again, this time to Candlewood Close. It was a beautiful home. I lived in a small flat under the garage; the rest of the family, including Brendan (my mom’s boyfriend), lived in the main house. Ryan’s aggression escalated. It began affecting Nicholas, who started showing signs of depression and self-harm. Finally, my mother asked Ryan to leave. He moved in with our father, started working at Spur’s head office, and seemed… better. He was still clean at least.

Ossi slipped into a coma on June 12, 2006. Carina called. We rushed to his flat. He was coughing, pale, barely breathing. He died while we were there. I wasn’t ready. Three years of knowing this was coming, and still… I wasn’t ready.

We went to his funeral at the Jewish Cemetary in Pinelands. I had attended my grandparents funerals before and they were nothing like this. There were no flowers. I considered him my father but in the eyes of the Synagogue I was not part of his immediate family that sat on the stage. I sat with everyone else, along with Ryan. Whenever it felt like it was ‘us against the world’, we always stuck together. It’s what siblings do.

Just under two weeks later, on the morning of the 25th June, my phone started ringing between 5-6am. With a groggy mind and sleep eyes, I picked up. It was Brendan. He said “Your brother is dead, come to the main house”. I was in my downstairs flat and walked upstairs. The idiot has gone and relapsed again I thought. My dad has no experience with this. I got to my moms bedroom and my mom looks at me and wails “He’s dead!!! He’s dead!!!” She was still on the phone to my dad. I’m trying to get more information but I can’t because my mom is crying too much. She says the ambulance isn’t there yet. Well, If the ambulance wasn’t there yet then how do they know?!  On the way to my father’s house she tells me that my dad found him in the car when he woke up. Ryan had gassed himself and he was dead. The ambulance & police had to come because it was suicide and someone needed to declare his death. I was still in complete denial and stubbornly believed he had just relapsed or overdosed and needed to go to hospital. We’ve been here hundreds of times, it’s just been 2 years so she has forgotten.

When we got there he was still lying in the car. I looked at him and in that split second, I knew. It didn’t seem real. I wanted him to wake up, it looked like he would wake up any second. But he wouldn’t. My eyes could see, my mind knew the truth, but my heart refused to accept it. He was there but he was not there. He wasn’t going to wake up ever again.  I hugged him as tight as I could. This cold, lifeless body. I wished he would just open his eyes to look at me one last time. I wished he would smile at me one last time. All I wanted was to see that cheeky smile one last time. See those blue blue eyes. It was Ryan but it didn’t seem like it was Ryan, his soul was gone. How could this be? How could my brother be gone? He’s my brother! I wanted to scream. He’s my brother, he cant be dead!!

My mom asked me to take his necklace off his neck. It was his favourite necklace that he had worn for years. A white coral necklace from Mauritius that he had bought years before. When life was good.

How could she ask me to do something like that? I will never forget trying to lift and turn his heavy head so I could take his necklace off. He was lying at an awkward angle and if he had been alive, the necklace would have hurt him as it scratched against his skin. That memory is etched into my brain forever.  I had to get away. I couldn’t breathe. I wasn’t even crying. I was just in shock. I went to sit on the curb outside my dad’s house but I didn’t know what to do with myself. My brother was dead. I wanted to speak to Claudie. I wanted my best friend. But she was in Scotland. I phoned Nikki who had dated him for a short while in high school. She knew him the best after Claudia. But even her words of comfort didn’t help. I don’t know why I expected them to. 

We stayed at my dad’s house for a short while and then we needed to go to the morgue to identify his body. I wish I hadn’t gone. I wish I hadn’t seen him lying there on that cold, hard table. I wanted to scream give him a pillow! Cover him with a blanket! But he wouldn’t have been cold or uncomfortable… He was dead. I didn’t have my older brother anymore.  I remember my mom falling as they opened the curtain and my dad catching her. But I was strong. I was numb. It felt like I was in auto pilot. This is a familiar feeling for me. My emotions shut down and my mind takes over in order to do what needs to be done next. We chose songs, pictures and poems, and planned a beautiful funeral for him at Pinelands Presbyterian Church. More people came than I expected. I didn’t even know he had touched the lives of so many.

It was around this time I developed a fear of my phone. I hate it when my phone rings, it’s like instant panic attack. For the last few years all it has brought me is more bad news. To this day I would rather get a message and will use my phone only as a last resort.

I dropped out of my interior design course at Boston House College. Grief consumed me. Not just for Ryan, but for Ossi, for my entire family. I couldn’t forgive myself for how distant I’d been in their final months. I had looked away from suffering because I couldn’t face it.

We think we have time. We think people will always be there tomorrow. But sometimes, the last moment already passed, and we missed it.

Ryan left a note. He said he hated being on drugs. But he hated being off drugs too. He had lived in daily torment and wanted out.

He was my brother. I was angry. I was heartbroken. I wished he had been able to come and talk to me about how he was feeling. I know how it feels when death feels like your only option. The best option. I am grateful that we had put aside our differences at Ossi’s funeral, we were always brother and sister when it mattered most. My last memory of him was him smiling as he got into my father’s BMW that he had borrowed for the day of Ossi’s funeral.

After a few months of mourning, I took a job at company called Buy Champagne, managing their personalised wine labels. It was the beginning of my career.

In October, we went on a pre-booked family holiday to Thailand. My boyfriend came too. I cried one night in the hotel, caught between needing space to grieve and the pressure of intimacy.

Even years later, I sometimes flinched at touch. I still fought the belief that my body exists for someone else’s pleasure. I’m still learning how to say no without shame or fear.

In early 2007, my boyfriend brought home a DVD: The Secret. It mesmerized me. I made a dream board and wished for a horse.

That marked the beginning of something life-changing. I started exploring the power of the mind. I read Chariots of the Gods by Erich von Däniken and Mind Power into the 21st Century by John Kehoe. I no longer believed in a God – at least not the kind I was taught – but these books awakened something in me.

Reflections

Maybe healing doesn’t come from answers. Maybe it comes from questions. From reading. Learning. Growing.

Maybe healing doesn’t begin with fixing anything. Maybe it begins with feeling, really feeling, what we’ve tried so hard to bury. The grief. The rage. The fear. The longing.

We can’t outrun our pain. We can’t numb it away. It waits. It whispers. It grows louder the longer it’s ignored.

You don’t let pain go by pushing it away. You let it go by letting it in.
By accepting that it was real. That it mattered. That you matter.
Only then, when it’s been seen, felt, accepted, can it begin to loosen its grip.