Elly left me laughing

Luky;
ELLY, my sister, died last year at the age of 75 on St Martha's feast day, July 29th. With her, an extra dimension vanished from my life. She was a typical Amsterdamse. Feisty with an uncompromising tongue, a horror of betraying her true feelings and a heart of pure gold. A competent amateur actress, she believed in leaving her audience laughing. She usually did.


We grew up in the house in Amsterdam, Holland, where my father had a bakery. Elly and I slept in the attic. At night we'd pull down our double bed which in the daytime stood stacked up in a frame against the wall. My mom had been forced to mix and match the material for bed linen because it was war time and the people had to make do. Elly and I would kneel down and she taught me my prayers.


Elly was a competent worker and I was hopelessly lazy. On Saturday afternoons our mom sent us to clean the carpet and brass rods on the staircase. I hated the job, as I disliked all housekeeping duties. Resignedly, Elly would say: "I'll do the work if you provide de vrolijke noot [the note of merriment]."
I'd wear myself out imitating accents and recalling anecdotes to entertain her. The more she laughed, the faster she worked.


At Elly's First Communion, when she was seven and I three, I sat between my parents at Mass. The priest was saying: "Now children, promise Jesus that you will never again be cheeky to your parents or nasty to your siblings."
I dragged my mom and dad down by their arms and said so loudly that everyone heard;
"Oh boy, aren't we going to have a nice time from now on!"
When Elly was 16, our family left Holland and shortly after our arrival in South Africa we moved to Springs.


As we lived far apart, we seldom met. On the infrequent occasions we did get together, her five and my six children marvelled at similarities they spotted between us. "Big deal," she snorted, "Now if you said I looked like Sophia Loren, you'd have my ear!"
She remained the Martha while I tried to become the Mary.
Once when I was collecting signatures for the people to recite the rosary daily, I invited her.
"Tell you what," she answered. "You pray, I'll work."
I recalled those words when she died on St Martha's feast day.


In 2010 our only brother, Jos, died from cancer. Around the first anniversary of his demise last year, she telephoned me grievingly four times within two weeks. After the last time, I stood bemused, looking at the receiver.
"It sounded as if she was saying goodbye to me forever," I thought.
"But why? It must be my imagination."
Less than a week later she landed in intensive care with gangrene in her foot brought on by diabetes.
I tried but failed to get a ride to Springs, bowing to the inevitable. I contented myself by praying for her recovery and phoning for bulletins daily. These were tempered by my nieces so I was unaware of the gravity of her situation.


An hour or two after midnight in the early hours of St Martha's feast day, our younger sister telephoned me in a flood of tears to tell me that Elly had died suddenly on the operating table an hour earlier, minutes before her leg was to be amputated from the knee down.
Present during the gospel reading that morning, I heard the words of St Martha;
"Lord, if you had been here my brother would not have died" and received consolation from Our Lord's reply. May God in his mercy keep Elly with Him and allow her to help St Martha polish the brass rods of the heavenly staircase. Perhaps some day I may provide de vrolijke noot.


One of my daughters phoned one of hers. Her cousin told her,
"When hours before her death we kids begged her to sign the consent form for the amputation, she grumbled:
'Easy for you to say! You won't be Hopalong Cassidy!"


The funeral was the way Elly would have liked to have it; sad perhaps but tempered by fun also.
I experienced great consolation from the words of the Deacon, who spoke about the meeting between Mary:
"She did not know Jesus until he just said, 'Mary!' When Elly died and entered the presence of Jesus, all He said was: "Elly!"
After the funeral, a friend told me that during visiting hours in hospital Elly had mentioned that when she was young she often bought shoes at sales. On one occasion when she came home she found that the shoe box contained only one shoe which she had then thrown away.
"I should have held onto it," she lamented. "It would come in very useful now."
As I burst out laughing when I heard this story, I realised Elly had done it again. She'd left me laughing.
But behind all her clowning it was Elly who, with my parents, first taught me to pray.


*Photograph is of Elly (right) and Luky on Elly's First Communion Day