My mother could have run an empire. She was bright, savvy, hard-working and so persistent she redefined that word. Once, my sister unknowingly left crucial immigration documents at home and took off for the UK to take up a scholarship at Cambridge University. My mother rallied her resources and had the documents delivered to Heathrow Airport before my sister's plane landed.
My mother had discovered the documents when she returned home after farewelling my sister at Johannesburg's airport. Mobile phones hadn't been invented yet, so my sister was oblivious to the fact that she'd be entering the UK illegally. Noting the urgency, my mother hunted down the telephone number of an old neighbour, a pilot, whom she hadn't seen in years; he put her in touch with a colleague who just happened to be piloting another flight to the UK that night. She rushed back to the airport and thrust the documents into his hands just as he was about to board his flight.
The pilot's British Airways plane was permitted to fly over West Africa, thereby overtaking my sister's South African Airways flight which, due to apartheid-era embargoes, had to take a longer route. Imagine my sister's shock when she was awoken by a flight attendant somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean to be told that a stranger had sent this message to her from airspace: your immigration documents will be waiting for you at the BA counter at Heathrow.
This is just one of many examples of my mother's refusal to take no for an answer, her belief that anything is possible, if only you make the effort. But, poignantly, her efforts were aimed almost entirely at helping others (family, colleagues) achieve their own success. She didn't seem to benefit herself — in the professional sense, at least — from such unshakeable optimism.
Even when she was diagnosed with terminal cancer, she didn't fight as she had — endlessly — for her five children; instead, she accepted her oncologist's advice that treatment was hopeless, that she ought to go home and make peace with her family and her god (she had retorted, in her gently feisty way, that there was no need, since she was already at peace with them all).
My mother didn't have much of a post-school education; the only child of a single mother, she matriculated, did a bookkeeping course and went to work. She wasn't financially disadvantaged: she'd grown up