Gauteng's first COVID-19 Death

The hospital was completely empty. I was the only person in the eerily deserted waiting room. Pharmacy closed. Coffee shop closed. I sat there calculating how much time I have spent in a hospitals, and the figure came to about six months of my life. An asthmatic child, a mom who I cared for, once in a coma for three weeks, an ex in and out of ICU,  my own chest problems. Taking kids to the ER with all the stuff moms do, anaphylactic attacks from bee stings, broken legs. I was once in hospital for a spider bite for three weeks. Hospitals are by default a busy place. Not on this day. I spent a night in this very hospital with bronchitis a few months ago, I know how busy this hospital usually is. Yet, there I was alone for three hours waiting for someone to come tell me the fate of my dad’s condition. It was like an apocalyptic movie when everyone on earth disappears. Like the rapture happened without me and nurses. The parking lot,  completely empty. I just left my car at the ER entrance where they had erected a COVID-19 tent for tests. The only car in the parking lot. They say some hours take longer than others. These three hours felt like a lifetime.

My dad was a man of boundless energy. He always told me he was going to live till 100 and I thought that was completely plausible. He was a health fanatic. He was the first person to bring Barley Green into the country, and for those who do not know, this means he was the first person in SA to speak about miraculous benefits of green juices. He would fight a cold with ginger, garlic, and big doses of vitamin C and was very outspoken about the healing power of prayer, thoughts, good food, sunshine and exercise. Every morning you could hear him a mile away whistling and singing. His brain produced a new song every day, which he whistled with gusto. He made my mom and I crazy. In the mornings making coffee he would sing and dance and make a bloody racket. I wish I had a rand for every time my mom rolled her big blue eyes at him. He also believed in the healing powers of water, and would splash around in the bath blessing his water. Yes he was crazy, but we have all seen the documentary on how words and music alters water molecules. He blessed his bathwater. Cue- mom rolling eyes.

My dad could spend hours telling us, my kids, myself and my mom and whoever gave him an ear, about the wiring of the brain and how the spoken word sends messages to the body and how the word creates life. That man was a powerhouse of positivity. That is one thing every single person who ever came in contact with him will attest to. If you met him, you would remember him. He spoke a lot, and to everyone. All the time. We had a family tradition of Friday afternoon movies. A movie, and a hamburger afterwards. From as long as I can remember. He spoke right through movies to my great chagrin. If an ad came on for a bank or financial institution, he would say at the top of his voice “Ag julle praat twak man“ [You are lying]… I would shake my head, and my mom would roll her eyes. He would also be very inappropriate at times. Once visiting a “verkrampte” staunch pastor, he walked into their lounge and the auntie had doilies on her couches like people did in the fifties. He told the lady, “oh dear you forgot to put your panties away”. He did that all the time. Say all the wrong things but it was so funny that he got away with it - always. When I spoke to the sister in charge of what my dad’s last minute was like, she said he passed away in mid sentence. Talking till the end. That was him. 

My dad sat in his office in the afternoons, and spoke to God. The one day he told us he saw a vision of New York falling into the sea. My mom and I just gave each other ‘that look’. Not even a month later,  9/11 happened. Then he saw a vision of Clinton crying on TV. I mean the President of the USA crying on international TV. What are the chances? Few weeks later, Monica Lewinsky happened.

My dad also had a vision for South Africa. An united peaceful nation. I was in high school when he started doing marketing for the National Party. I asked him what on earth he was doing, it is crazy. But he told me he had a plan, and he is calling it the New South Africa. And that he is going to stand in parliament and tell the government to change their laws. He called me from the Cape the morning he did that, and said Mouzi, I don’t know if they will jail me or not, but do not worry it is the right thing to do. FW de Klerk posted a tribute to my dad in the Rapport on hearing of his passing. As did his friend Herman Mashaba on Twitter.  I received countless messages. Messages of stories of the impact he had on lives.

We have experienced it all on social media since my dad passed. The thing that really agitated me most was that there were so many comments that my dad was ‘elderly.’  Insinuating what? I wonder… That lives do not matter if a person is 79? He had a lot to offer the world. He had more energy than my millennial friends. Only old people die of COVID-19, I had to hear over and over. When did society become so callous? Older people are discarded in our society, and we as a society must look long and hard at our ageism. We have forgotten the wisdom that can be shared. My grandmother was born in 1900. She lived through two world wars, saw her young nineteen year old son to go fight Hitler in a plane. Survived British concentration camps and the Great Depression. I regret not being able to talk to her about life, I was too young, but I remember her laughing every day. There is a lesson in that, I see now. Now I am regretting not having my dad here in these times, he would have many opinions about what we are going through right now. Go talk to your family members, chat to them, hear their stories. 

The one thing I can say is that I spent more time with my parents than most. I have lived on and off on the same property with them my whole life. Most of the family is still here on the same property as I write this. My dad and his advertising buddies were in their twenties when they decided to buy an empty stand far out of town, on a little crinkly road called DF Malan Drive. There was nothing on the property but rocks and aloes. The friends clubbed in to build a tennis court for Saturdays, and they held their own tournaments and then drank Campari afterwards, then drove back to Linden and Northcliff. One day my dad told my mom, the classiest and most intellectual woman in the world in my eyes, that he has decided he wants to live on the farm permanently. I see her rolling her eyes, but they bought a caravan and lived without electricity with my brother and myself as toddlers, while my dad built a Moroccan style house on the weekends, complete with a dome, which is still solid as a rock fifty years later. They were intrepid. Fearless.

When the series Mad Men came out, my mom refused to watch it with me. She said she could not stomach any more advertising stories, thank you very much. Every episode of that series brought back memories so strong that I could smell each scene; I could smell the offices, the meetings. Stale smoke and I even remember the type writers’ clicking sounds. I grew up spending every day of my childhood in the ad agency they ran. I sat in the darkroom chatting to the lady developing prints; I sat in meetings and pitches and did my homework at TV shoots and radio recordings. When the newspapers published stories after my dad’s passing it was titled “Marketing Guru succumbs to COVID-19”. He was that. He had an opportunity as an underdog agency to pitch for a new Simba product they were launching. It was orange and was a weird shape and had no name, no identity. My dad scheduled a meeting on a Saturday morning at 9am with his small staff, for a brainstorm as to what to do with this product. By 8:45am in the morning he still had no idea what to do. He saw the cars starting to arrive and asked God for an idea. The NikNaks man was born in his mind by 9am exactly. They dressed up the client service director in a make-shift outfit and make up, some big glasses, and presented to Simba that week. That is how many of his ideas were born. There is no doubt about my dad’s gifted creativity. Years later, the last NikNaks ad my parents shot was the most expensive ad to have been produced at that time in SA. My mom flew Michael Jackson’s choreographer in to SA and a dancer who was in the Beat It video, and it was shot in that power plant in Cape Town near the harbor. It was epic. I wish I could find the ad, but that was before YouTube. When I started my career in advertising as a photographer, I was often ridiculed by my clients for being Louis’ daughter. “Oh you are Louis’ daughter, the man who ‘prays’ for his ideas”. He was respected, but he was also not liked in his industry. His Christianity was a source of great ridicule in the industry which is known for ‘white powder’ Loerie parties, and in those days creative directors would start the day with a whisky. He was very strategic in seeing that his clients’ sales went up but could not have cared less about awards and award parties. He showed his clients results in sales, and that was what he focused on. He built brands. Some of his ad’s jingles people can still remember, Dip-an-Ouma, Dip-an-Ouma… I want to be a Simba Chippie. Is good is good is good is nice. [Chicken Licken]

At this time, my dad made a golden rule for his agency, that 10% of all the agency earnings goes to charities. This was long before anyone heard of CSI [Corporate Social Investment] projects. The one project was financing an old age home in Soweto and a lady called Irene ran it. Irene was my hero. We spoke until the day she passed. A real solid woman of gold, diamonds in her heart, surrounded by goodness. The day she passed, Soweto came to a stand still to celebrate her life. It was in the early 80’s when my dad took me to visit the old age home and meet Irene. Not many white faces around the area in that time.  Then he started a preschool in Soweto, and my dad began his life passion for early development. Later on he would write early development journals for children and trained parents to teach their children how to find their value and purpose in the world. This is how he met a couple called Jerry and Nkele Lechela. If ever there was an angel that walked this earth it was Nkele. She was so pure hearted, I was convinced she was not human.  They lived on our property later, and then Nkele ran a preschool for the area’s kids who could not afford a creche. I often found her walking around Muldersdrift, handing out vegetables to the poor, which she grew in her backyard. I was in awe of her. She was pure light. If you had to put her next to the Dalai Lama her light would have shun stronger. I do not say this frivolously. They had two little boys who ran around the farm. One Easter weekend, Jerry and Nkele left the boys in care of an uncle and went to buy food for the long weekend. Their car lost control, no other cars involved, and they died instantly. My ex and I got worried around 7pm that night when they had not returned, and we went to the police station to hear if they knew of any accidents that had happened that day. The policeman handed me Nkele’s ID book and that moment was one of the darkest moments I have ever lived. I could not believe that God would take angels from this world. After their funeral, my parents took in the two boys, Tebo and Lebo, and raised them like their own. My dad called them his ‘chocolates’. They were sweet like chocolates, he said. They sang songs all day, the ones their mom had taught them. That was circa 1991. It was not legal at the time to adopt, and my dad was often pulled over by cops to hear what he was doing with two ‘black’ kids in the car. My parents were in their late fifties then, without much discussion they took the boys in and that was that. My kids were born in 1994 and 1996 and the four boys grew up together.

One of the saddest moments of this whole ordeal was the Rapport newspaper’s main cover story with my son being held by his partner and my brother standing there, just three people by the grave of a man that should have had a large and warm send-off. I was with my dad, and my son too, in his last few days at home in isolation hence we could not attend the funeral. I took him tea and juice and begged him to go to hospital. He refused. He was a great many things, but he was also stubborn when it came to consulting doctors. He said he knew his own body, and that he just had the ‘flu’. He got on a plane to go to rest at a beach house near George because he told us he is tired and wanted to rest. I could not believe that he would get on a plane amidst warnings related to COVID-19. This was mid March. Italy was starting to have more and more COVID-19 deaths, and I was very apposed with him getting on a plane. Two days after his flight, he came back a week early and ill. I am the only woman in a family of seven males. I am seen as the ‘drama’ queen, and as I started sending more and more text and group messages to all that I thought that ‘Opi’ contracted COVID-19. I could see that they all found me very irritating. I read up all the symptoms. He had every single one of them. I started worrying about my son. I was worried about the gardener. We knew nothing about how deadly the virus was, we did not know how contagious it was. It was so new and foreign to the whole of the world. Then finally, I got my dad to go to the hospital. I told him he just needs to go on a drip to restore his fluids in his body. He finally relented. My dad was an avid reader who subscribed to the New Yorker, Time, Newsweek, and Fortune magazines and watched a lot of news. He was well informed. The last week he spent at home in bed, he stopped taking calls, watching TV and had no idea the world was in a lock down.

He came to the car dressed like a ‘movie star’. He had his blue shades and French fisherman’s cap and scarf around his neck. He got into the back of the car, and asked me why I was wearing a cover on my face. By the time we got to the main road on Beyers Naude Drive which is usually crazy busy with traffic and he saw the roads were totally empty, he went quiet. He stared out the window. We drove in silence for the first time in fifty four years. He was never silent. I took him to the COVID-19 tent and he still argued with the nurse about his temperature, and I just rolled my eyes at him like my mom used to do. They took him into the ER and I sat there waiting for hours in that desolated hospital. Eventually a doctor came out and said I can say goodbye. He had every medical machine connected to him. I stood there in silence with my scarf on my face, the staff scurrying around him. This was their first COVID-19 case. I stood there speechless. Then he said, “ag I am so sorry ok?” It was his last words to me… 

In the four days to follow I called the hospital a few times a day and they had put him in a special isolated room that had no phone access. They took his belongings and sealed it. His clothes were never retrieved. I really wanted that French sailor’s cap. I sent him messages every day to say that I love him dearly. I hope he got them.

On the fourth day, I went to sit under a tree. I spoke to God. Then the message came. He was gone.

The next few days I can only describe as a nightmare. The hospital did not know what to do. The funeral parlor did not know what to do. The police told me not to leave the property, I was to stay in isolation. The media wanted to hear what happened. He was the first case in Gauteng. The third in the country. I thought it was my duty to tell the newspapers what a nightmare the funeral was. To see my son on the cover of a Sunday paper standing at the grave all alone without me being able to hold him was heart wrenching. Not to see my dad in hospital was inhumane. My dad being alone for his last hours on earth haunts my thoughts. 

I have been inundated with messages from all over about the conspiracies and apparent ‘hoax’ of the virus. The damage and effects of lock down. The socialist plots. One person told me the virus did not exist and should have had an autopsy done. We were now a stakeholder in statistics whereby people were losing businesses, income. I lost all my clients. My family has not been able to be together for a meal since lock down started - my brother is farming in Mpumalanga. I finally saw my son one day in a parking lot. We have suffered anxiety, skin rashes, and one member is losing his hair.Insomnia. We suffered like the rest of the world. The governments of this world owe us one thing, which is an explanation of why this virus came from Wuhan, and why they were mixing ‘SARS and HIV and bat blood’. The least they could do is tell us the truth. This suffering did not start from a man eating a bat. They owe us the truth. 

The night my dad passed, I lay in bed and I could feel the blood pumping through my body and the next morning I had flu. It was March, no one knew what to make of this virus. I was required to sit at home for fourteen days in isolation and then go for a COVID-19 test with my partner, gardener and son. The test took three days, they had my surname miss pelt, so it took longer than usual. It’s a lot of time to think about your life and ‘dying’. April was a time of baking and cooking on social media and dancing on TikTok. I was on my way to make a new life for myself in the Midlands in April and we had rented a house on a farm there and we had plans to promote the Midlands as the best-kept travel destination in SA. My April however was spent moving back into the house I grew up in. Sanitizing my dad’s room, burning his bedding, who knew what to do otherwise? No information available. Thinking about my son’s health. Contemplating my demise. The news media is not on one’s side when experiencing these kinds of uncertainties. Thriving on calamity. I kept on thinking about my parents’ love for travel, and what on earth they would have said seeing Time Square without a single person in it. Paris’s streets completely empty. And then, just like that, thousands on the streets engulfed in looting and chaos. Wonder if my dad has a note written down about this in one of his many journals. Too scared to go read…

My dad was a letter writer. He wrote long emails to his friends, deep thoughts of spiritual warfare and the goodness of God. He told me laughing one day that his best friend asked him to please never send one again. He had enough now, he said. We chuckled a lot. ‘Opi’ did not tell jokes. But he turned everything into a humorous scenario. Trying to make light of every situation. Optimistic as always. So, now wanting to write an example of one of his ‘jokes’ I can’t, he had clever and ridiculous comebacks for everything said and that is what we will all miss the most. He had a mind for clever wordplay. He never left a restaurant without innocent ‘flirting’ with the waitress and making her laugh and asking her about her life story. In Cuba once, he started making conversation with a very nice lady, asking her about her life. She told him it would be ‘ten dollars’. He thought that it was very funny, he just wanted to chat to her. Once in Thailand my mom and I gave him the death stare when he befriended a lovely waitress and she was all over him, eventually we had to break the news to him that it was a ‘lady boy’ – he was naive like that. He wanted to hear everyone’s story and laugh with them all. 

I am sure his friends will miss his emails now. He would have had a lot to say about things currently.

He did a lot, was active till the bitter end, his desk littered with business proposals and plans. But what I now spend my time on is looking at is his drawings and paintings. My mom and I wanted him to focus on that. The two of us had seen enough church politics in our lives. My dad gave up advertising, although under duress, to pursue church work. He lost his clients on one weekend when his NYC affiliated agency sold out to a big ad agency in worldwide with an office here in Johannesburg. He had to hand all his clients over to them. He had a large overdraft to carry an American car company to launch their marketing in SA. After decades in the industry he thought, stuff it, he is going to do God’s work. He is not starting over. He is starting afresh. In the end, and this is just my opinion of what I have experienced, the church politics were no different to agency life. He did so much for the community. He changed people’s lives person by person not through organizations but personally one-on-one. But one church organization told him he couldn’t attend meetings in his beloved classic 911 Porsche, so he bought a Ford Fiesta. That church later was engulfed in a big scandal and dissolved. Our family was very upset when he sold his car which meant so much to him. It was not even a flashy 911, I could not drive it, and the gears were too hard. But he loved it. I went through a lot of politics, office politics, and church politics, I was at their side through it all. By the time I left school, I felt that I already had a whole career behind me. 

My mom and I wanted him to paint and illustrate and not one gallery would take his work. He took his portfolio around and was rejected by all. Now we treasure every journal entry and sketch. Is that not life for you? Now when I post pictures on social media people love it. Now only…

Here are some of his many travel journals entries :

My biggest concern is for my sons. To deal with their grief. My dad was controversial and well-loved but there were people who also thought he was a tad ‘crazy’. But one thing that is undisputed, was the fact that he has been a grandfather like no other. Opi was on duty from the moment my sons were born, till the moment we drove him to the hospital, my son waved goodbye. He took an interest in my son's dreams – sat and drew a million tractors and trucks with my one son - took them for holidays, drives, and if he heard them cry at 2am in the morning he would knock on my door and take over. My house was fifty meters from my dad’s room. He would listen at night if I needed help. As a single working mom of a photo studio, which was thriving in those days, I would drop the babies off early on a Saturday morning in bed with my parents and stumble back to bed and get a few hours sleep. My parents received the babies as if they won the Lotto. It was a big time ‘love affair’. My son, on telling me the hospital called to say it was over, told me not to talk to him for the rest of the day. He just wanted to be alone. Then he took to bed. For days. I ate one whole ‘Areo Mint’ slab every night thinking that if I die at least I can die eating chocolates. ‘Cyril’ said no Merlot for me. We sat our fourteen days in isolation. And every night I went to bed wondering “what had just happened?” How can the world change in an instant? How could this happen to my dad? Overnight, life changed. My nights were filled with nightmares and weird dreams. I was under another tree when we were all declared negative. But I am still eating a lot of chocolates.

My dad should have had a well attended funeral with champagne and Campari and people telling stories and laughing about his antics and beautiful quirks. Instead I saw my son standing by a lonely grave, his picture on the Sunday newspaper cover. I wanted to honour my dad’s life, but the country needed to see the reality of dying alone from COVID-19. I was at my mom's side hours before she passed and she asked me to kiss her at least six times, as I walked out she lifted her fingers in an attempt to wave. But I never left her sight. The ICU nurses just let me sit there day after day. Now, I live with the scene in my mind of my dad surrounded by covered faces and body’s suits and I will never know what he was thinking. Surreal became reality. His last words to me was an apology. I wonder if he got to joke with the staff a bit. I am sure he tried, knowing him.

One cannot honour a dad in a mere story. He showed us the world. The one time he took me out of school for a week for a road trip. We drove past Nieu-Bethesda and the Owl lady’s house intrigued him, but it was not open to the public yet. She was yet unknown. He went around town to look for the gardener to open up for us, that was how he could persuade people, I remember her teacup still stood there on the table, like she left it. Then he spent the rest of the day telling me stories of what could have happened to her, a broken love affair perhaps. He took my children on similar trips too. Always telling stories. He told me of the day he was “hijacked”. A BMW flashed his lights at him early one morning while it was still dark, on his way to work, signaling for him to stop, so my dad thought oh well it is what it is. He stopped. The man ran over, and gestured for my dad to turn down his window. Then the young man said, “don’t you remember me?” Many years ago, my dad stopped to put in fuel and a young schoolboy asked my dad for a lift to school. From Honeydew to Jozi CBD. He asked if my dad would mind if he got a lift everyday, and my dad said on one condition : He would have to listen to all my dad’s Christian tapes [It was long ago, before CD’s] and listen to my dad’s advice. The young man said, “ look what i achieved, I am working at a bank, that BMW is mine. I just wanted to thank you for what you meant in my life and show the fruitful results it delivered.” There are a plethora of those stories. Untold. Lived. Impacts he has made. 

He had his moments - on a Monday we knew never to speak to him. It was his only ‘bad mood’ day. Not a Monday person whatsoever… He was tough on his kids sometimes, he had high expectations of all his staff. But a great friend he was indeed, he leaves warm memories in every heart of every person he called a friend. Memories of laughs and insight and strategic thinking and plans…

My short little ‘glimpse’ here, a very short story of an intriguingly complex man, should tell you that there is more to my dad’s story than being the third person in SA to die from COVID-19. The first man in Gauteng.

Louis Wilsenach remembered by his daughter Mia Ziervogel