Love And Loss Times

Published 9 years ago
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At 50, Monica Zwolsman has a jovial irreverence about her. There is a reason behind that, the single mother of two has endured one tragedy after another.

In the course of a decade, she lost two husbands and an infant son. She moved cities numerously during this time and eventually settled in the Gold Coast, Australia, where she survived a divorce from “husband number three”, father of her two young boys.

Today, Zwolsman makes peace with her tragedies in a new book, Love. Loss. Life (published by Jacana).

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“I’ve spent so much of my life trying to forget and I had to forget in order to survive…I had to be emotionally stable enough,” she says.

In April 1994, a week before South Africa’s historic elections, her award-winning photographer husband, Ken Oosterbroek, was shot and killed while out on assignment. He was a victim of the bloody political violence sweeping the country.

“Everyone knew he was dead except me…when I got there, people had just ran away and I ran into the hospital and I just saw his feet sticking out, he was [on a gurney] covered, with his feet sticking out and that’s when I realized [he was dead]…I was so stunned they probably had to steer me home.”

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At the time, Zwolsman was a crime reporter with The Star, a popular Johannesburg daily, she knew the dangers of the time. But his death was a deafening blow.

“I just floated along in a cloud, babbling on mindlessly…eventually I took a lot of sleeping pills and I hid in the cupboard. Occasionally people would try to check up on me and I just hated that. I put my bed in the cupboard…I would take strong sleeping tablets and I just slept in the cupboard.”

Looking for a way forward, she left for London.

“I just left and I said to the estate agent, “pack up everything and take it to the dump”. I packed a suitcase of stuff; memorabilia, mainly photos, a shirt of his…and just left. I was so odd, I hid in London as well. I had a little apartment and I had a job. I would just wander around the streets, I would walk all the time because I never slept…because if I [didn’t] go sleep, I wouldn’t have to wake up and realize ‘Oh god, Ken’s dead’!”

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But that difficult time eventually came to an end. Returning to South Africa in 1995 for the inquest into Oosterbroek’s death, she met a “friend-of-a-friend”, photographer Steven Hilton-Barber, in her words meeting him, on the anniversary of Ken’s death, was electric.

“…we spent the night together partying wildly. By morning, I was the Merry Widow personified. I’d totally lost the sympathy vote and nobody remained my friend. I returned to London but a few weeks later, Steven arrived in London and we got married soon after.”

Husband number two was a “wild, woolly man” and they traveled the world together seeking adventure. In 2002, they had a beautiful baby boy, Benjamin. However, their happiness was short-lived. That year, Hilton-Barber suffered a fatal heart attack. He was just 39 and Benjamin was five months old.

A few months after Hilton-Barber’s death, Benjamin had a minor operation, but wires crossed with medication, the baby went into a coma and never woke up. In the space of a year, she had lost both husband and son.

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“So, there I was, now 40 years old, a widow with a dead son.  I could not imagine the agony of having to continue living…I begged people to put me out of my misery, like a dog.”

Once again, Zwolsman left town, to Australia, where she now lives. Fourteen months later, she had met and married “husband number three”, had a son and was pregnant with the next. She began a new life in earnest.

But that, too, was short-lived. She and her husband separated a few years later and she was at her lowest. Her memoir opens at that point, she is depressed, devastated and considering suicide, wondering if her children would ever forgive her.

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Fast-forward to the present, she is coping well. She is a proud mother of two and an English teacher.

Putting pen to paper, she says, is a ‘full stop’; the declaration of an end to a series of unfortunate events. And despite the sorrow she shares in her story, Zwolsman manages to let some humor seep in.

“Putting all my surnames [on the book] was supposed to be funny but now everyone goes Monica Nicholson Oosterbroek Hilton-Barber Zwolsman…it was supposed to be a joke but I think it backfired.”