Memory, Legacy, and a Promise Kept

The moment is etched into the canvas of my consciousness. I stood at a bus stop on the road to Berlin, the anonymous hum of traffic in my ears, the chill of a European evening settling in. Half a world away, my family was gathered around a bed in South Africa. My sister Mariette, our courier of love and duty, carried my voice on a fragile line of connection into that sacred room. I made a promise into the ether, a vow against the dying of the light: I will write your story. I will put it into a book.

The line went quiet. Then Mariette returned with the four words that became both commission and benediction: Mamma says Thank You.

That moment has never left me. It is the seed from which this work has grown, a quiet inheritance of responsibility. My mother, Jacoba Johanna du Toit, lived a life that refuses the easy summary. She was a teacher, yes, but more than that, she was a sower of seeds in soil others deemed barren. She was a woman of deep and abiding faith. But it was a faith stripped of all pietism. A practical, muscular belief that anchored a family across generations and geographies. Her life bore the scars of hardship, the rind of years that had asked too much. And yet, it shone with a quiet strength, a sovereign dignity that steadied everyone in her orbit. There was nothing small about it. There was nothing ordinary.

To tell her story is to keep that faith alive, to render it in ink and memory. For what is legacy, if not this? It is not measured in the monuments we build or the wealth we accrue, but in the values we embody, in the burdens we choose to carry for one another, in the love that remains when all else has fallen away. The Apostle Paul speaks of finishing the race, of keeping the faith (2 Timothy 4:7). My mother’s legacy is one of such steadfastness, of a gratitude that persisted not in the absence of storms, but as an anchor within them.

This book is my thank you, a promise fulfilled. But it is also, I hope, an invitation. An invitation to each of us to reflect on the legacies that shape our own lives — the ones we inherit, and the ones we will, in our turn, leave behind. To write her story is not simply an act of remembrance. It is the work of carrying forward the light she tended, so that others, too, might find their way when the path grows dark.