Of course, I had missed the most remarkable part of her life. But over the next few years, she told me snippets, and eventually I was able to piece together her life story.

 

She was born in Namibia in 1907 to Afrikaans parents. Like so many of those colonialists, she never lost her love of West Africa - some of her great-grandchildren still live there. At 19 she met the love of her life, and they got engaged. But before they could get married, her fiancé died of Black Water fever. Heart-broken, she headed for South Africa and enrolled as a nurse at Groote Schuur Hospital. The following year, 1927, a typhoid epidemic hit South Africa, and she was assigned to nurse typhoid patients. One child in particular was so sick that she had to carry him to the toilet and back. As a result, she contracted typhoid herself. She didn’t respond to treatment – she thought because she really had no desire to live after the death of her fiancé. She got worse and worse and, one night, clinically died. She tells of her experience at that moment: how she left her body, and came to a place of beautiful light, green fields, and lovely gardens. Then she saw her fiancé beckoning to her, but she couldn’t get to him because of a kind of glass wall. Then she clearly heard a voice saying, “Not now, Tina, you must go back. I have work for you to do.” So she turned back, and saw herself re-entering her body. And her heart started beating again. A month later she was even worse, because she had also contracted pneumonia. Once again, she clinically died, and had the same experience again - beautiful light, green fields,  lovely gardens, glass wall, and voice calling her back.

 

Now, when I read of these stories told in glossy magazines, I’m sceptical. But this was an eminently sane woman, and a disciple of Jesus all her life. So it really makes you think.

 

When she finally started to recover, she was so weak that she couldn’t even hold her head up to eat, and had to be taught how to walk all over again. Who would have thought she would live into her 90s?

 

She finished her training and went back to Namibia where she met and fell in love with another man, and married him.

 

She proved to be a natural nurse, and a remarkable care-giver. When she was eight months pregnant with her first child, and alone on the farm, word came that a local woman was having trouble in child-birth. So Tina got her house-maid to help her onto a horse, and set out to help. On the way she had to go through five farm gates, but knew, at eight months pregnant, she dared not get off the horse because she would never get back on. So she manoeuvred the horse next to each gate until she could unlatch it with your foot and carry on. When she arrived, she discovered a woman with the breech-baby. She managed to solve the problem, and the mother and child were saved. A month later, her own daughter was born.

 

She and her husband eventually had three children.

 

One day, when the girls were off the farm at boarding school, she and her husband were working in the vegetable garden with their six-year-old son, when her husband suddenly keeled over with a heart attack. That son, now 50, can still remember running four miles to the neighbouring farm to get help while his mother administered CPR. But by the time the doctor finally arrived, it was too late.

 

And so the second love of her life died as well.

 

For a while she struggled along on her own. Then one day, her sister, Betsie, who lived in Durban,  phoned her and said, “Look, this isn’t working. Why don’t you move in with Andries and me? You can  go out to work, and I can look after your children and as well as ours.” And so it was. Betsie brought up six children, and Tina went to work in Durban. She worked non-stop until she was 70, and then finally retired.

 

And that’s where I met her – still living with them 50 years later. Then, aged 95, she started to fail. I was called into pray with her. Her mind had been wandering far and wide, and they didn’t expect her to know me. But, amazingly, she rallied. The old twinkle was in the eye, and the sense of humour were back. She even managed to tease me a little. Then I read Psalm 121 – “I lift up my eyes unto the hills…” She seemed to have drifted off again, and I didn’t know if she was hearing me. But when I read “Where does my help come from?” a gnarled finger came out from under the sheets and pointed towards the ceiling, and a smile crept over the ancient face.

 

She died last Wednesday. She never reached 100, and I never did get to marry her off. But at the memorial service, I wondered if I was actually conducting funeral or a wedding.