Christa Swart’s story from her husband Martin Swart!

This is Christa’s story.  Some of it.  It has been nearly five years since she passed away and the time has come to put parts of her life down in words.  Something which I could not get myself to do up to now.  Some of it she only told me in the weeks before she died.

Her story starts before she was born with her mother getting pregnant while still at school.  Her father also being very young and just out of school.  So unplanned and not really wanted by both parents.  They got married, but there was that sense of not being wanted by them for many years.

As far as I know their marriage was an unhappy one from the start with both physical and mental abuse towards Christa’s mother from the start.  Which spilled over to Christa and later her sisters.  With some instances where Christa took her younger siblings to hide from their father and hearing how he was assaulting their mother.  And at least one occasion when she was in high school where Christa had gotten hold of her father’s gun and had locked herself and her sisters in her room waiting to shoot him should he try to get to them.

And then the beatings and mental abuse towards the children which Christa took the brunt of because she stepped in to protect her younger sisters.  Abuse which carried on although to a lesser degree towards them after she had more or less left home to study.

Then there was the sexual abuse/molestation which I suspected but Christa only confirmed in the weeks before she died.  Not by her father, but by two male family members.  Her father was aware of it though and did nothing.  It was just swept under the rug.  Her sister who is just a year younger was also molested by the same family members with the same result.  Nothing was done.  Nothing happened to her two much younger sisters as far as I know but by then she was old enough to look after them and later on I was also in the picture.  She was fierce when it came to protecting her sisters.

Christa and I met in her second year of study and were together for 24 years. Soon after, her mother found the courage to leave her husband. Though their relationship remained strained, Christa helped her through the divorce, enduring continued mental and occasional physical abuse from her father. In one instance, he threw a large rock through a window, barely missing her youngest sister. After the divorce, Christa and her mother gradually rebuilt their bond. She later remarried a good man who remained part of our lives and passed away three years after Christa.

The issues with Christa’s dad carried on though.  Not at the same level as when she was growing up, but still there.  Fights and arguments when we went to visit him.  As soon as anything from the past was brought up.  Christa desperately wanted to help her father to be the person he should have been and the father he never was to them.  It never worked.  There was never violence or abuse because of my presence.  Looking back I suspect sociopathy as one of the main reasons he is what he is and the reason why he cannot be helped.  They stay the same but just learn how to hide what they are better.

No abuse till the last time we visited him on a farm he had at that time.  By then our youngest was just over a year old.  I had taken the oldest three to another part of the farm and Christa was at the house with her father and the youngest two.  Half an hour after I had left I got an sms from Christa just saying ‘Please come back’.  When I got to the house I saw her dad going out the back door and out towards some outbuildings – at speed so as to avoid me.  When I got to the door Christa met me and told me we were packing and leaving.  While we packed and drove away her father was nowhere to be seen.  Two hours away from the farm when it was too late to go back she told me what had happened.  In short, he had been so abusive and angry towards her that she would have shot him had she been able to get to her gun.  In the presence of my two youngest daughters who had nightmares about it afterwards.
She then decided to cut him out of her life.  Break all contact and block all avenues to get to her and her children.  A decision which I totally agreed with and supported.  It influenced her relationship with her sisters and mother in a very negative way, but she did not back down and eventually things got better again.  That was about three years before she passed away.  In her last month or so she had some contact with him again, only to tell him that she had forgiven him for everything but did not want him back in her life.   Something which I have kept to.  When our children are old enough and able to make their own decisions they can decide whether they want to see him again.
Christa was ‘allowed’ to go and study by her father, but only law.  There was apparently no money in art which was what she loved.  That was the condition for him to pay.  Which she ended up doing most of anyway by working part-time as a teller at Absa.  She finished her BProc degree that she had started.  By then we had moved in together and my father and I paid for her to do a Electronic Origination course at the printing college in Honeydew as by that time she had become interested in computers also and it was a way in which to combine it with art.

Christa worked her way up to web development manager, handling high-profile clients like Daimler Chrysler. Three months after our first child was born, she resigned to focus on motherhood but continued working from home for three years.

Our son's birth was traumatic due to a doctor's mistake, leaving him in ICU for a week. Determined to do things differently, Christa researched extensively, and our second son was born naturally at home—with the midwife arriving too late, she delivered him herself. With the next three, she saw no need for medical assistance, overcoming resistance from doctors and officials to follow her own path.

Her next battle was with educating her children and raising them.  I was involved in education before we had children and we both saw the direction a lot of it was heading in.  From the start there was lots of concerns and issues raised by our families about what we were doing but she kept on doing what she knew was best for her children.  I have carried on with what she envisioned and wanted, and looking at our children now I can see that it was another battle that that she won.

And then her last battle that she lost.  In 2018 Christa was not feeling very well overall and sometimes had issues breathing.  She was tested for cancer and the tests came back clean.  There were other issues but not related.  In 2019 she started feeling worse with more symptoms and things feeling off but because the cancer tests had come back negative she did not consider that.  Middle 2019 she noticed a lump in her breast and then when she had tests done her count was so high that that had a * next to it.  Almost immediately after that she picked up some kind of bacterial infection which caused further complications.  She fought very hard and we tried everything that we could.  She never gave up and tried her best right to the end.  If it had been a gunfight we would still be digging through the brass to find her.  She was with her children and still trying her best for them right up to her last night when she had to stay in hospital overnight for a procedure.  The hospital phoned me just after one on the 4th of December 2019 to tell me that her condition had deteriorated.  I can only hope that she knew that I was there holding her hand as she died. 

That she was not alone.

She never allowed the things that had happened to her in her life to get her down.  She always managed to overcome and come out stronger on the other side.  Helping everyone around her.  Caring for them.  So even though she lost her final battle, her war was won.