Madiba, the millionaire and the music man: Memories of Michelle

I never met Mandela, but Michelle did, twice. I asked her what she thought of him the first time because I placed huge value upon her judgement, and knew she’d soon be gone. A few months later she was dead, but she’d told us she liked the old man because he treated her like a normal person, and that was good enough for us.

The first time our daughter met Mandela was in early 2002, when Reach for a Dream took a group of kids to meet him. Although she was just 14 years old, she had already survived two years of cancer, undergone a leg amputation and two lung ops, and endured many rounds of brutal chemotherapy and radiotherapy, so she was far beyond childhood. She’d also met more than her fair share of “celebrities” who stood next to sick kids for photo opportunities when they had to and then drifted off to greener pastures. Our little girl didn’t suffer fools gladly, because she knew she didn’t have much time, so she cut them off pretty quickly once she decided they weren’t worth the trouble. That’s why we found her judgement so important.

Mandela chatted to the kids and asked Michelle what she wanted to be when she grew up. By that time the cancer had spread to both lungs and she knew there was going to be no such time, but she said something about being an astronomer.

“Oh,” he replied. “I’m going to talk to Mark Shuttleworth on TV when he’s in space. Would you like to come into the studio and talk to him with me?”

“OK,” said Michelle.

A few months later, my cellphone rang. It was Mandela’s office, asking if Michelle would like to fly up to the M-Net studio in Jo’burg to talk to Shuttleworth with the ex-president. By that time she was pretty sick and not at all keen on travelling, but we told her it would be a wonderful experience and she finally accepted. We instructed the M-Net crew that if at any time she wanted to cancel and come home on the next plane, for any reason, that was what would happen. Jenny and our son Alan flew up to Johannesburg with Michelle. I opted to stay at home and watch it on TV.

In the studio, Michelle met Derek Watts, and then Mandela arrived. “Do you remember me?” she asked.

“Of course,” he said. “You’re the little girl who wants to be an astronaut.”

“It’s actually an astronomer,” she said, “but if you want to say astronaut it’s OK!”

Mark Shuttleworth’s team had asked me to email details of Michelle’s background so he could be properly prepared for her, and they also asked that we forward two questions from her in advance — that was her quota. I sent them some information about her personality and situation, and warned him not to patronise her because she’d switch right off. As far as the questions went, we had no joy.

“I don’t know what questions to ask because everybody else on TV seems to have asked all the good questions already,” she said. “I’ll think of something when I’m there.” On that, she would not budge.

Michelle knew nothing about Shuttleworth before, but after Mandela’s invitation she’d started watching the First African in Space channel and was quite taken with him. “I want to tell him to spend some of his money on researching osteosarcoma, and some on tooth-gap fixing,” she joked after noticing his toothy grin.

Come the time to speak to Shuttleworth, Michelle had her questions all ready. The first one, “What’s the most amazing thing you’ve seen in space?” was pretty ordinary. The second one floored the man, if that was possible in a world without gravity: “I was wondering whether you’d like to marry me!” That was her acute sense of humour coming through, but newspapers around the country picked up on her quip and the following day ran stories about the little girl who’d proposed to Mark Shuttleworth.

Michelle had an enormous crush on Damon Beard, the East Coast Radio DJ — he was the best thing to happen to her in her short life. He’d been marvellous for her morale throughout her two-year ordeal, paying a surprise visit to our home to bring her flowers in front of all her friends on her 14th birthday, sending and receiving endless SMSs, visiting her in hospital and always phoning at just the right time whenever she was really down.

The morning after the space transmission, I was in Pinetown when my cellphone rang. It was Mission Control in Moscow, wanting to know if Mark could phone Michelle sometime, from the space ship, without all the TV razzmatazz. I told them it would be fine, as long as it wasn’t late at night. Later on, I was sitting in the lounge with her and my cellphone rang. “Hello, Mr Foster,” said a strange voice. “This is Mark Shuttleworth. I was wondering if I could speak to Michelle?”

I sat in my lounge in Queensburgh and listened to my 14-year-old daughter chatting up a millionaire orbiting Earth in a Russian spaceship and it was bloody marvellous, even though I could hear only her side of the conversation.

“You haven’t answered my question yet,” she complained, and when he stammered something about getting to know her better first, she told him that he’d better hurry up if he wanted it to happen. “If you say yes, I can get the photos done cheap — my dad’s a photographer,” she added.

The two of them chatted away like old friends for, I don’t know, 10 or 15 minutes, and then it had to end. I knew that Shuttleworth met with Michelle’s approval, though. Then she phoned Damon. “I just thought I should let you know — I’ve found somebody much younger and richer than you,” she told him.

Michelle had a dry sense of humour that never failed her, right till the end. She lived her last couple of weeks on her bed in the lounge — the doctors said that was because the cancer in her lungs made her own room seem cramped, so she couldn’t breathe properly, and she wanted space. One day, while Jenny wheeled her down the passage to go to the bathroom, I pulled her bedding straight and tidied up her things.

My efforts obviously didn’t meet her high standards, though. As her mother wheeled her back into the lounge, Michelle stopped the wheelchair, looked at her spot in front of the TV and said: “Dad, you’re quite cute when you do things badly.” I asked what she meant and she explained: “You know, like a little kid when they’re colouring in and they go out the lines.” That funny little comment is still one of my most treasured memories.

Just three weeks after flying to Johannesburg to speak to Nelson Mandela and Mark Shuttleworth, our beautiful, funny daughter was dead. During the last week she was too ill to see or speak to anybody, and when Mark heard of her condition and phoned, we had to turn him away. Damon came around to see her, though, towards the end, and she miraculously perked up a little when she heard his voice. “See how sexy I look when I first wake up!” she said. If one thing good came out of her illness, it was her great friendship with and affection for Damon Beard.

Michelle’s time on Earth was short and, for the last two years and one month, very tough. She never flinched, though, and neither would she allow us to. And she was befriended by three very good and special men. Thank you all for that.