Mother’s dying gift for her slain daughter
Foundation will keep alive student’s beautiful soul
● Before she died, Anna Cornelius stoked a fire of her daughter’s memory so strong that it will be impossible to extinguish.
She closed her criminal law practice to start a foundation that would ensure her 21year-old daughter Hannah would be remembered for her beautiful soul and not only as a student who was raped and murdered in Stellenbosch.
Anna’s body was found in shallow water at Scarborough beach on the Cape Peninsula last Sunday. It had been a tragic 10 months for the 56-year-old who also lost her mother, Eleanor de Villiers, in November.
This week Lily Reed, CEO of the Hannah Cornelius Foundation, dispelled rumours that Anna had committed suicide.
“Anna swam almost every day but she had been ill the week before; she had the flu and a chest infection. It was her first swim on Sunday. But that was Anna . . . she was doing her normal swim . . . always active,” said Reed, adding that she “had lots of plans for the week after” and had been at the foundation’s office two days before her death.
Reed said Anna had dealt with Hannah’s death better than anyone because of her resilience and love for her daughter. Her husband Willem retired as a magistrate after Hannah’s murder, and Reed said he was planning to play a supportive role at the foundation.
A family member said losing three women in the family in close succession had been “incredibly difficult to deal with”.
“Andries [Anna’s 19-year-old son] has not stopped asking for his mother since she passed on. Because of his autism, he does not really understand death,” she said.
“I like to think that the end of Hannah and Anna’s lives meant the beginning of greater things, through the establishment of the foundation.”
Four men are on trial for Hannah’s murder in the High Court in Cape Town. In May last year, she and a friend were in the car her granny Eleanor had given her. The men allegedly threatened them with knives and robbed them. After she was raped and murdered they used her car to continue their crime orgy.
Denise Goldin knows the grief of the Cornelius family all too well.
Today is 12 years since the Easter Sunday when her son Brett, 28, was murdered with his friend Richard Bloom after they were abducted in Camps Bay.
Reflecting on the loss Anna suffered before her own death, Goldin said: “After you’ve lost a child, it’s like you’re living in a fog. The very day you lose your child, you are born into a new life, a new role you don’t want to embody.”
Three months later, she was diagnosed with cancer. “I had lost my will to live, but then I realised this was fate’s way of telling me I had a choice. I could refuse treatment and die, or I could fight it. That is what my son would have wanted.”
Before a year had passed, her husband Peter had a fatal heart attack while swimming, but Goldin said he died of a broken heart.
“His grief was so intense, and it caused a massive heart attack. All I remember was lying on the floor next to him. They had covered him in a towel. I remember beating his chest and saying ‘you cannot leave me’ but he was already gone.”
Brett’s image lives in the locket around her neck — a window her two grandsons often open to see the uncle they never met.
In 2013 it was Corlia Olivier who joined what Goldin calls “the worst club in the world: parents who’ve lost children”. Olivier’s teenage daughter, Anene Booysen, was found in Bredasdorp with her intestines hanging out, moaning in agony.
Olivier spent Anene’s 18th birthday in a courtroom hearing details of her daughter’s death. “We are alone now,” said Olivier at the time. “All I am doing is working towards one goal — to buy her a tombstone.”
The public stepped in to help, but soon after the tombstone was unveiled Olivier died of cancer. Days after Olivier’s death Anene’s father, Klaasie Speelman, was stabbed to death.
Cape Town clinical psychologist David Rosenstein said a trauma, especially murder, could have a “physical impact”, especially if someone was already predisposed towards a weak heart. The nervous system could become “overloaded”, while the part of the brain responsible for stress and survival sent victims into a “highly anxious space”.
“This is the face of grief and its unwillingness to let go,” said Goldin, but “you find the wherewithal to carry on”.
Said Reed: “Anna has left me with so much strength and inspiration — she just filled me with what she wanted for Hannah and it is in me and I am going to blast it out to the world every day. There is no stopping the fire, I am going to spread it.”
This is the face of grief and its unwillingness to let go but you find the wherewithal to carry on Denise Goldin Mother of Brett Goldin, the actor who was murdered in Cape Town in 2006