Free Chase Your Shadow by John Carlin

him. Sheila was terrified of crime. She lived in fear of an intruder breaking into her home, often jumping up in bed when she heard a sound in the middle of the night, then rushing to the phone to call the police. She would wake up her children, take them into her bedroom, lock thedoor, and wait until the police arrived. Her fears were not unfounded. When Henke left, the family had moved not just to a smaller home but to a rougher neighborhood. There were several break-ins at her home, to which she responded by taking an ominously extreme precaution. Every night she went to bed with a loaded pistol under her pillow.

 
    5
    Stone walls do not a prison make
.
    RICHARD LOVELACE , TO ALTHEA, FROM PRISON
    C AGED INSIDE the home of his rich uncle Arnold during the year-long wait for his murder trial, the sounds, images and smells of that night tormented Pistorius. He would gladly have given up all the riches and every last ounce of the glory he had earned to turn the clock back and undo what he had done, but it was irrevocable. He had fired those gunshots; he could not unfire them.
    There were occasional moments of respite from the horror of memory, when he was able to shut off the screams inside his head and repress the nauseating stench of blood in his nostrils, but the remorse never left him. He had one consolation: knowing that his family understood, forgave and would stand by him, no matter what. His uncle Arnold and his wife Lois, their four daughters and sons-inlaw, other uncles and aunts, Carl, and, most of all, Aimée – they, along with other members of the extended but close Pistorius family, were always ready to sit silently with him, prodding him gently towards the understanding that his old life had gone forever and he had to find the strength to build himself anew.
    Before Pistorius, no one could have imagined that a doubleamputee would rank among the fastest 400 meter runners in the world. Thanks to the celebrity he had gained, the little-known discipline of Paralympic sport, which he had ruled over from the time he won his first gold medal at the age of seventeen, had come to grip the public imagination. Thanks to him, the world at large had learned to regard disabled athletes – and, by extension, all disabled people – with a new respect, and they in turn had begun to view themselves with a new dignity.
    Running had shaped his public identity and raised him to impossible heights. But he knew that from now on his fame and reputation would be defined less by his triumphs on the track, or by the good that he had done, than by the tragedy of that night. Reeva’s death by his hand had seemed to have destroyed any possibility of ever resuming high-level competition on the world stage. That part of his life was over. What he had to do now was to learn to live with a sorrow that was more implacable than guilt.
    He also needed a new purpose in life. One was ready to hand.
    Now the shadow of the trial loomed, his task was to prepare himself for it with as clear a mind as he could muster. But in order to manage that he had to imagine an existence beyond the hell he had inhabited since Reeva’s death. To that end, Pistorius’s lawyers encouraged the family to help him visualize a favorable legal outcome and to start contemplating the outline of his rehabilitation after it. The lawyers admitted they were anxious about how he would perform in court, fearing he might fall apart when the critical moment came to take the stand and face cross-questioning by the state prosecutor. It was impossible for Pistorius to imagine how he would hold himself together in the face of the evidence of what had happened that night, but he owed it to his family to try.
    They had all understood immediately that there was no questionof him going back to live alone at the home where he had shot Reeva. When his uncle Arnold invited him to stay at his place, where his younger sister had been living for the last ten years, he did not think of