Wellington writer Lee-Anne Duncan with photographs of her mother, Lynore, on her wedding day in 1969. Photo / Marty Melville
Lee-Anne Duncan was still at primary school when her mother died. Through her Too Young project, she’s collected the stories of dozens of other Kiwis who faced their own childhood loss of a parent and how it changed their lives.
When I was 8, my mother told me she was going to die. I can still hear her words, sense the light of the after-school sun, feel her as she knelt beside me in our Dunedin kitchen.
“Lan, they’ve run out of treatment for me. There’s nothing more they can do. That means I’m going to die.”
And she did. A few weeks after I turned 9, and six days before Christmas in 1981, my mother, Lynore, died. After two remissions from leukaemia and five years of fighting, the cancer overpowered her.
My father, Blair, ignored speed limits to make it to the hospital in time to hold her hand as she left this world, as our worlds changed forever. She was 33.
My brother Jeff and I had been taken to play at a family friend’s house. I had fun that afternoon, something I held some guilt for later. I was playing as my mother died.
When we were brought home, our father said, “You don’t have a mummy anymore.” His face was pale, his eyes were red. It was the only time I saw him cry.
That day will be 44 years in my past this December. The fact I grew up with a “dead mother” has sat with me always, but mostly as a detail only I feel, rather than as a defining feature.
My grandmother, my mother’s mother, was a huge source of support and guidance for me – she was my “lighthouse person”. My childhood and young adulthood would have been very different without her.
I’ve often wondered how my mother’s death changed me. How different is this Lee-Anne from the Lee-Anne whose mother didn’t die on December 19, 1981? How far off my previously assigned trajectory did her death nudge me?
There’s no way of knowing, but I can tell you every child whose parent died has spent hours – more – wondering.
I missed her at milestones – my wedding, the birth of my children – and I exercised my scant arithmetic to calculate to the day when my age matched hers on her death day, and when my daughter’s matched mine. So young. Too young. Both of us.
Still, beyond that, I’d not dwelt on my mother’s death. If I did think about growing up without her, my thoughts were, “I’m fine – what’s to think about?”
However, as I edged towards my 50th birthday, I started wondering, “How am I, really? And if I am okay, why am I okay after this massively traumatic event?”
And then, “What about all the other kids – the 5% or so of New Zealand children whose parents die before they turn 19?” Some lose both parents – four of the people I’ve since interviewed were orphaned in their teens, one before she turned 5.
So, in 2021, I began what would become my “Too Young” project, talking to other people like me.
How was the loss handled? How do they think it affected them as children, and as the adults they grew into? What’s their advice to adults guiding children going through this now?
I wanted to write a book that would bring comfort through a shared experience, but also to give adults a glimpse of what a grieving child might be thinking, feeling, and want to be supported.
Because, frankly, we need to “do death better”. We need to understand how children experience parental death and its impacts, including the emotional legacies our dead parents leave us.
I started with a Facebook call-out, as one does these days, looking for New Zealanders who’d had parents die when they were 18 or younger.
After completing more than 70 interviews – too many for just a book – I created my Too Young website to host some of the stories.
The people I spoke to ranged in age from Meg Mckay, 26, a just-graduated med student who nursed her mother through years of cancer, to the feminist writer and playwright Renée, who was 93 when she told me about her father’s suicide. She was 4 at the time, but his act and its effects still stung her acutely.
Author Owen Marshall has only a fleeting memory of a coughing woman who may have been his mother and who died from breast cancer when he was 2. Now in his mid-80s, he wonders if growing up without her gave him a “certain sense of isolation” and self-sufficiency that’s been useful for an author.
Michael Huddleston, a father of two, lives with a heart condition likely similar to the one that killed his father when Michael was 15.
Labour MP and former Cabinet minister Barbara Edmonds realised she’d accomplished so much so young because she’d subconsciously believed her life would be short, after losing her mother just before Barbara’s fifth birthday.
Broadcaster and TV exec Carol Hirschfeld always wondered if she was “being a girl” in the right way after her mother died from a cerebral haemorrhage when Carol was 10.
Then, suicide. One person I spoke to said a parent who dies by suicide bequeaths an increased risk of suicidal ideation in their children, that “suicide becomes a legitimate life option”.
Shared by pretty much all of us was the relief when we ticked over the birthday at which our parent died – a parent who will be forever younger than their child.
Of all the themes in the stories, the limited ability most of us had to talk about our feelings, about our loss and about our parents was the most common and the most consequential. We had to learn later in life how to expose our vulnerabilities and express ourselves.
There’s useful stuff, too. Many say they’re more independent and self-sufficient, more driven. They’re empathetic, caring. Many would not be doing the work they do – funeral director, therapist, social worker, Victim Support volunteer, doctor, nurse, etc – if they hadn’t experienced that painful childhood loss.
Early trauma has taught us to deal with stress and hard things. The downside is we’re good at pushing on, pushing down big emotions. Which works until it doesn’t.
But we also know to live each day, to jump at opportunities, to not sweat the small stuff. We are prepared in case what happened to our parents happens to us – we make wills, take out insurance if we can afford it.
The book, which will be out next year, includes about 35 stories. I’m independently publishing and hope to find philanthropists to help fund what I believe is an important and much-needed work.
As well as sparking recognition in others like us, we want our stories to help and give hope to families going through this today.
We want them to know that, yes, it’s horribly hard to have a parent die. And yes, the child left behind will be forever changed. But that child will always remember the love of their parent – we do – and, with the right supports, they should be okay.
Even better than okay. Because, all things considered, we’re amazing.
A collection of quotes from some of those interviewed for Too Young reveals the lasting impact of a parent’s death on their young children:
“Our mother cried every day for a year. We were completely and utterly lost.”
“Losing one parent is hard, but we lost two. If counselling was available, I might have learned to cope a lot better with life.”
“To not have her here to ask questions is like having half the chapters ripped out of my book.”
“The lack of my ability to talk to someone in an open way about what I was going through was really hard. I had to internalise a lot.”
“People were probably afraid of making us cry, so they said nothing about our parents.”
“I remember kind of attaching myself to whoever was my football coach, like, ‘Oh, he could help me with being my dad.’”
“I feel disconnected from my past because no one exists now who was there then.”
“If something bad happened, I would think… ‘I don’t need anyone’. It took me till my mid-30s to realise that wasn’t the case.”
“The theme of my dad dying is that everyone forgot about me and my grief.”
“I would look at other mothers and try to work out what they were telling their daughters about how to be a girl.”
“I was angry I was losing Mum. I was raging inside and no one knew.”
“If he’d lived, I’d have never come to New Zealand, and my life would be somewhere else and completely, utterly different.”
“It may not have been the best growing up, but it’s made me who I am. I am okay with that these days.”
“My subconscious was thinking, ‘Life is short, go hard.’”
“The worst thing in my life was also responsible for some of the very best things in my life.”
“Everything I can remember of my mum, which isn’t a lot … I just remember being loved.”
“There can be as much joy in what you had as sadness in what’s been lost.”