Catherine Peters

“All I wanted was for everyone to be together … that’s probably my greatest sadness.”

Her father’s fatal heart attack when Catherine Peters was sixteen had many immediate and obvious impacts on her family. Decades later, it’s perhaps the impact on her relationships with her sisters that is her biggest and most lasting sadness.

Catherine Peters remembers sitting in the playground of a McDonald’s restaurant, looking at all the people eating around her, and thinking, “None of these people know that my dad has just died”. Catherine, her three sisters and their mother were retracing their journey back home from a beach trip. This time, they were travelling without their father. 

“My dad died very suddenly of a heart attack in 1994. It was the school holidays, and my mum wanted to go to a beach, but my dad was from Europe and wasn’t really into beaches. As a compromise, we went to a beach north of Wellington about six hours’ drive from our home, and stayed at a holiday park with family friends. 

“I can’t remember how far into our holiday it was, but my dad, he just woke up and died… My mother said he’d got up to go to the toilet, saying he was having chest pains or something. From my bed I heard my mum screaming to call an ambulance. This is pre-cellphones, obviously, so I ran to the manager's house where there was a phone. 

“I remember running with a blanket around my shoulders, and my sister, who’d just turned ten, she followed me, and we knocked on the manager's door shouting, ‘Wake up! Wake up!’ because it was probably about seven o'clock in the morning. I vaguely remember seeing my dad sitting on the bed in our cabin before I ran, I think? It was all a bit of a blur.”

The manager called the ambulance, and to Catherine it felt like an eternity before it arrived. The paramedics worked on her father for about an hour, she thinks. A long time. 

“Then they came out and said there was nothing else they could do. Mum has said since – she’s a nurse – that as soon as he collapsed she knew that was it, and she wanted to tell them to stop working on him. I think she was already saying, like, ‘Please stop, this is awful’. He’d had a major heart attack, just out of the blue. 

“Looking back, my mum said he’d been complaining of shoulder pain a couple of days earlier, so maybe there were a few tell-tale signs. But he’d had a medical at work, and that had come out okay. He had been a smoker, but he’d stopped years before. He was only forty-eight, and my mum was forty-two. I was sixteen, and my sisters were ten, seven, and four.” 

While the paramedics worked on their father, Catherine thinks they all “milled around outside the cabin, hugging, waiting and crying”. She thinks her ten-year-old sister knew what was happening, but her younger sisters may not have. 

“My youngest sister hadn’t even started school yet. It was all very nightmare-like. When they said they were stopping, I remember thinking, ‘Whoa…’ Yes, I knew what stopping treatment meant... Straight after he died, his body was taken away and we packed up and drove back home.” 

Catherine’s memories pick up again, sitting in that McDonald’s, supervising her younger siblings, looking around and thinking how strange it was that this huge thing had happened to her family, but no one had any idea. 

“I was thinking, ‘We are going home and Dad won’t be there’. That's pretty much the only thing I remember of the ride home. I don’t know if my mother drove, or maybe I did? I do remember getting home, and there were a bunch of people at our house already. They’d come in to light the fire and welcome us back.”

Catherine now lives in Auckland with her partner and their three children, and works in corporate affairs. Her father came to New Zealand from Holland in the late 1960s, as one of the last assisted migrants, and met her mother. They lived in the central North Island, in a small rural town where her mother worked mostly in the home, looking after the children, animals, and hives of bees and her dad worked in IT at the nearby paper mill. 

“I’m not entirely sure what he did, but he went to meetings about emails, conferences about computer engineering and computer systems. My mum always said it was such a shame he died in 1994 as he was always talking about the internet coming, but he mostly missed it.”

One of the first things Catherine remembers having to do when she got home was call her grandmother in Holland. “He was always her favourite. My grandmother, my Oma, was quite deaf and I didn't want to have to scream down the phone that he was dead, so I called my aunt. She was really excited that I’d called because it was still rare back then, an international call. But I cut right to the chase, saying in Dutch that my dad, her brother, was dead. She and my uncle went around and told my grandmother, and apparently she collapsed.” 

Her grandmother and her uncle – her dad’s youngest brother – immediately arranged to come to New Zealand, and Catherine, with a friend of her mother’s, left home at four in the morning to drive to get them. 

“They arrived the morning of the funeral, and I remember very clearly, me, being sixteen, driving to Auckland International Airport in a big station wagon. I remember going 140 km/h on the motorway,” she says with a giggle. “I think I still had only my restricted licence. Now I look at my seventeen-year-old daughter and I would not want her driving!”

Another thing happened soon after they arrived home, Catherine says with a ‘wait, there’s even more to this story’ laugh – a call came in from Germany about the exchange student due to arrive in three weeks’ time. 

“Dad had been really excited about her coming because he could speak German. I remember Mum taking the phone and saying, ‘I'm really sorry, my husband's just died’. We decided to still take her, but she stayed with my German teacher for a week or so first. She was with us for three months, and I think for me that was probably the saving grace. If she hadn’t been there, we probably would have been in a state of not knowing what to do. 

“She kind of provided a new start, we had to keep going, and it was nice for me to have someone around my age to talk to. And it’s what Dad would have wanted. It’s such a shame he missed it. He would have loved having her there.”

Catherine’s dad’s body had been brought to the house and laid in a conservatory-like room with lots of greenery. “We had wanted to put him in the lounge, but it felt a bit weird, having him in the middle of that space, so he went into our conservatory. Then all the flowers started arriving, so he was in a beautiful, vibrant room full of flowers and plants. Anyone who wanted could walk down into the conservatory and spend some time with him.” 

Catherine says it was important to her mother to have their father’s body close to them, and to involve her daughters with his body, because she had her own story of childhood parental bereavement and wanted to do things very differently. 

“My mother’s father had died in a car accident when she was four. My mother had been in the car, too, and by the time she woke up in hospital he was gone. She didn't get out for something like five weeks. She always regretted not being able to go to the funeral. So we weren’t shunted away, and being around his body was good for us. We were all young, but we all touched him, and patted him, and wrote him letters, and put the Dutch chocolates he loved in with him. The coffin was full of stuff. It was a really weird time. An awful, awful time.”

With Catherine’s grandmother and uncle safely arrived, everyone gathered to fasten the casket. Photos were taken, and Catherine remembers it being a “collaborative” experience with everyone around, offering company and food. 

“So many people came to our house with food. We called it the ‘fruit loaf funeral’. I couldn’t eat date loaf for years – I do now.”

The funeral was in a local community hall, followed by a burial. The undertaker put the dirt on the grave and jumped on it,” Catherine says, thumping her feet on the floor. “My uncle made a joke, saying, ‘It’s just so he can't get out’. There were lots of dark jokes. 

“Dad’s company put a bus on for employees, and through my work I recently had an email from one of the guys who came, and he put me in touch with two of Dad’s other workmates. They remembered a lot about the funeral and my dad, and said it was quite emotional for them. Soon after the funeral we had to go into his office and clear out his stuff. That was really weird, because we didn’t know much about that side of his life at all. I’d been there only once before. ”

After the funeral, after all the fruit loaf was eaten, and after her grandmother and uncle had returned to Holland, Catherine started thinking about what their future was going to be. She felt her mother was functioning in a fog, so she had to take responsibility for her sisters. 

“I felt like Mum was out of it for ages – like, for three months. I don’t think she remembers that period of her life at all. It kind of made her retreat into her grief. It wasn’t much fun.

“Financially, I can remember thinking after Dad died that we wouldn't have any money, and we certainly became more frugal, but actually Dad left us well set up. We didn’t have to sell the house and we were fairly financially stable.” 

Catherine’s mother signed up for the widows’ benefit, which Catherine says was made into an unnecessarily humiliating experience. 

“I remember going with her to Work and Income, and just how awful that was. I have a lot of empathy for people who are solo parents. The stigma…. There was no compassion, and you had to prove everything, and agree that you were going to get a job, even with four grieving kids. My mother was determined to get off the widows’ benefit, so she soon got a job.” 

Catherine found understanding to be a bit lacking at school, too. “I went back to school about a week after Dad died, probably when the school term started. My German teacher was amazing, she was really good to me, but my English teacher? Ugh. About a month later, for some reason I hadn’t done an English assignment, and they said about my dad, ‘You can't use this as an excuse for the rest of your life’ – a month after he’d died. I remember thinking, ‘I hate you. How dare you?’ 

“Also, I missed out on going to the nationals for a sport I loved because the teacher assumed we couldn’t afford it, so hadn’t selected me. If I have a major negative through that time it was that some teachers had no understanding and they made assumptions about me.

“The kids at school were fine, but they didn’t have any real idea. I went to a school reunion-type thing recently, and some – who’ve now had parents die – told me how sorry they were that they didn’t understand what I was going through then.”

Catherine was nursing her own complicated feelings. At sixteen years old, she had been rebelling a little against her strict, Dutch dad who, she felt, didn’t get how things worked in New Zealand. 

“I was at the stage where, although he still played football and rough-housed and bounced on the trampoline with my younger sisters, I no longer had loads to do with him. I didn’t have a close relationship with him when he died. There were no big issues, but he was super strict about not letting me go to parties, and he had strong opinions about my schoolwork. It could be infuriating!” 

Catherine says the last thing her dad said to her was to joke about her being a party-pooper because she went to bed early at the holiday park, rather than play games with the others. 

“And that made me so angry with him because he wouldn’t let me go to parties! He was a funny guy, but when you’re a sixteen-year-old girl, that's not super cool. And he made me do languages, which is why I did German. When, at the end of high school, I won a scholarship to go to Germany, Mum said, ‘Your dad would be so proud of you’.”

As well as ensuring her children were involved around their father’s body, and present at the funeral, Catherine says her mother was determined to encourage talking about their father. “She came from an era when kids were, you know, not talked to much. Basically, my mother’s dad died and they never talked about him again. The way Mum described it, she was never allowed to talk about her dad – he was dead, he was gone, that was it. 

“However, she was made to go to his grave every Sunday and lay down flowers. She hated that, and we never had to do that. Sometimes we’d go to my dad’s grave but not a lot. We had lots of photos of Dad around, and we’d talk about him, and there’d be jokes, whereas Mum had a terrible time of it. It created a lot of problems in her family, and for her in particular in terms of dealing with her grief over her father. 

“I think she had always wanted to know about her dad, but he was a taboo subject, whereas my dad was never taboo. We knew that her mother moped around and didn’t get over her husband’s death, according to my mum, so she was determined to move on from the death of her own husband. I don’t think she did, but she tried.”

Talking about their father became harder as they all grew older, and his death was further away. Catherine’s relationship with her sisters also became strained, to her lasting sadness, as they grew into adulthood. 

She feels maybe it was because of a complicated mix of her staying around, trying to be responsible for them, helping them. But then, also, maybe it’s because she had to go away to university, even though Catherine opted for a nearby college and came home a lot, especially for birthdays and holidays. However, for her masters Catherine travelled to Holland and was away for four years, leaving her sisters with their mother and a new partner who was not at all interested in stepdaughters. Catherine feels conflicted about that, but, as a young woman, she had to live her life.

When her own daughter turned sixteen, Catherine looked at her and thought about the weight of responsibility she had carried at that age. 

“The hard thing was I wasn't expected to do it – I did because I thought I had to. I felt so terrible because I'd grown up knowing that my mum's dad died when she was four, and here was my sister who was four when she lost our dad. I felt more for my sisters, because I thought, ‘Well, I had sixteen years of Dad, and they’re all young and my mum’s not coping emotionally…’ 

“It’s the repercussions it's had on everyone else's lives that really bothers me. I think I had a very solid foundation, and my sisters and I had a good bond, but it fizzled out. We've had a horrible thing happen to us that we all live out in different ways. I don't think we would be like this if he had lived.” 

In thinking about how her father’s death might impact her as an adult, Catherine remembers something her mother said during her final year at school. That year, like many teenagers of that age – seventeen or eighteen – she didn’t spend much time at home. Sure, she was having a good time hanging with friends, but with an added element of home not being where she wanted to be. 

“Mum would say, ‘It's going to hit you one day, the grief’, because she thought I was running away from it by not being around the family. But I was just having a very happy year. I wanted to look forward, and I felt a lot of the time Mum was looking backwards. What she said did make me scared the grief was going to hit me and I would crumble, but it never has, in the sense of being hit by a truck or something like that. 

“I don't think grief has to hit you in this massive way and then you ‘deal with it’ somehow – it’s just something that’s always around. It's amazing how somebody's death can create so many ripples. I probably think about it every day, but not in a sad way. Would my life be different? Yes, but maybe not too different. Although, maybe I would have stayed overseas? Maybe my family relationships would be different? Be better?” 

Three of the four sisters got together for the twentieth anniversary of their father’s death. “We hadn’t been together in a very long time, as we live a long way apart. I’d rather we got together for his birthday, than his death anniversary. We were a close family unit but that can unravel when you take out a person. Mum was the glue in one sense, but having Dad taken out changed everything, threw everything up in the air. 

“I think I tried to be that person to keep everyone together. At this point in time, it’s been two years since I’ve had anything to do with my sisters, and our estrangement took a long time to get used to because all I ever wanted was for everyone to be together. That's probably my greatest sadness, and it’s the result of people not being able to communicate.”

Catherine is in contact with her father’s family in Holland, and ensures her children are well connected with their Dutch heritage.

“You never know what's going to happen, so you can never manage your relationships perfectly. My daughter has a close relationship with her father, but I've still had morbid thoughts, like, ‘If he dropped dead now, what would she remember of him?’ I hope she would know her father better than I knew my dad. They have the usual grumps, but they're probably closer than I was with my dad. And they still hug, which I’d stopped doing because I was a teenager. As a family we're a lot more tactile, which could be a response to my dad dying, too.” 

Catherine’s now in her mid-forties, fast approaching the age her dad was when he died, although she thinks more about the age her mum was widowed. 

“My mum thought she would die at the age her dad died – thirty-eight. When I got past forty-two, when mum was widowed, I thought, ‘Phew’, but also, ‘Oh my god, Mum was a widow now’, and I do think she did a good job to keep everything together. Dad was forty-eight, so I do think, ‘Shit that could be me, or could be my partner, we’d better get things checked out’. Reminders come up at all significant ages.”

In the cemetery where Catherine’s dad is buried is another lasting reminder of them as a family of six. “Mum asked us what we should put on his gravestone, and I think it was really important for us to be involved, especially my younger sisters. So it says, ‘Loved husband of, and awesome father of…’ and our names. He certainly was an awesome father.”

Story by Lee-Anne Duncan