Helen Goodwin

“I don’t remember crying for him, particularly. He was not much like a dad.”

Helen Goodwin’s dad died suddenly and unexpectedly, even though he’d been ill for some years. Helen felt conflicted about her father’s death, and psychologically stuck, until she discovered change was possible.

The entrance to Helen Goodwin’s Auckland home is lined with books. That’s unsurprising as, a librarian by profession, it could be said books saved her when she was young and struggling with her homelife, and again when she was older and trying to save her marriage. Save herself. 

When we speak, Helen is in her seventies. She knits, cares for her cat – who sits on her knee as we talk – and keeps up her “side hustle” as an editor. She’s also a trustee on a local community trust, and makes sure she exercises regularly to stave off her Parkinson’s disease as much as possible. A cyclone has been forecast to hit Auckland so we don’t have long to talk about Helen’s father and his early death.

Even though she’s recalling events from more than sixty years earlier, events she doesn’t often get asked about, she’s open and speaks fluently.

“Well, he died when I was ten, in 1960. He had an undiscovered abdominal aortic aneurysm. He’d had major heart surgery earlier, when I was about seven, after which he developed a hospital infection. They couldn't get rid of it, and he was in hospital in Auckland for months. Auckland is a long way from where we lived in the central North Island so, while he was there, my mother, sister and I temporarily moved up to stay with my mother’s parents on the North Shore. My sister and I went to school there for a while, then we all went home together when he was better.

“A few years later, he needed surgery back in Auckland for blood clots in his leg. My mother and sister and I stayed at home that time as the treatment was expected to be straightforward and they probably didn’t want to uproot us again. However, the shock of the surgery must have exacerbated the aneurysm, and he was found dead in his hospital bed. 

“They rang us at home at six o'clock in the morning. My mother came to our bedroom door and said, ‘Daddy's dead’. My younger sister and I were lying in our twin beds in the dark, and she told us the news that baldly – ‘Daddy’s dead’. That was pretty grim and unexpected.” 

Helen can’t remember a lot of what happened next. Blocked memories, she supposes. She mostly remembers a “very strong sense of the hypocrisy of the adults that day”. She remembers a neighbour coming over and saying to her, “Look after your poor mother. Make breakfast for her, make her some bacon and eggs”. 

“And we never had cooked breakfasts,” says Helen. “I tried to do it, but of course she wouldn’t eat it. The whole scene seemed full of people worrying about her. I don’t think she, my mother, did much for us on that day. She never embraced us or anything. Literally. We were not a touching, hugging type of family. She was not capable of much empathy or sympathy.” 

Helen’s other memory of that day was her father's brother and his wife arriving in the afternoon from a nearby town – the only visit Helen can ever remember them making. When they came into the house, Helen and her sister were told to go outside. 

“Someone, I don’t remember who, said, ‘Go out and play’. We’d never been kicked out of our house before. I mean, no one ever came to our house. Our parents didn’t have friends and we were really isolated, even though we lived right in town. Partly that’s possibly because our family wasn’t religious and it was unheard of in that town, at that time, not to be religious. Young people’s social lives were based around the church and the Sunday School, and we weren’t involved in that, so my sister and I didn’t know anyone outside of school.

“My sister and I were bright kids, and I had my own friends at school, so I was lucky. But my sister and my mother had very few friends, so the experience of my father’s death in that context was pretty crummy.”

Helen’s family had a large vegetable garden, as many New Zealand families did at that time, which attracted white butterflies. Helen and her sister used to swat the flitting insects with tennis racquets. After being told to get out of the house, Helen was in the garden and, unhappy and with nothing else to do, was swatting the pests. 

“A woman, who lived down the road, came out of the house and said, ‘Oh, how can you do that? They've got mummies and daddies, too!’ I just thought, ‘You stupid woman’. It was the dumbest thing to say. There was nothing along the lines of, ‘Oh, you poor little lambs, you’ve lost your father’. Nobody said that, that I can remember. At any point. Nobody.

“There was no sympathy for us at all. I think I knew the adults were embarrassed. They couldn't deal with the idea of grieving children, so they turned their attention to the adult, to our mother, and left us to ourselves.” 

Helen, her mother and sister took the train to Auckland for her father’s funeral. Once there, she says there was still no comfort to be had from her mother’s or her father’s families, and very little ceremony around his funeral. At least, not that Helen can remember, and she’s certain she and her sister played no part in it. She thinks she did go to his funeral, as she remembers her aunt telling her to pick flowers from her grandparents’ garden – something that was forbidden at any other time – but can’t be sure. 

“I was only ten, so I wasn’t in on much of the detail. My sister told me later we'd worn our school gym frocks because we had no other suitable clothes. We were pretty poor.

“The funeral was probably at one of the local funeral homes, and I don’t think there was anything like tea and cake afterwards. There would have been no fuss. My father was cremated, and his ashes buried. There is no grave. My mother didn't know how to do ceremonies of any kind. She didn't know how to have fun either – she couldn't even really manage Christmas.” 

Helen does, however, very clearly remember being prevented from seeing her father’s body.

“I was utterly stricken that I couldn't see him. I couldn’t tell you why I wanted to see him, I just know I really did, and I didn’t know why I wasn’t allowed to. My mother told me many years later it was because he looked ghastly as he’d had a postmortem examination, but she didn’t explain that at the time.

“I held it against her for years that I wasn't allowed to see him, as there was no closure for me. Just – whomp! – he was dead. It felt like a huge betrayal, although it was done to protect me. But my mother didn't tell me that, so I didn't know. 

“My mother was not very good at remaining present for us – for me, anyway. When our father was in hospital for that long period the previous time, I felt like she abandoned me. I did not enjoy my time staying with my grandparents. Our father was in the hospital, but everyone was harsh and there was no kindness. My mother wasn’t really there, and even my grandparents – her parents – were anything but kindly.” Helen says her teachers at her Auckland school were also far from supportive of this bright, shy girl who’d moved to a strange school to be near her sick father.

Even arriving back home after his death, after his funeral, no one at Helen’s usual school said anything about what she’d been through. Well, except one boy. “He said, ‘Is it true that your father is dead?’ and I said, ‘Yes’, and that was the only conversation I had about it with anybody.” 

The family did receive sympathy cards, addressed to her mother. But because the family wasn’t religious – and the townsfolk knew they weren’t religious – Helen found the cards infuriating rather than comforting. 

“We kept getting cards saying, ‘He is with God’, and we didn’t believe in God. The one that really pissed me off was, ‘He is just away’. It made me furious, even at ten years old. I had a fine sense of the hypocrisy of things, even then.

“Even though I felt that, I tried very hard to find God. I thought, ‘I want to find Him – maybe that will give me a small voice of comfort in the night’, an idea I’d read about somewhere, or from learning about the Bible at school, maybe. 

“I tried quite earnestly, praying to find God for a few months, I think. I prayed and prayed but nothing happened, and, of course, I got fed up with it. I feel a bit emotional thinking about that, thinking about a ten-year-old girl trying to find comfort, because there was nothing comforting in my whole world.”

With no grave to go to – something grown-up Helen agrees with now, and can’t see herself having a grave and a headstone – young Helen tried to memorialise her father in other ways. But her mother was having none of it. 

“My mother rebuffed every attempt to remember my father. We had some little artificial flower baskets that somebody had made, and I arranged a photo of my father with a basket on either side. My mother came along and said, ‘Oh, for goodness sake’, and put the baskets back the way they had been. I wasn't allowed to do anything. No sense of memorial at all.”

Complicating the situation was that, in total honesty, Helen wasn’t entirely sad her father was dead.

“I don't remember crying for him, particularly. He was not much like a dad. I felt quite guilty after he’d died as I’d been kind of avoiding him. He was this grey figure sitting in a chair when I’d come home from school, and my mother was at work so I’d look for somewhere else to go and play because it wasn’t much fun being there. I felt quite guilty about that after he’d died. So no, I don't think I loved him in that sort of way. 

“About six months after he died, I remember having a conversation with my mother where I said that occasionally I forget he’s dead, and then I feel guilty about forgetting. I must have been astounded that we had that conversation, because I remember it. It stuck. Other than that, I don’t remember us talking about his death. He was always quite a remote figure. He was always sort of slightly… over there,” she gestures away from herself. 

“Looking back, I do think life would have been worse if he’d been around when I was older. My mother looked after us, provided for us. She did her job. But I didn’t feel loved by her.” 

Helen did find solace in books. Her father had stopped work some years before his death because of ill-health, but he’d previously worked in a bookshop and their shelves at home were stacked with the classics. At school Helen spent a lot of time in the library, and the local public librarian allowed her to take out books from the adult section as she’d already read her way through the children’s. 

“She’d say, ‘These books are for your mother, aren’t they?’” says Helen, verbally winking. “Reading was an escape, as well as a way of finding out about the world because I knew nothing.” 

In her second-to-last year of high school, then seventeen-year-old Helen “accidentally” passed the exam that granted her university entrance. She’d taken it as practice for sitting scholarship exams the following year, but passing meant she could go to university with financial assistance.

Her mother encouraged her – she wanted Helen educated in a way she couldn’t have been herself, due to the era and growing up in poverty. So, Helen left school, worked for a month, then took the train up to the University of Auckland to study English, boarding at a student hostel.

At university, she made good friends and found others who’d faced challenging backgrounds. 

“I would have been completely socially inept, but one of my roommates was quite outgoing. It was a mixed-sex hostel, and I remember groups of us sitting around in the room, all talking about our terrible upbringings. Many of them were doing psychology, so we talked about our terrible parents. I had never felt loved by anybody, not in a cosy sense. While I didn’t really talk about myself at that time, hearing others’ stories was hugely helpful.”

Helen’s complicated and conflicted feelings about her father, and his absence in death, sent her looking for men who were, maybe, like him. “That did not do me any good. ‘Lost boys’, that was sort of my thing. I haven’t done terribly well at finding love, so I'm sure that all had impacted on me. It doesn't do you any good, not feeling loved.”

But again, Helen had the love of books. And, again, books helped. 

“When I was nineteen or twenty, I did a year working half time in the hospital’s medical library. We had lots of psychology textbooks for nurses, so I read heaps of them when I was supposed to be processing them. I learned a lot of stuff that got me into therapy later.

“The textbooks gave me a way to understand things, which gave me some tools to start learning that I was capable of change. I read Carl Rogers and his person-centred psychotherapy – the ‘growth movement’ – meaning that ‘you don’t have to be what you started out with’.

“I knew I could rise above my background. I knew I could change, but first I had to learn a lot of new skills.” 

Just shy of her twenty-first birthday, Helen got married, and then, some years later became a mother. “He was one of my flatmates. After the hostel, I’d looked for the biggest, messiest flat I could find and had a wonderful year living with about eleven people. Then I wound up in bed with one of my flatmates and we got married.

“I was looking for love, obviously, and his parents were quite insistent we get married, although my mother was oddly liberal about it. So, I did marry him. That lasted for ten years and two daughters. Being married for life was part of my programming from how I was brought up, but I had to get out of that marriage.” 

Once again, books were her saviour. Helen discovered feminism, reading Doris Lessing, Fay Weldon, and Marilyn French. “I devoured them all. That really buoyed me up. They gave me a sense of the things that needed to change.” Here Helen means what needed to change within herself – that she needed to exit her marriage, but also what needed to change in society, around women’s value in the workforce and the need for childcare. 

“I developed – probably in the therapy I had after my divorce – an understanding of my ‘Helen Project’. That was me trying to reinvent myself as somebody different, as somebody more outgoing and more capable of being in the world. More sociable. I did that through reading, mostly, and having female friends. That was just magic, just wonderful. 

“I’d had friends in school, but talking to these new friends, being able to have real conversations, was so helpful. I had married when I was quite young, and then needed to get out of it, so being able to talk to women about that was great. I really wanted to be self-reliant. I grew up in poverty, and I didn't want a life like that.

“I was rescuing myself, I suppose, making myself into something where I would be competent and able to function in the world, and have a better life than the one I'd grown up with. That’s ‘self-realisation’, although I wouldn’t have put it in those terms then.”

As therapy does, as it’s designed to do, Helen discovered other, hidden, aspects of her life. “I thought I was way over my father's death, that I’d left it in my past. A therapist had me lying down on a couch, which I’d never done before, and was taking me through my life backwards. I was feeling totally detached from the process, quite sceptical, but when she hit 1960, the year my father died, everything just went ‘bang!’ I burst into sobs and was completely overwhelmed by the death of my father – and, honestly, I could not have been more detached. 

“I was absolutely blown away. I blurted it all out and told her everything. I was completely amazed by the effect on me. I realised then it wasn't quite as far behind me as I thought. Until then, my father’s death had never seemed like something that influenced my life that much.”

Her upbringing, however, influenced Helen’s mothering, giving her a strong model to parent against. She made sure her two girls had parties and friends and fun.

“I consciously tried to do everything differently to how we grew up. I talked to my kids, I tried to do everything the way I learned in therapy rather than the way I was brought up. My aim was to be very different.”

That included learning to hug, as her family never hugged, and Helen made sure she hugged her children a lot. She even hugged her mother, who lived with Helen in her later years.

“I was really, really surprised how much my mother liked it. She didn’t say anything, but she hugged me back, and we hugged ever after.”