Jeff Duncan

“To not have my mother here to answer questions is like having half my story missing, or half the chapters ripped out of my book.”

Jeff Duncan’s mother died from leukemia when he was ten. His best friend, and his friend’s family, offered him ongoing stability, a place to hang out. Decades later, he’s grateful for that, but aware he might have ventured further beyond his comfort zone had his mother lived.

Jeff Duncan is my brother, so this piece is a little different. It’s written from my point of view, as a conversation between Jeff and me, Lee-Anne, so it has part of my story in it, too. This story appears in part in the forthcoming book, Too Young, but I wanted to run it fully on this website to show how the same event can affect siblings differently, even those close in age. Another note, there’s a fair amount of swearing in this story… 

If you met Jeff and myself side by side, I’m not sure we’d immediately come across as brother and sister. Maybe a little. We have the same shaped mouth, our eyes are similar, though his are greener, mine bluer. His front teeth are gapped like my son’s.

More striking, I think, are our differences. 

He’s seventeen months older than me, but I think we’d agree the years show more on him. I went to university, while he left school as soon as he could. I swear with glee, but Jeff takes it to another level – he’s not one to fuck around with niceties, so I’m going to edit him only lightly.

Since leaving school, he’s worked in a fish factory, on the wharf in Port Chalmers, at a panel beaters, then delivering plumbing supplies. Me, I’ve had desk jobs all my life, using words to make my living, keeping my hands callous-free and kitchen-ready clean. 

Aside from the occasional trip to Australia, Jeff has stayed close to home, still living a kilometre or so from where we grew up outside of Dunedin. I’ve travelled widely, lived overseas, and am settled in Wellington. For now, anyway. I’d love to travel more, seek new adventures. 

My point is to illustrate how differently, I think, we have come out the other side of our mother’s death and its consequences. And it seems Jeff largely agrees. Jeff’s memories of our mother’s diagnosis and too young death tally closely to mine, which is reassuring given how slippery memory can be. 

“Yeah, when I was five, Mum was diagnosed with leukemia, and she finally died when I was ten, she was thirty-three. So, that took a while to happen,” he says, with classic-Jeff-off-handedness, as we sit in his Sawyers Bay living room. One of the cats he professes to hate meows on his knee, demanding attention. Jeff pats it. He’s big, bearded, and baseball hatted. He’s a total softie.

“It was a weird household we grew up in, wasn’t it? All this medical stuff all over the place? I thought everybody had sutures and syringes and pisspots and that sort of stuff everywhere. I just thought that was normal. I don't remember too much about it, really. I know we stayed away a fair bit, which I assume was when Mum was sick.”

“Yeah, definitely. I remember staying at a whole lot of places,” I say, and we briefly discuss the different places we were shunted off to – well, it felt like we were shunted off, even though I know we understood why. 

Sometimes we went to the same place, often not. Jeff tells me some of his memories, I tell him some of mine, trying to tally up the number of family friends we bunked down with according to our sick mother’s need for us to be elsewhere.

I hadn’t been looking forward to interviewing Jeff about our mother’s death. Boy, that might necessitate a level of vulnerability that makes me curl up inside, so I had prepared myself a cosy coat of journalistic distance. I try to keep the questions easy – for both of us. 

“What’s your first memory of realising Mum was sick?” I ask. Maybe no question is really so easy… 

“I don’t know,” he replies. This turns out to be Jeff’s answer to a lot of my questions. For an interviewer, that’s super frustrating. For an emotional coward like me, it’s a get-out-of-jail-free card. 

He does remember being told she was going to die, and he remembers the same phrasing as me: “The hospital has run out of treatment. There’s nothing more they can do.” He thinks it might’ve been Dad who told him, but I remember it definitely being Mum.

“Yeah, that makes more sense,” he agrees. He doesn’t remember his reaction at all, while I remember mine viscerally – feeling terrified, of both her dying and the great unknown afterwards. My throat clenched tight, unable to swallow.

“I think that's about the first time I even had the thought she might die. But to be honest, I was too busy running around being a bratty little kid, doing bratty little kid stuff to think too much about it. The way I sort of explain it to people is that, when you’re young – boys, anyway – you don’t think much about your mother. She's just the one who keeps growling at you, and making you have a bath and shit like that. So, I have very few memories in general, really.”

He does, however, remember the last time he saw our mother. Again, his recollection gels with mine, and it’s not a great one. It’s of us visiting Mum in hospital, not long before she died. Days, maybe. She’s still with it, but the pain meds are making her woozy and she’s lost a lot of weight. 

“I remember she looked shithouse. I remember giving her a kiss – I mean, she was my mum, so of course I was going to kiss her even though she looked real rough. It’s an unfortunate vision to have as your last memory of your mum. Especially when I can’t actually picture her in my mind. I should try to picture a nicer image of her from a nice photo, like her wedding picture.” 

Jeff does have a wedding photo of Mum – “it’s around here somewhere” – but says it’s a bit upsetting to have it up on the wall. For me, I have heaps of photos of Mum up all over the place and they’re a comfort. Definitely a pleasant reminder.  

Jeff’s memory of learning of our mother’s death is the same as mine, too, although my memories are a bit sharper, despite being younger, and I fill him in on some stuff he’d forgotten. Like, where we were when she died – at a favourite family friend’s house.

“I just remember being at home and Dad saying we didn’t have a mum anymore. That’s the only time I remember him hugging me.” Yeah, Dad was not the hugging type. He’s much better at it now, funnily enough. 

Jeff doesn’t remember going to the funeral home to see Mum after she died. I tell him what has stayed with me – the low light, the flowers, that she looked pretty bloody dead rather than asleep like everyone said. Was it healing? Dunno, but it did give me a slightly – very slightly – better final vision of her. Jeff says he wishes he had that to cleanse his own memory. 

Jeff has one other last memory of our mum. “It was me telling her I hated her when she was trying to get me into the bath.” I laugh. Jeff laughs. It’s hilarious. It’s so Jeff. 

“Well, I don't know if I used those exact words but that’s what I remember,” Jeff continues. “My lasting memory is me telling her I hate her! And that’s about all I remember. I don’t think I was an unhappy kid or anything. I think I was just at that age where I was more into being an idiot to really think about anything beyond that.”

This is the contradiction of my brother. He can be as rough as guts but, like I say, he’s the biggest softie. At my wedding he cried, wishing our mother was there. Yes, he’d had a few drinks, but I think it’s indicative.

He chuckles about it now. 

“Oh, yeah, I lost my shit at your wedding”, he says. “I can be emotional at times. Not sad for me, ‘Boo hoo, poor me’, but sad for her. I mean, poor her.” That’s a thought we come back to a few times over our chat.

“I don’t remember crying at Mum’s funeral,” he says, then retrieves another memory. “Oh, yeah, actually, I do. I cried when the vicar said something about how she’d died so young. That’s quite a weird thing for a wee kid to cry at. I mean, that’s something that would make me cry now, thinking it’s so tragic, that I won’t see her in life. But kids don’t think about that stuff. I just remember I was dressed in terrible brown clothes.” 

Yeah, he was, and later as confirmation of his memory I send him a copy of a picture of me, Jeff, Dad and our grandmother, known as ‘Gam’, taken on our lawn as we were about to head off to her funeral. 

“When an old mate’s partner died recently, I totally lost my shit, which is really weird, too, as she’d had cancer for years, was immobile, that sort of thing. We knew it was coming, but I lost my shit. I think that’s the only time I’ve lost my shit as I think I’m a bit hardened to death from Mum dying so young. Well, not hardened, but I know that death is just a fact of life. A fact of life we had to learn too early.”

Aside from having lots of medical stuff lying around, Jeff remembers our childhood being pretty normal and no one treating him differently – for better or worse – because he had a dying mother.

Yeah, same. I don’t remember anyone saying or doing anything special because Mum was dying. Or dead. 

Jeff does remember being asked if he wanted to go with various people and do various fun things after Mum died, but he didn’t want to. I don’t remember being asked, but I possibly was. I was more of a homebody than Jeff. I was shy, and quite a timid child. I remember being scared of a lot of things. 

One place Jeff did go often, and was very lucky to have, looking back, was the dairy farm of family friends just a few hundred metres up the hill and down the road. Their eldest son was Jeff’s best mate. This family was kind to us all, but they essentially became Jeff’s second family. 

In my memory, the baking tins were always crammed in their warm kitchen, big colourful plastic jugs always brimmed with raw cow’s milk, and their rambling house and garden provided endless hide-and-seek and make-believe possibilities. And, joy of joys, their daughter had a pony. For Jeff the attractions were more about the trees to climb, huts to build, and, later, the motorbikes and cars. All that freedom, with none of the worries of home.

Jeff’s answers to my “what was it like for you…” questions are almost invariably, “I don’t know, I probably just fucked off to the farm”, or variations on that.

“I mean, most days I’d come home from the farm, change my clothes – maybe – have something to eat, then go to bed. Then the next day I’d fuck back off to the farm.” He doesn’t think he did it to avoid being at home, but rather it was a fun place to go and hang with his mates. I’m not so sure about that. Home wasn’t always a relaxing place to be, and/or we were quite often alone, and/or would simply rather be somewhere else.

After Mum died, Jeff reckons the farm and that family helped his life remain pretty stable. Nothing really changed, he says, aside from the obvious. He stayed in the same home, at the same school, kept playing rugby and going to the farm as he grew into his teenage years. 

“I've said, and I don't know what you think, Lee-Anne, but I say that if you had to pick an age in your life for a parent to die, ten is probably as good as it's gonna get. You’re old enough to know what's happened, but, for me at least, I wasn’t old enough or mature enough to have built a relationship with our mother, not like if a parent died when you're older. 

“If you’ve become friends, or  are just starting to become friends, that would be a lot harder. Mind you, a psychologist might say a different thing if they sat me down on a couch.”

I don’t think we’ve discussed this question before – a question a lot of children whose parents have died consider – but those are my thoughts exactly. I’ve always said that if you’re young when your parent dies, say pre-puberty, you’re kinda like a dog – that so long as someone loves you and cares for you, it almost doesn’t matter who it is. I realise that’s a gross generalisation and simplification, and, as Jeff says, a psychologist might stay something different.

However, we both agree we feel we must have had enough support around us that our childhoods sailed on fairly unscathed by that shared monumental trauma. Kudos to our family for that.

However, where we started feeling things differently is when we got into our teens, when other forces – friends, high school, academic expectations or the lack thereof – impact our progressions.

While our father did a solid job of stepping up and becoming a dad – for a while at least – and our stepmother (who came on the scene rather quickly) did a commendable job all difficulties considered, it’s our grandmother who, I feel, did the heavy lifting to keep us kids on track.

Our father hadn’t had much parenting himself, and his parenting ethos was more the ‘pull yourself up by your bootstraps’ credo. But sometimes you need a bit of help getting those darned boots on, or, hell, finding boots that fit. 

For me, our grandmother – our mother’s mother, Gam – was the one there, helping me find the boots that suited and encouraging me to strap them on. Jeff, however, wasn’t as receptive to her influence. He’s not sure why. I know Gam wished she’d had more influence on Jeff, and regretted not pushing harder. 

“Yeah, I’m not saying it’s worked out bad because it hasn’t. I’m really happy with my life. But if Mum had been around, I probably would have done better at school. Or at least have given a fuck about school. I was clever enough, but I just wanted to run around. Maybe Mum would have given me a kick up the bum, or put some expectations on me to do better. 

“I probably should have joined the army, like Gam wanted. I think I would have liked that. It might have given me motivation. Even now I have no self-drive or anything like that. It’s not a great thing, but it is what it is. If Mum had lived, maybe I’d have had someone to push me along and do stuff, or encouraged me to do anything, because I never got any encouragement or help whatsoever. 

“Anyway, I think in the end, it's probably made me a better person. I think it's made me a stronger person, because everything I've done I can claim I have done myself – with my wife, obviously. So that's a positive. Another is that I feel like I can take a lot of life in my stride. 

“But as for what I’d be like if Mum had lived, there’s no parallel Jeffrey in a parallel universe where his mother didn’t die, so how would I know?” 

Quite. And that’s a challenge those of us who’ve had parents die when we were young are faced with when trying to pin down, to quantify, how that affected our life’s trajectory. There’s no verifiable counter-narrative. No window into that parallel universe. 

Anyway, as Jeff says, it is what it is. Could he have done more, would he have done more had Mum been there to lift him up, shape him, direct him? Almost certainly. But he’s happy. He’s got a great marriage, got a great kid, and is the most doting granddad you could find on Facebook. He’s all good. 

Jeff’s pragmatism, and his refusal to go all “poor me”, extends to not using our mother’s death to excuse his teenage misbehaviour. And there was quite a bit of it. 

“Did I do all that smoking weed and drinking piss just because Mum died? Nah, that’s just something we did. Maybe I would have done it a bit less if Mum had been around, but probably not. That’s just the dumb shit we did, but maybe I did it a bit earlier than I would have.”

Then there’s the question of does he miss our mother. Do we miss her? Do we miss the potential of her? “How do you miss someone you don’t know?” Jeff counters, then reframes the thought again to be about what our mother lost. 

“Obviously I’d like to have Mum around. That might be quite nice. She’s never too far from my mind. But now it’s more like, ‘What was going through that poor woman’s mind as she tried to deal with being sick and keeping a family together while preserving a front?’ 

“Obviously, I’d love to have known her as a person. To not have her here to ask questions is like having half the story missing, or half the chapters ripped out of my book. Most people know their parents as people. We don’t know our mother. And we never will.” 

Advice from Jeff on supporting grieving children

Having a refuge, somewhere to be, outside the family helps.

“Being able to go my friend’s farm, to have that outlet, to have my wee island to fuck around on, was really helpful. Being able to go to the farm meant my life could pretty much carry on as it was. And it kept me entertained.

“If I didn’t have that outlet, like most people wouldn’t have, it might have been a very different thing for me. I would have been left on my own a lot more and it all could have been vastly different.”