Kat Schwarzkopf

“If my Papa had lived, I probably would have learned to fly an aeroplane!”

Kat Schwarzkoft’s father died suddenly when he fell through a roof. Kat thinks of her Papa, and his love for aviation, whenever she sees a small plane in flight.

Kat Schwarzkoft’s teenaged son is considering becoming an air and space engineer. If he does, he’ll follow directly in his grandfather’s footsteps, even though he never met the man who died two decades before his birth.

“My mother sent him my father’s old engineering instruments. I think it’s cool he’s got them, even though they’re obsolete now, and he never had a connection with my father,” says Kat, German by birth, who has now lived in New Zealand, mostly in Wellington, since 1999. 

I know Kat – she’s an accountant and auditor by trade, but is also a musician and a primary school teacher aide. However, through all the years I’d known her, chatting to her on many occasions about all sorts of things, I didn’t know her father had died in rather dramatic circumstances. It wasn’t until I started asking around for people who, like me, had experienced parental loss as a child, that she offered that info. 

And that’s the thing – there are heaps of us ‘adults bereaved as children’ around, even if we don’t drop it into conversation often. We don’t usually get the chance to talk about what we’ve been through in losing a parent. In talking to me for this story, Kat, like others, valued the chance to talk once again about their parent.

Kat’s early life was in the north of Germany. Her father, aside from his work as an air and space (“mostly space,” says Kat) engineer, was also a mad-keen aviation photographer and writer. A project manager for a satellite building project, he travelled a lot for his work, including to French Guyana to see a rocket launch, which was clearly a career highlight. At least it stuck in the memory of the young girl Kat was when it happened. 

“I thought he had the coolest job,” she says. 

When Kat was nine, the family, including her two older brothers, moved south to the German Alps. This new home was two hours away from his work base, so Kat’s dad came home only on weekends. It’s clear she loved him dearly, and the two, with Kat the youngest in the family, spent a lot of time together. 

“I think he was very caring. He was a lot of fun, perhaps because we mostly saw him on the weekends and holidays, so we did fun things. He took me seriously when I said something, and I remember going places with him. But I’m not sure which are real memories or from photos – as a photographer, he took a lot of photos.

“He was quite serious – he was a scientist. He was also a hobby pilot, so he spent a lot of time at little airports for little planes.” Then she laughs, “I spent a lot of time watching him go up and down, up and down in planes and gliders. I would sometimes go on trips with him, just me, when he went away on assignment as an aviation journalist. One time was just before he died, when we went over the Alps on a plane into Italy. And we did some tramping in the Alps. He loved the mountains. He had asthma when he was young, so was sent to the Alps to recuperate, pretty much by himself, with his family staying way up by the North Sea.”

On one such assignment, in April 1985, he went to France, taking Kat and her mother with him. He needed to take photos of small planes taking off from an aeroplane factory, and for this he needed a high vantage point. He asked if it was safe to climb onto the factory roof, and was told yes, it was perfectly safe.

So, up he went. 

“But it wasn’t safe and he fell through plexiglass,” says Kat, who was eleven at the time. “He didn’t actually fall that far, but the bigger problem was the table underneath him and, as he came down, he caught his feet on the table, and the back of his head crashed into the concrete floor.” The impact caused a brain bleed. “It was all very sudden.” 

Kat can’t remember what she and her mother were doing when she heard about the accident, but says they had likely been having a lovely day exploring the town, shopping and lunching. The next thing she can remember of that day is being at the hospital and a doctor, with “blood all down his front”, talking to them. At this point, her father was still alive, but his prognosis was poor.

Her mother sent Kat back to the hotel with some people from the factory while she stayed at the hospital to be with her husband. “My mother assumed the French people would take me into the hotel and look after me, but they didn’t. They just dropped me off. I spent that whole night on my own in a foreign hotel. I was all on my own and I couldn’t speak French. I watched some war movies because they had some German soldiers in them. I kept walking up and down to reception because I didn’t know what was going on. It was all very traumatic.” 

The trauma of that night in the hotel has stayed with Kat over all the years since, and she’s sure it affects her today. She hates uncertainty, not knowing what’s going on, and is always worried when it looks like someone might fall and hit their head on a hard surface. 

With her father critically injured in the French hospital, Kat’s mother drove her back to the Alps. Kat’s two brothers had been staying with their maternal grandparents while the rest of the family was in France, so no one was home. Kat was dropped off to family friends she didn’t know very well. “They were very lovely, but I cried so much that Mama had to come back and comfort me, but then she drove the six hours back to France to be with Papa in hospital.”

However, at some point during a that journey, her father died. Kat’s mother turned around and came back to Germany to tell her the news.

“I remember her telling me that something awful had happened. She started crying and she gave me a big hug. I didn’t cry – I honestly didn’t know what to do, how to react. It was only us two for a few days until my grandparents brought my brothers back. They were then thirteen and fifteen. It was a big shock for them. They knew a lot more about what it all meant, although they didn’t have quite the trauma with it that I had.”

Funeral plans began. Kat remembers going everywhere with her mother as she organised the funeral. She felt quite overwhelmed. 

In Germany, open caskets aren’t common, and Kat never saw her father’s body in what was her first experience of death. “It didn’t really sink in. For years I thought he was going to come to the front door and knock. At the funeral, I was shaking, which is what I do when I’m emotional. 

“After the funeral, I kept asking relatives to walk with me back and forth between the café, where we had gone afterwards, and the graveyard. I don’t know why I did that, but I guess I wanted to look at his grave again, maybe to make sure it was all real, that he was really there. But it didn’t feel real. My relatives were really patient.”

Kat says even though it felt all unreal, death is quite openly talked about in Germany. There was no question of her not going to the funeral, and she’s glad she went. Graves in Germany are generally held by for only twenty to thirty years or so, until the remains have decomposed, then the grave is reused. Kat remembers finding a jawbone when they planted some flowers at her father’s grave.

After the funeral, her mother got down to the business of rebuilding the family. 

“Like after any sort of life shock, we had to get on with rebuilding. Mama didn’t have a job at that time, as we’d been in that town only two years and us kids hadn’t settled well. She sold our house in the north of Germany because she had to pay the mortgage on our house in the Alps, and she worked in various jobs over the years.” Those jobs included teaching piano, which she enjoyed, and working in accounts, which Kat says she did not. 

There was no life insurance to offer a buffer, but the children got “half-orphan” payments and her mother received a widow’s benefit. It wasn’t much, and money was tight after her father died, which it hadn’t been while he had lived.

“Now we would get clothes for our birthdays, but not in between. A special treat would be six bottles of apple juice. I’m good at managing money, and I got that from Mama during this time. I don’t know how she did it.” Kat believes her mother coped well. “She was – and still is – a very caring person.”

It might have been tempting to return the family to the north, closer to family, but Kat says that would have been more disruptive for everyone, especially her older brothers. “There were lots of musical things we could do where we were, which was very important to us, especially at that time.” 

Her maternal grandparents moved closer to help where they could, and her mother made good friends in the town. “Another impact though, is that, apart from one uncle and his family who liked to come down to the Alps to go tramping and skiing, we didn’t see Papa’s family again for at least twenty years.” Kat took her own family to meet them in 2016, and loved seeing her paternal relations, looking at photos of her father as a boy, and finding out more about his younger years. 

“I found out that my father had a split little toe, and my daughter has that too. The questions you ask about your parents growing up – you know, what they were like as kids and all that – that’s missing for my father. My brothers sometimes know more than I do, being that bit older and still living in Germany, closer to my father’s family. I can talk to my mother about some stuff, but I think she’s still sad. I get sad too, sometimes, when I think about what life could have been. If my Papa had lived I probably would have learned to fly an aeroplane!”

Back at school after her father’s death, Kat had to work out how to behave as “the girl with a dead father”. “One thing that still shocks me today is that something funny happened, and I laughed, and everyone seemed so shocked. I can’t remember if anything was actually said, or it was just the looks, but I knew they thought I shouldn’t be laughing as my father had just died. But that doesn’t mean I can’t laugh! I remember being upset about that. 

“Other than that, nothing was really said. The teachers didn’t say anything, and I think I was glad about that. I think I was quite happy that people left me to it, given how I felt about them looking at me when I laughed. I didn't feel like I wanted to talk too much about it. But maybe that was because at that stage I still didn’t really believe it was real, that Papa was really dead. That reality gradually came to me over the next two to three years.”

Germany, in the 1980s at least, offered quite a lot for bereaved children. Children who suffered trauma – especially if they also had health issues – could go to special camps. “For a few weeks you could go with a whole lot of other children. You would have health treatments, and do activities like go for walks, get outside. Mine was held in a nunnery… 

“My middle brother and I went there the same year Papa died – quite soon after he died, I think. There was a girl there, around my age, whose mother had died of cancer. We did talk about our parents, and she said her situation was a bit worse than mine because her mum died, not her dad. She argued that it’s worse to lose a mother than a father. But how do you make that judgement? It’s like trying to work out if it’s worse to lose a parent suddenly or when it’s expected? What’s the impact?” 

The presence of her brothers perhaps cushioned some of the loss of her dad, Kat thinks, as they were old enough to pick her up from places and offer an older male presence. But she definitely felt the loss after teenaged arguments with her mother.

“Having another adult to talk to would have been really good. I had my grandparents who’d moved down to us, but it’s not the same. Those situations would have been better with another parent.” On the upside, Kat feels she’s probably closer to her mother today than she might have been. “I was slightly a daddy’s girl!” 

Her loss impacted Kat’s decision about what to study at university, and her choice of career. “If Papa had been alive, I feel like I would have studied engineering or physics, or something like that. But I wasn't brave enough because I felt like I had no one to ask about the nitty gritty of the sciences. I went for accounting and finance, because I was good at it, and my grandfather was an entrepreneur. If my father had been there, I would have considered other options much more.” 

Kat’s mother never remarried. Kat thinks she was working for her family so hard she was perfectly happy to come home to peace and quiet, even though marrying might have eased her finances. Late in their schooling, her brothers and Kat all opted to go to boarding school, accessing scholarships and government funding, which they might not have been offered had their father lived. 

“Mama had gone to boarding school and had sworn we would not go. But she saw the benefits of us going as it was a great opportunity, and we were old enough to decide for ourselves.” 

In Germany, when a parent dies, their children automatically get half the inheritance, Kat explains. If those children are under eighteen, a guardian is appointed to act in the interests of each child. That sounds good, but it also requires a level of paperwork for a bereaved parent. 

“All we were inheriting was a mortgage, not money,” says Kat. “There wasn’t really any money, and what there was Mama had to use to pay off the mortgage. It was a huge amount of administrative work.”

From that experience, Kat is very organised in having her financial affairs well settled should anything happen to her. 

“When I had a big operation, I wrote down everything I could for my husband in case I died. I don’t know if everyone does that, but for me that’s normal. I needed to be prepared. I feel spouses need to have quick access to finances in case they have to pay for a funeral. These are the things I think about.

“Since I had my children, the idea of death, especially sudden death, is always in the back of my mind. I’m thinking that, at any moment, one of my children, me or my husband, could fall, hit their head and die.” 

Despite that focus, the anniversary of her father’s death usually passes Kat by without notice.

“I think about him on his birthday. I don’t remember the day he died, although I know it’s in April. My mother and brothers remember it. It’s the distance, I think. But I didn’t even when I was in Germany. On his birthday, I don’t do much – it’s more that I think about him and think about how many years I’ve been without him.” 

Kat has a particularly precious connection to her father from his final hours. The French hotel had an underground car park, and “just for fun” Kat had got in his car and driven out of the car park exit with him. Then she jumped out, said goodbye, and her father continued off to his photo shoot.

She laughs about it, but also, it means something to her. “I was the last person in my family to say goodbye to him! I have held onto that, that I was the last one to speak to him. And I am glad. It was a nice goodbye. It is a bit special.”

Advice from Kat on supporting grieving children

This is quite a common feeling among children whose parents have died, but when Kat was young, she wished that people she meets didn’t automatically assume she has a father. Then she’s forced into saying “no” and explaining that her father died.

“I have always felt – and it’s still like this in a way – that I then have to comfort that other person for my father’s death. When I say, ‘My father died when I was eleven’, they then feel really bad for me, and I need to comfort them so they don’t feel bad about my loss.

“That doesn't make any sense, but that's how it feels. Usually it’s easier to cut the subject short.”