Kate Walker

“The thing I miss the most is not having an adult relationship with my father.”

Kate Walker’s dad died suddenly when she was eleven. He’d gone to bed with a headache, then was taken to hospital during the night. He never came home.

Kate Walker’s life changed in the middle of the night. Her father had been nursing a headache for about a week but, like most people, thought it would sort itself out. He still had it when he went to bed one night, then in the early hours of the morning it worsened.

“We were woken when the ambulance came for him at about four o’clock. It had obviously got bad enough that Mum had to call for the ambulance, and off he went,” says Kate, now a Wellington-based accountant with three children of her own. 

Then eleven years old and living in Waikato, Kate, her twin brother and their fourteen-year-old brother were taken to an aunt’s house while their mother went to hospital with their father.

Some forty-eight hours later, he was dead. “A thrombosis, a blood clot in the brain. Because it was so quick, we didn’t get into the hospital to see him.”

Kate then reflects, with a touch of surprise, that her father has now been dead longer than he lived. He was only forty-three when he died. 

The call from the hospital came to her aunt’s house and Kate remembers everything about the room in which she heard the news, even though she can’t recall the exact words. 

“I think my aunt told us he was dead. But she can’t have used direct language because I distinctly remember her then telephoning relatives, my twin brother overhearing the conversation and bursting into tears because he didn't actually realise Dad was dead. Whatever she had said, he’d thought it meant Dad was only very sick. I understood though, and my elder brother understood. 

“Dad and I were very close because I was the only girl. I was not quite spoiled, but I was protected as I was rather sickly as a child, so I'd been sort of cosseted. I was very upset. It was so sudden.”

Kate has several vivid memories of the funeral. She remembers they sang “Jerusalem”, their school hymn, and she remembers looking over at her twin brother. And she remembers being at the graveside and asking about the plot next to her father’s.

“It was explained that it was reserved for my mother. I found that quite upsetting, thinking about us losing our mother, with my father having just died.”

Not only that, later, back at their house after the funeral, Kate heard some family friends talking.

“They said something along the lines of, ‘Well, at least if the children have to lose a parent, it's better it was the father rather than the mother’. They probably thought it was a kind thing to say? I don't know. Maybe they meant, ‘Look on the bright side – at least it’s not the mother!’ I thought, ‘Well, that's offensive’. Even at eleven, I remember thinking that was a weird thing to say.”

Kate’s dad died just before her August school holidays. “It was just before Elvis died. I remember that,” she says. Returning to school after the funeral, Kate recalls one of her teachers being upset about her father’s death.

“For some reason Mum hadn’t been able to go to the last round of parent-teacher interviews, so Dad had gone. That was only a couple of days before he died. Dad came home all chuffed and excited because my teacher had said nice things about me. So, that teacher had seen him just before he died, and he was affected by that. He was kind to me. I remember everyone being kind.

“Honestly, it was a bit of a novelty having a father who had died. Divorce was becoming more common but there was still a bit of a stigma to it, so I would always clarify that I didn’t have a father because my father had died, rather than because my parents had divorced. It sounds like a terrible thing to say, but I do remember saying that!”

For the next school holidays, Kate was “sent” to a camp. “I didn’t go with either of my brothers, but a cousin went with me. Maybe it was to give my mother a break? It was kind of exciting, but it also felt like I was being shipped out. I remember telling lots of kids at the school camp about my dad dying, and getting lots of sympathy. I’m not sure if I was talking about it because I was upset, or it was something that made me a little bit different.”

Kate says her mother was very calm after her loss. She didn’t see her cry. “I remember her being sad and quiet, but she wasn’t overt or loud in her grief. Maybe she shielded us a bit? She’s dead now, too, so I can’t ask.” Kate’s mother, who hadn’t previously worked outside the house, soon started part time in an office to bring in money for the family.

Life was quieter without her father. Kate says her mother was “quite introverted” whereas her father was “outgoing, the life and soul of the party, especially compared to Mum”. The big, sociable gatherings with her father’s family, which Kate enjoyed, pretty much stopped. 

“We did keep seeing them, but not as much. Dad had a sister nearby who was unmarried, so we saw a lot of her. His brothers had farms in the Bay of Plenty and I used to go and stay there, particularly as I got older, but probably not as much as we would have done had Dad lived.

“Mum and Dad also had lots of family friends, but they stopped visiting. We’d see them maybe once a year, not like we had done before. Dad was very passionate about rugby and sports, so he'd always be watching rugby or taking us to rugby games, that kind of thing. All the things you did in New Zealand in the 1970s.

“I missed him a lot. I remember crying and Mum being comforting, but not crying herself.” 

Kate’s twin brother possibly felt the loss of their father more, she thinks, missing a male presence in the house. Kate admits she took advantage of her mother’s lack of back-up as she grew through her teens. 

“I was a bit rebellious. I mean, I was still quite straight because I could see what that behaviour could lead to. But I did lots of things I wouldn't have got away with if Dad had been around. My mother was not as strong a person as perhaps she might have been if Dad had been there.

“I look back now and think I was just awful to her. I was probably just acting out. I can't categorically say I did what I did because my dad wasn’t there, but who knows?”

Kate left school one term into her final year, which she may not have done had her dad been around.

“I was hanging out with people who had left already, and I had had enough of school. But after working for a while, I thought, ‘Hm… working in an office isn’t that much fun. I probably do need to do something a bit more, get a bit more qualified’. So, at the end of the year I announced I was going to university to study commerce.

“My mother was horrified because she, I think, thought that because I was bright, I could have moved up in that office to be an executive secretary, not just a secretary, as that was her idea of success. She was horrified I was giving up a job to go to university for no money. But then she was very proud and pleased when I carried on and did well. 

“Dad, I think, he would have been proud of what I decided to do. He would have related to me doing business and commerce. He would have understood and affirmed what I wanted to do. However, maybe I’m basing that on that last memory of him coming home from the parent-teacher interview just before he died. He was just so pleased with what the teacher had said about me.”

Kate exhales as she says this, and sits back, remembering. As far as last memories go, it’s a pretty good one to have.

“The thing I feel I have missed the most is not having an adult relationship with my father. We had only a child-father relationship. I definitely think it's something I missed. It is a loss to not be able to form the next stage of your relationship with a parent. But maybe I would have ended up clashing with him, too. Who knows?”

As for reaching the age her father died, Kate, like most people who lost their parent young, is struck by his youth at the time of his death.

“I've always thought he was young, but as a child you don't think it's that young. But once you reach that same age, and more, you think, ‘Gosh…’ We might feel a bit down that we’re all aging, growing older, but we need to be grateful we’re alive.”

And, just as Kate was becoming a mother, her own mother got sick, then died when Kate’s daughter was very small. “I feel a bit sad for my mother, really, because she was twenty-three years on her own. I think she was lonely when we all left home.” 

It’s nice, Kate says, to see her own children grow to resemble her father, especially her youngest son.

“He has my father's names as his middle names, so sometimes we talk about how he might be like him. For example, we think he’s going to be tall, and my father was tall, so we talk about his height coming from my father. None of my children knew either of my parents, so I think there’s a whole mystery around some other part of me that they don't know anything about. 

“I sometimes say to my husband, if he’s grumpy with the kids, ‘You have got to be careful you don’t get all grumpy and grouchy, because my father was sometimes that and then he dropped dead’, or words to that effect! What I mean is, I know you have got to be careful your kids’ memories of you aren’t cut short, and all they remember is you being grumpy or negative or shouty. 

“It's almost like, if you're making memories for your children, make sure they’re good ones, because they might be very condensed indeed.”