Lendl Oosthuizen

“Mum hugged me and said, ‘Your dad has gone to heaven’.”

Lendl Oosthuizen’s family moved from Zimbabwe to New Zealand in 2003, after handing the family’s farm lease back to the government. Settling in Hawke’s Bay, a year and a half later everything changed again for the sixteen-year-old.

Two decades after her family arrived in New Zealand, Lendl Oosthuizen’s accent is almost pure Kiwi. Her Zimbabwean roots cling mostly to her elongated ‘a’.

“Zimbabwe was an amazing place to grow up and I’m very grateful for my childhood there. It’s an incredibly beautiful country that’s been ruined by its political situation,” she says, curled on her couch in her Wellington home. She’s on a day off from her job as a travel agent and has just painted her long nails – with professional effect – in fluoro pink. She finds doing her nails calming.

“In the early 2000s, Zimbabwe was becoming really unsafe and not a great place to raise a family. My parents thought, ‘What’s the situation going to be like in five years? In ten? What are we going to do for our kids?’ We leased a huge farm but they gave up everything to move to Hawke’s Bay to give me and my three siblings another life.

“That was hard as a fifteen-year-old – that’s not a great age to move countries, lose all your friends, and be so different, with a different accent. But we got on with it. And I love being in New Zealand,” she says.

Chances are the family would have been evicted anyway due to then-president Robert Mugabe’s land reforms, which took farm leases from white farmers and redistributed them to black farmers. It was better to leave before eviction became inevitable.

As part of their visa requirements, Lendl’s parents, Leon and Margie, had to buy a business and employ locals. They opted for growing hydroponic tomatoes, turning back to horticulture, an industry they knew as they grew tobacco back in Zimbabwe.

But it was a hard life, Lendl says. The hothouses were old, the boiler to heat them often broke, and money was tight. It was also a very different lifestyle, and a very different way of farming, not least because the farm was well under a hectare, compared to the 1000-hectare farm in Zimbabwe, where Lendl could ride for two hours on a quad bike before reaching the boundary.

Despite the challenges, the six Oosthuizens set about becoming part of their new community and, only a year and a half after the family arrived, the connections they built became vitally important on 13 September 2004.

That day, Lendl’s mother met her at the door when she arrived home from school.

“That wasn’t so unusual, but the look on her face, the look in her eye… She gave me the biggest hug and wouldn't let go. I guess I immediately knew what was wrong. Not necessarily exactly what, but by the way she was hugging me and crying, I knew. I remember saying, ‘Mum, you just need to tell me. You just need to tell me’. She knew that what she had to say was going to change my life forever and I think she wanted to delay it as much as she could.

“Mum hugged me and said, ‘Your dad has gone to heaven’. I lost it. I remember running screaming down the passage and not wanting to be near anyone – even my mother. But she came and found me.”

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Lendl with her father, Leon.

Lendl was the first of the four Oosthuizen kids to arrive home that day. Each was met at the door and told the terrible news.

Their father had died much earlier in the day, but Lendl says her mum didn’t want to tell the kids at school. She wanted their lives to remain “normal” for as long as possible – wanted their father to remain alive to them for as long as possible.

The news was that Leon had been driving their delivery van along what was then the main road from Hastings to Napier – one the family had taken, and would continue to take, hundreds of times – when he collided with a truck while overtaking. The collision was fatal. Their father was gone.

Lendl doesn’t remember the other children arriving home or how they reacted. “I just remember feeling so numb. And I remember feeling instant regret.” Regret because one of her final interactions with her father was something she isn’t proud of.

“Obviously my feelings and emotions have changed so much over the years from when it all happened when I was sixteen. At that age you aren’t thinking you should be nicer to your parents because they might die. But a few nights before he died, my dad came to my sleepout and asked me if I’d help him check the boiler. It was still wintry, so we needed to keep the glasshouses warm for the tomatoes. He said something like, ‘I’d love you to come and sit with me while I sort it out’. But it was cold and I was like, ‘Nope, sorry, I want to read my book’.

“I really regret that, and I regret that I can’t remember the last thing I said to him. Thinking back I wonder, ‘Did I even say goodbye that day? Or did I just run out the door?’ That whole period is a rush of disbelief, grief and regret.”

As the eldest, Lendl immediately felt she had to be strong for her three younger siblings and her grieving mother, and they had to pull together to keep the tomato business going. “I wanted to move forward. I don’t think it was so much about ‘getting over it’, but more about helping those around me.”

Lendl took some comfort, however, from knowing what her father wanted done with his remains. Shortly before he died, Lendl and her dad were driving around on deliveries when they happened to stop at a cemetery. “I can’t put my finger on what made us stop, as we weren’t particularly interested in cemeteries, but it’s such a beautiful hillside cemetery with a view all over Napier and out into Hawke Bay. It's a really beautiful resting place, if you will.

“Dad and I sat there and talked about dying and death, and whether we would prefer to be buried or cremated. It was a bizarre conversation, in hindsight. He said to me, ‘I never want to be buried. I don’t want people to feel they have to go to a specific place to be near me. I want to be everywhere, so I'd prefer to be cremated and for my ashes to be scattered’.

“Then, a few weeks later, there we were, planning Dad's funeral.”

So when the funeral director asked if their dad wanted to be buried or cremated, Lendl could answer. “Having that odd-at-the-time conversation was good because he got his wish.”

After Leon’s death, life had to go on and there was much to be done. School had to be attended. Tomatoes had to be grown and delivered. Money had to be made.

“In the beginning it was very hard, and I wanted to protect my mother,” says Lendl. “When I was younger, my mother had severe depression to the point where she was hospitalised. I can remember going to the hospital and seeing her there as if it was only five minutes ago. It's probably one of my most vivid childhood memories.

“All I could think after losing Dad was, ‘I don't want Mum to be in that position again. I don't even want to know what’s next if that happens again’. We had all been through so much stress and uncertainty – leaving Africa, getting here, trying to make the business work financially, and now this? What else could happen?

“I do think I had to grow up very quickly – too quickly to grieve properly for Dad.”

Unfortunately, there was more bad news. With Lendl’s father’s death the family’s eligibility to remain in New Zealand was thrown into peril. Her parents were in New Zealand on a partnership visa, but that became void without Leon and her mother apparently wasn’t eligible for another type of visa.

“I don’t remember a lot of that, but I remember Mum being panicked, as you would be, about what we were going to do. Going back to Zimbabwe was not an option,” says Lendl.

However, as her father had already built strong community relationships, the local newspaper and Member of Parliament got behind the family. Their mother was eventually granted a work visa and they were allowed to stay. Further, the community donated thousands of dollars to support the family.

“I don’t remember the timings very well, but I’m sure that only a few days after Dad died, the editor of the Hawke’s Bay Today newspaper turned up saying people wanted to donate money. The healing that came from the Hawke’s Bay community was incredible.”

The community’s support was further shown by the numbers who attended her father’s funeral, held the day before Lendl’s seventeenth birthday.

“Being in a place for only a year and a half and having over 400 people turn up to farewell him? That was testament to the kind of person Dad was. So many people sent cards and dropped off flowers saying, ‘I meet your dad a handful of times – or even once – and I remember him, he made my day’. That was my dad.”

Some family support was available around the time of the funeral. Leon’s identical twin brother flew in from Australia, and their sister-in-law travelled from Dubai. Leon’s funeral was delayed until they could arrive.

“As the eldest I had quite a lot to do with the funeral,” says Lendl. “I remember deciding the flowers – I think they were donated – and the casket. I remember it all feeling ridiculous because you lose someone and you're, like, ‘Who cares what kind of coffin?!’ I knew Dad would have been, like, ‘Just get some plywood from out the back and nail it together’.

“I was in a little church group at the time, so I sang at the funeral. I sang ‘The Rose’. Dad loved supporting me in all the drama and music I did. But that was the last time I sang in front of people.” As for her birthday the following day, Lendl describes a kind of “amnesia” around it. However, she remembers feeling loved.

Funeral done, it was time to get on with life, starting with going back to school. Lendl thinks she was off school for a couple of weeks. “I remember feeling strange going back to school. Not necessarily the school part, but, like, how do I go on with normal life? Everyone's going about their business and I just want to scream.

“But everyone was amazing. A lot of people came up to say, ‘I'm really sorry’, and give me a hug. However, I also felt like others avoided me, which I kind of understand – like, what do you say? It just felt bizarre, like I was going through a dream. You do what you need to do, but it’s unreal.”

Counselling was offered, but as an understandably reluctant and resistant teenager, Lendl fended off efforts to coax her open.

“I absolutely hated going to counselling. I remember sitting on that couch and trying to talk – trying to explain my feelings to somebody who I thought would never, ever understand. I didn't believe anybody in the world would understand what it was like to move countries, get a second chance at life, and then lose their father. It felt like such a kick in the teeth. I didn't feel like anybody could ever comprehend it, apart from my immediate family, who I didn't want to talk to.

“Also, I wanted to protect my mother. I didn’t want to burden her with my feelings. I didn’t want to be the cause of any more stress for her. Now I realise that she’s my parent, she is the person I should have gone to, but back then I thought, ‘He’s gone, let's just get on with it’.

“It was a totally horrific time and I just didn’t see what talking about it was going to do. Today I wish I had felt differently as it took me a long time to heal.”

Lendl finished her schooling with what she says was a “dream-like unreality” clinging to her for the duration, although she enjoyed doing lots of theatre productions and being with her friends.

Then, rather than moving to Wellington with university-bound friends as would have been her next move had her father not died, she stayed in Hawke’s Bay, partly to keep an eye on her siblings and help her mother. By this time her mum had wrapped up the tomato business as it was too difficult. Lendl got a job in retail, which led her, a year later, to transfer to Wellington.

Apart from delaying her plans by a year – which she says was the right thing to do – Lendl thinks her life in her late teens and early twenties would have been much the same had her father lived. It’s more in her later twenties and thirties that she feels her father’s loss made more of an impact, especially around her financial nous.

And, while Lendl is far from a “glass-half-empty” kind of a girl, she believes his innate positivity would have rubbed off on her more.

“He was larger than life. He was an absolute mountain of a man and so positive. Despite incredible adversity in his life, he somehow managed to get up every day and slap a smile on. He was always so happy, always cracking a joke and fooling around. I do wonder what having that positive influence on my life would have done.”

Part of that, maybe, could have benefited Lendl’s relationship with her mother, she thinks.

“My dad and mum were very different. I love Mum to pieces, and she’s given up so much for us all. She’s incredible in the things she’s been through in her life, and I can’t even imagine how she got out of bed and got on with things. She just looks at life differently to me – I’m more like Dad, and I want to try and look on the positive side. I want to have a happy life, even when things are a bit, well, a bit shit. I think Dad would have acted as a buffer between me and my mother, so we would get on better, generally.”

In her twenties Lendl did finally access some counselling, as her work offered it for free. She didn’t really gel with that therapist so put the idea aside for another few years until her best friend suggested she give it another go.

“I now swear by counselling for everyone. It is so great to speak to a neutral person who has no idea about my life, but who can help me with tools to manage my emotions and let it all out. I've never really bottled it all in, but I think I did put on a brave face as I didn’t want to burden other people, even my friends. I didn't want to be ‘poor sad Lendl, always talking about her dad who's died’, you know?

“The death of a parent is a forever thing, but for everyone else it’s a terrible thing they’ll support you through for a while, then they’ll go on with their lives – as they must, it’s not their tragedy. But you’re there thinking, ‘How am I going to get on with this?’ But, you do.

“Therapy has helped me figure out who I am and where I belong. It’s really helped me in relationships, but beyond that I think it's helped me find myself. It’s helped me come to terms with the fact that everything I felt was okay, completely normal, and that I'm allowed to be emotional about Dad’s death. I'm allowed to be sad about it and I'm allowed to be angry about it, whereas for years I felt like I should just bottle those things up.

“Even just a few years after he died I thought, ‘It's been so long ago now, what's the point of opening up this can of worms? I’ve dealt with it. I'm moving on’. But that’s rubbish. Having done therapy means when I have adversity in my life, I'm better able to deal with it at the time. I don't bottle it up, and I rely on the people around me to support me.

“I know more about who I am, and I’m okay with myself. That’s a pretty cool feeling.”

Her father’s loss has also taught Lendl that every moment is precious. She makes huge efforts to live in the now, rather than wallowing in the past. And the arrival of her father’s first grandchild, Lendl’s niece, sparked many thoughts of her dad.

“I feel like there were a few years where I didn’t think of him much. Now it’s so lovely thinking about what kind of granddad – or Oupa, as we would have called him – he would have been. My sister and I have had beautiful moments talking about what he would have thought, and how much we yearn for him to be here. It’s lovely to remember him that way.”

Generally, remembering has become easier, Lendl says, and with that passing of time the siblings can increasingly speak of their father more freely. “For Christmas in 2018 or 2019, we had some family videos transferred onto digital and everyone got a copy. There are hours, dozens of hours, of videos. Watching those, seeing footage of him and hearing his voice, made him come alive in our lives again.”

Even after living half her lifetime without her father, Lendl feels him with her in spirit, and sometimes very strongly. Rather than “getting over” his death, she focuses on living with his loss, she says.

“I want more than anything to have him here, but I can't have that. Instead, I have a real feeling of gratitude, because losing him has taught me a lot – although I didn’t feel that at the time, and not for a very long time afterwards.

“But now I look at the impact he had when he was alive, and how he was as a person, and it's made me reflect on how I want to be. What impression do I want to leave on other people, even just in small day-to-day interactions, small kindnesses? That’s what was important for him. If he was still alive, I’m not sure I would have received that wisdom and learned from his example.

“I think losing him was as important as having him for the years I did. That's a very strange thing to say, but it’s also kind of cool because it comes from a place of acceptance. I can see I’ve learned so much from losing my father.”

Story by Lee-Anne Duncan