Danielle Heyhoe is a writer who lives in Aotearoa with her husband and three sons. Her fiction has been published by takahē, Landfall, Headland, Penguin Group, Newsroom and Something Other Press, Paris. She was shortlisted for the Michael Gifkins Text Prize 2023 and Sargeson Prize 2020. Danielle is currently working on her second novel.

The first time I remember thinking about my mother dying was when I was eight-years-old, and she was perfectly healthy. She had been coughing for several days; nothing out of the ordinary from the common cold: hot flushes, reddened eyes, clogged sinuses. But everywhere I went, I carried an image of her coughing to death on the kitchen floor. I didn’t understand what needed to happen in someone’s body for them to die, what organ needed to shut down or how much blood they had to lose. I was living with a single parent in Auckland, a city prone to tropical storms and frequent viruses. As far as I was concerned, it was only a matter of months until she was gone.

It took 14 years for my mother to sit me down, nudge a hot chocolate toward me using her knuckle, and say, “Isn’t the ocean bluer than usual? Gosh darling, just look at it.” 

I looked at it. She was stroking her throat. I sipped the brown foam, said something about my sister Rachael stealing my hosiery, again. 

“There is a tumour here, apparently.” Her tiny, freckled hand rested on her tiny, pale throat. “About the size of a marble. Though, the doctor tells me I should have a few good months.”

I watched the ocean. The waiter returned to explain that they were out of my order. He looked between us. She didn’t seem to notice him. “You’re going to find this the hardest, darling.”

We ate Thai takeaways in her lounge after the funeral. I kept looking at the empty concave cushion on the couch beside my brother, trying desperately to remember what it had looked like when she draped her right leg over her left knee, barefoot, bobbing up and down. 

I was 23; an English graduate who had spent several years abroad. The entire 18 months since the hot chocolate incident had been consumed by visiting mum, cooking food small enough for mum to swallow, accompanying mum to chemotherapy, planning mum’s funeral. Now that everything had been completed, I had nothing more to do.

Why hadn’t I planned ahead? Anticipated the end more thoroughly? My siblings were both married, one with children. They had their mortgages to pay, their families to feed, their jobs to show up for. In comparison, I had sunk into a nothingness with no understanding of how I got there, and no way of getting out. This was the part she was referring to when she told me I would find this the hardest. Darling.

I wasn’t a loner. Honestly, I had tons of good friends, which sounds conceited, but the point is this: No matter how many goodhearted people surround you, nothing can prepare you for dispatching from being a person with a mother, to being a person without a mother. Or a husband. Or a father. Or a friend. Or a child. The crimson laceration that pierces the underside of your breastbone blooms spontaneously without ceasing.

If my mother left me with anything, it was her knowledge around people. She was a trained counsellor who had worked with broken humans for well over a decade. And the thing about humans is that we’re always grieving something – a dog, our vanity, cracked delusions, a person, the dream of a person, our hearts that were once whole. 

And you must do it. You must grieve. Name one authentic person you admire who escaped grief. I can think of no one. I will do a terrible job at paraphrasing Bette Davies here, but being human is not for sissies. 

So, I set an hour timer on my phone, and I wrote about her, listened to her favourite songs, read all the cards she’d written me over the years, then all the cards I’d written her – it felt superficial and unnecessary at times. 

I wrote a horrendous poem and foolishly tried to get it published: The chair she sat in, household meals, / The cold metallic sound of steel. / Her jaw once clicked with every morsel, / Just one more time, promise I’ll be joyful. / This place of home is now abandoned. / Rocks, those books, the air we stand in. / Spilt glass of wine left us despairing. / I can’t do this; can’t stop caring. / Sorrow cut the roots from me, / And hung you there upon his tree.

Then when the timer went off on my phone, I called a friend who corralled me over to their place to watch Anchorman. I hadn’t laughed like that in 18 months. I did this every weekend for longer than I can remember. I still can’t watch Under the Tuscan Sun without crying, but I can watch it without feeling afraid, and that’s something.

What’s more is I can go about my life and the thought of my mother is a pleasant one, even necessary. This surprised me. I had imagined grief would follow me around like a shadow, a mugger lurking in the darkness. 

Yet, years later I’m spreading hummus over toast, and she is there. My three-year-old falls off the playground, then abruptly stands and yells, “My back is so strong, I can’t even believe it!” and my mother is laughing, laughing until she is crying. 

We experience another loss, because as you know there are many, and I see her smiling, telling me that I will survive the hardest of them all. I bask in the sun, my face challenging the sky, and I see her there. She is the colour of my life.

When I met my husband, he was disappointed. “I want to meet your mother,” he said.

“Oh, you don’t,” I told him. “If you could, you wouldn’t even recognise me.”

Though she is gone, she is not a thing I have lost, and yet her absence continues to run an exquisite thread through my unremarkable life. That has not ended, not yet.