TOO YOUNG: Experiences of Childhood Bereavement

Date: 10/09/2026
Time: 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm
Venue: Centre – Te Whare Hapori o Ngā Puna Waiora, Cnr Colombo Street &, Rintoul Street, Newtown, Wellington

How important it is that parents who have the ‘luxury’ of having time to prepare for their death, get brave and prepare their children for after they’ve died. That starts with being honest (being dishonest has a huge negative legacy!), but it’s also about ensuring you leave behind things to remind them of you, and that they have a range of people around them to care for them. But I also want to talk about how love is also a legacy – I’ve had soooo many people say they still feel their parents’ love, and the value of their parents’ love, even decades after they’ve died. I know that, if I was a parent facing death (or even not!) this would bring me great comfort. Love endures!

ABOUT THE PRESENTER:
Lee-Ann Duncan

When Lee-Anne Duncan was eight years old, her mother told her she was going to die. A few months later, just before Christmas, and just after Lee-Anne turned nine, she did. A Wellington-based journalist and writer, Lee-Anne is using her experience of losing a mother at a young age, along with other New Zealanders’ stories, to create a book and website (www.tooyoung.org.nz) that gives voice to a child’s experience of parental death and its impacts. Lee-Anne-Anne’s book will be published later this year. As well as helping others who lost their parents young find comfort, Lee-Anne’s focus is on how we – as parents, family and friends, and as a society – can mitigate some of the harms from early parental loss. Her book, she hopes, will help us “do death” better for children – in short, using lived experience to suggest ways we might “make a terrible situation slightly less terrible”. Many of her interviewees didn’t feel equipped to address their grief until their middle years, and spoke to Lee-Anne of their wish to have had “the tools, the language” much younger to share their feelings, to ask for help. This has spurred Lee-Anne to push for grief literacy to be taught in schools, so the next generation of New Zealanders understand grief and bereavement, know how to ask for help, and how to support others.

RSVP and questions to [email protected]