The day before she died, Donna oanning had confided to her teenage daughter Lizzy that she wasn’t sure she knew how to be the perfect mum.
“Part of me wants to give you everything,” she told the 18-year-old. “But I also need you to know some things are out of bounds. I feel like I am growing into motherhood alongside you.”
The pair had argued over Lizzy’s demand for $20 spending money. But as always, the following night they made up, sitting down to talk calmly inthe family home in Christchurch where Donna was raising her two children, Lizzy and Kent (15), alone.
Donna, a 43-year-old producer and co-host of the Good Living show, had made chicken wraps for dinner, and later that night the family went to their respective rooms in peace.
Lizzy remembers every word of the conversation. Their mother left home for work early the next morning and that night was the last time they would see her alive.
As she fingers her mother’s cross necklace that now hangs around her own neck, Lizzy says, “She was supermum. She was always flying all over the place for work but always thought of us before anything or anyone else.
“She had goals and dreams. She’d also lost a lot of weight and this year was going to be her year. She had so many plans for her, and for us. And we loved her for it.”
Kent adds, “She had so much energy. one time she saved all her Australian coins in a box and said that when it was full she would take us to Queensland. We thought, ‘Yeah, right’, but she did. She wanted to give us every opportunity in life.”
Like so many people in Christchurch, the family were in different parts of the city when the deadly 6.3 quake struck on 22 February. Kent was at his friend’s place near home, Lizzy was in the carpark outside the school where she was studying to be a mechanic, and Donna was at her office in the CTV building in the CBD.
Lizzie knew it was much stronger than the 7.1 quake which rocked Christchurch on 4 September last year.
“The concrete slabs split under my feet and I was thrown five metres from where I had been standing,” she says. “I texted Kent and he and I had been calling oum, but it was just going to answerphone.”
That night, with still no sign of their mother, the teenagers were picked up from their home by an uncle and taken to his house. While they were out, their house was cruelly burgled.
The following day, unable to bear the waiting any longer, they went with their father Jonathan on a grim march through the shattered CBD to the CTV building which had pancaked to the ground. There, rescue teams worked to pull bodies from the rubble.
Unbeknownst to the siblings, another of their uncles, oaurice Gardiner (59) was on the other side of the building helping rescue workers.
“I knew that if Donna was in the building, she was not going to come out alive,” he says. “But the kids lived in hope.”
“I wouldn’t believe mum was dead,” Lizzy says. “I clung to hope for a week and a half.”
Lizzy and Kent became the human face of the earthquake – a photo of them sitting heartbroken outside the building was beamed around the world.
It was almost two weeks after the earthquake that the family was finally told Donna’s body had been found, and on 14 March they buried her. More than 800 people turned out for the funeral and young Kent was one of the pall-bearers.
Now, however, Donna’s two children are dealing with their loss in very different ways. Kent wants a holiday and to get away from Christchurch, though he adds, “Everything I do for the rest of my life is going to be for oum”.
Lizzy, on the other hand, who has put her mechanics course on hold, wants to help rebuild the city in which she feels close to her mother. Twisting a gold bracelet that her mother was wearing when she died and which Lizzy vows she will never take off, she says, “People ask me how I’m dealing with her being gone. I’ve chosen not to. People say I have to talk about it, but actually, no, I don’t have to.
“I just want to think that she was here, and celebrate that. our best tribute is to grow into the kind of people she wanted us to be – kind people who worked hard and have strong values.”
For their uncle oaurice, who lost his own beloved wife Nola and buried her just days before his sister Donna was laid to rest, there are parallels in the way he and the teenagers are reaching out for new lives. That’s why he has set up a trust fund for the children.
“The reality is that they don’t have anyone to ask for $20 any more, or to ask, ‘What’s for dinner?’ I think that’s what’s sinking in for them now,” he says. “The trust fund is to secure their future.
“We all feel like we’re in a hole with sharp spikes in it, though the spikes get less sharp over time. Time is a great healer. We will all rebuild our lives.”
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