Reflecting on my own whakapapa journey, I recognised seven such moments stretched across more than four decades. At first, they looked like unrelated events: marriage, bereavement, illness, redundancy, and family estrangement. Yet when viewed together, a pattern emerged. Each event dismantled an identity I had been carrying. Each required something to be surrendered. Each left behind something worth keeping.

 That observation became the foundation of my paper, Te Whitu Matenga Wairua — Seven Symbolic Deaths. In that paper, I explore the pattern through two lenses.

 The first comes from Taylor Welch’s observation that crisis often forces consecration. Sometimes life removes structures we would never willingly leave behind. The loss creates a cave season—a period of stillness, uncertainty, and confrontation with us, a site of praxis —before something new can emerge.

 The second lens comes from whakapapa and numerology. Seven is my ariki number, determined by birthdate and traditionally associated with completion. I did not identify seven deaths and then assign meaning to the number. The number was already present.

What changed was my ability to see the pattern.

There is also a convergence that fascinates me. Modern personal-development theory, clinical psychology, and biomedical research all point toward a similar principle: what remains unseen continues to exert influence, and what is acknowledged can begin to transform. What is not metabolised does not simply disappear. It remains active in our lives, our relationships, and even our bodies.

 The table below summarises the seven symbolic deaths. It is not a record of the events themselves so much as a record of what each event required me to relinquish, what needed composting, and what eventually emerged on the other side.

 Each symbolic death involved four movements: an event, the loss of an identity, the release of something no longer serving me, and the emergence of a new way of understanding myself and my whakapapa (see map below).

Seven Deaths, One Whakapapa

What strikes me most now is that these are not seven separate stories.

They are one story.

Each death involved the loss of something I believed I needed to be safe, valued, loved, successful, or accepted.

· The death of innocence challenged inherited assumptions about truth and belonging.

· The death of my father dismantled the security rooted in a single person holding everything together.

· Cancer disrupted the certainty that my body would always do what I asked of it.

· The death of my mother severed the daughter identity I had carried all my life.

· Redundancy dismantled an identity built around achievement and professional contribution.

· The second cancer diagnosis exposed an employee identity built on endurance and self-sacrifice.

· The final death required surrendering the belief that love always means carrying burdens that belong to someone else.

Seen this way, the symbolic deaths were not simply losses.

They were reorganisations of identity.

There is a similar insight in trauma-recovery literature. Psychiatrist Judith Herman’s work names acknowledgement — seeing and naming what happened, without softening it — as the first step before anything can truly heal. Different language, same principle. Nothing shifts until it is seen clearly. Nothing changes until it is named for what it is.

That is what these seven deaths ultimately gave me: sight.

Not all at once.

Not easily.

Not without cost.

If there is one thing I would say to someone experiencing their own symbolic death, it is this: the cave is not necessarily punishment. Sometimes it is preparation. Sometimes what feels like everything falling apart is the dismantling of an identity that can no longer carry you where you need to go.

I did not choose any of these seven deaths.

But I would not be the person I am without them.

One whakapapa.

Seven symbolic deaths.

A life continually being re-formed.

Spiritual Death	What Happened	The Symbolic Death (What was lost)	What Was Let Go	What I Take Forward
1. Death of Innocence 1983	Marriage of religious duty; discovering people could lie; parents revealed as human rather than the standard demanded of others.	The Pākehā-as-goal frame: the illusion that the adults around me were the standard.	The inherited lie that colonial frames were the measure of worth — ‘learn the ways of the Pākehā’.	Recognition that the Whakapapa Dilemma began here — this is where the questioning started. Acknowledgement that this same exclusion existed around Māori and the whakapapa of Abraham.
2. Death of Whakapapa Anchor 1998 — Major Whakapapa Shift	Ill for many years. Died without family around him. Tangihanga disconnect; family fracture getting him back to his home in Shannon.	Dad is the family’s quiet core. Lost the chance to know him fully while he lived.	The family fracture that followed his passing.  Not mine to carry.	The Legacy he left behind in the lives of others. The decision to have children, to continue his lineage — building forward inside the wreckage. The simple image of what mattered was displayed in Tauawhi Men’s Centre in Gisborne — a man, thick white hair, white polo shirt, black trousers held up with rope as a belt. No costume of importance, unbothered by status — because he was the importance. A world that told Māori men they weren’t enough; he just set that quietly down.
3. Death of Physical Certainty 2010	Body permanently changed — 10 months of chemo, weekly hospital visits. Continued to work full time: my husband’s hidden weight only visible once treatment stopped; Mum’s passing arriving at the close of the same season.	The body as it was; my hair, my strength; the assumption of ongoing health.	The fear that God wouldn’t pull me through — met instead with gratitude that He did.	Grace and loss can coexist; they don’t have to resolve into one or the other. Taku Tinana was doing all she could to keep me going.
4. Death of Belonging 2011 — Daughter Identity Severed	Discovering Mum’s hidden suffering and poverty — kept from me; the scarf Christmas gift; the unopened Christmas card in the letterbox. She went before me.	The daughter’s role: the chance to be there for her in her later years. Denied her heritage as a child, denied comfort in her older years.	A difficult life that ended in difficulty. The reunion that never came, and the fracture that followed her passing.	She gave what she was given; she passed forward what she knew.
5. Death of Institutional Belonging 2020	The manipulation and injustice; set aside from a team of 150; the project that saved money and time, unacknowledged; colleagues who looked away.	“After 35 years, I didn’t even have a career to show for my life’s work.” Loss of manager role, loss of financial entitlement. Became invisible. Loyalty destroyed.	The physical collapse afterwards — naming its link to cancer’s return.	Refusal to let it happen again — the start of the exit plan, the counselling path. Entrance into the cave of consecration. The acknowledgement that the corporate life gave us the financial backing for our children’s futures.
6. Death of the Endurance Identity 2023	Mastectomy, radiation therapy through Christmas, seven months of chemo — “the second assault on my body”. Start of two years of ill health.	The link to the redundancy — the employee was finally dead.	The old corporate habit of managing illness the way I’d managed a project. Enduring hours of non-stop work. Physical separation — no central office to work from.	A chance reconnection with my younger brother in the hospital sowed the seeds of dimension autophagy. Learning to listen to the body — TPO forming in words, arriving inside the hardest stretch.
7. Death of Rescuer Identity 2025	Twelve months caring for a mokopuna out of aroha, taken on in full knowledge of what it would ask of me. Recognising in myself a lifelong pattern of always being the one who absorbs the cost.	The role I’d carried without being asked to; the belief that taking on someone else’s burden was always the right thing to do.	The chaos of trying to hold together what was never mine to hold.	Understanding that my health mattered as much as anyone’s need of me. going forward. A closer connection with one sibling, growing through this same season.