Napier woman Doris Day found love with man who conducted her husband’s funeral

David and Doris Day found love after loss thanks to a couple's friendship. Photo / Paul Taylor

Napier woman Doris Day found love with the man who conducted her husband’s funeral.

That one-sentence description of her relationship with Anglican minister David Day always turns the heads of the people they tell it to.

It’s the kind of framing that Hollywood would bottle in a script if it could. If her namesake was alive, they would’ve had the the perfect Academy Award-winning actress for it too.

But for David and Doris, who have now been married for seven and a half years, it’s not a love story that’s the stuff of movies as much as it is one that makes perfectly ordinary sense.

Doris married her previous husband Tom in 1957 in Scotland before they moved to New Zealand to live in Christchurch, where she worked as a banker.

David married Marguerita in 1963 and the pair also lived in Christchurch, where they had one child. David worked as a lady’s shoe designer, creating high heels, wedges and pointed-toe shoes.

In 1979, the two couples visited a church camp together in Lower Hutt and became firm couple friends.

David and Marguerite then moved to St John’s College in Auckland in 1980, where he became an Anglican minister.

Despite living in different areas, the couples always found time to visit each other and go on adventures together across New Zealand and Norfolk Island.

When Doris’ husband died in 2009, she decided David would be the one to conduct his funeral service, and he and his wife would in the months following often invite Doris to stay with them in Whanganui.

David’s wife died two years later and he found himself left with a spare ticket for a train trip he and his wife had booked to travel the North Island.

So, in what they describe as a move that made the most sense, he contacted his friend Doris, and the two took the trip together.

“We didn’t do anything naughty and we had a nice time,” he said.

After that, they remained in touch as David would regularly phone and email Doris, and a few months after the trip to Auckland, he called and asked her to marry him.

She said it was his efforts to visit her and take her out to dinner that won her over.

Now in their eighties, the couple have reflected on their past and the move from friendship to marriage.

“Quite a number of people are quite surprised how things worked out for us,” Doris said.

She spent five years on her own and felt that finding companionship was important after the loss of her partner, and she “couldn’t live without it”.

David speaks very fondly of his wife and describes her best quality as being a thinker, as well as “very loving”.

Doris said the key to a long and happy marriage was to view it as something that will be forever and not a “flash in the pan”.

“Make sure the person is the person you want to stay with, presumably for the rest of your life. I think you need to be old-fashioned and have a courting,” she said.

Michaela Gower joined Hawke’s Bay Today in 2023 and is based in the Hastings newsroom. She covers Dannevirke and Hawke’s Bay news and has a love for sharing stories about farming and rural communities.