Amanda Kidd with children Samuel and Mariana, pictured when they were younger. Photo / Supplied
Amanda Kidd with children Samuel and Mariana, pictured when they were younger. Photo / Supplied
When Amanda Kidd's children farewelled their mum at her first funeral in Auckland, it was too painful to consider doing the same again days later in Southland.
Now there's a plan afoot to make that journey by road later this year - all the way south to where their mother was born and to where she returned after the workplace accident that claimed her life.
Kidd, 50, died on April 4 after an incident at Urban Quarry in Henderson. She was unloading a skip filled with soil at the end of a working day. Exactly what happened next is unknown other than it was sudden and she didn't come home that night, or ever again.
"You forget how much you need your parents," said Will Leizerowicz, 50, whose shared custody of Mariana, 11, and Samuel, 8, is now sole parenting. "If I could trade anything, I would do it for the kids. It hurts. To hear the kids, it really hurts."
And so the idea of a road trip began to take shape, not quite two months after she died. For the children, it is a hikoi the length of the country to visit their mother, not only in the place where she rests but through the lives and stories of others who lost her.
Leizerowicz is adjusting from shared parenting to going it alone. "Parenting is hard. The less I think about it, the easier it is. One foot in front of the other."
When he speaks of the road trip, it lifts his focus toward year's end. To help him on his way, friends of Kidd's set up a Givealittle page with the aim of raising $5000. It's $3900 short.
Ideally a campervan, Leizerowicz says, and a detour to Hastings to visit Conan, the Bernese mountain dog Kidd had bought for breeding and as a family pet. With her death, Conan also needed a new home. He was "a size to fit the name" and even at "a tenth the size would have been a struggle".
Amanda Kidd died in April 2022 in a workplace accident. Photo / Supplied
Leizerowicz has a book on grief. "All the big things in the book, [Mariana and Samuel] have got it all at once. They lost their mum, they've lost their dog, they've moved house."
There is such a broad and raw trail of pain left with Kidd's death which came just as she was embarking on the latest of a series of adventures that made up her life.
Kidd grew up in Heddon Bush, Southland, on a farm that raised sheep at the time before turning to crops and eventually dairy. Her parents, Marion and Frank Kidd, introduced older brothers Geoffrey then Neville to the world before she came along.
She went to Otago University, coming away with two degrees and majors in economics and marketing. A gap year during university sparked a love of travel, particularly in Southeast Asia.
After graduation, Kidd lived and worked in Vietnam and later Japan where she learned the language and met Leizerowicz, a Canadian. That was 2003.
By the time they parted, there were two children and lives were established in New Zealand.
Her brother Neville Kidd rattles through the return - the marketing job in Gisborne then Auckland, produce-related companies. And so busy and energetic, always "coming up with an idea and everything needed to make that idea happen".
"Amanda was different. She was contagiously positive. She was gung ho. And she had a heart of gold. She would do anything for anybody and not always to the betterment of herself. If you weren't up yourself, you were in."
There was no mid-century cruise control for Kidd, who celebrated her 50th birthday on a superyacht on Waitemata Harbour. Neville Kidd said she was always full steam ahead.
Stephen May with partner Amanda Kidd during her 50th birthday celebrations aboard a superyacht. Photo / Supplied
Last year, she sold her Birkenhead house and bought a rundown but well-located waterfront home in Bayswater. "Amanda was between things," said her brother, describing how she got into the skip business.
Stephen May, a professor at the University of Auckland who met her in November 2020 and fell in love, fleshed it out: "She got sick of the sexism in the corporate world, and marketing particularly."
That's how she wound up leaning "on a gate post", as Neville Kidd described it, talking to the guy dropping off a skip.
"Amanda talked to anyone," May said. "The guy rocked up and they got chatting. He was the owner of Westie Bins. From that random conversation she decided to buy the company."
May's voice wavers when talking, his grief still fresh. They met online, connected over travel, fell in love and had a future together. "It was fabulous," he said. "She died 10 days before her 51st birthday. She was a very young 50-year-old."
Kidd had worked through both Auckland's lockdowns. "She made quite a splash on the scene," said May. "A tall beautiful blonde woman running a skip business is quite unusual."
Neville Kidd recalled how the business was flourishing. "It was busier and busier." Normally, she managed the business and had others shift the skips. There was fierce competition for drivers. "She had her driver poached. There was no animosity - just couldn't compete with the wage."
Amanda Kidd during a New Year's adventure on the Milford Track walk with partner Stephen May. Photo / Supplied
So she wound up unloading a skip at the end of the day before heading home to the children she loved in the house she bought to give them the future she wanted - a future that included May.
The events of the minutes that follow are being studied in a coroner's inquiry. Neville Kidd's "inquiring mind" wants to understand how he lost the sister to whom he could chat all evening without realising time was passing.
"She was a breath of fresh air. So positive. A whirlwind." He sighs. "It's life. Somehow we're just going to somehow find a way to move on."
* The Givealittle road trip fundraising page can be found here.
