Kiwis love to chat, but talking about what we’d like to happen when we pass away is a tough conversation for anyone. Seven Sharp reporter Rachel Parkin meets a woman who learned the hard way about navigating the logistics of loss — and has since developed a gentle approach to lighten the load.
Standing on the footpath at North New Brighton beach with a young boy on her hip, a posse of older kids around her and a grin stretching across her sparkly face, Melissa Davies was hard to miss.
“Oh hiiiii!” she called. “You must be Rach.”
I grinned back and we cackled. Meeting people in the flesh after lengthy online chats is always bizarre.
“Oh no,” I said to one young girl, rubbing her eyes. “I’ve got you up early.”
“She doesn’t mind,” Davies replied for her, as the girl nodded and smiled.
“We love the beach.”
And this whānau sure did, just about as much as they clearly loved each other.
The shoot was set up to help tell Davies’ story, but there was nothing manufactured about their belly laughs that erupted with various hijinks.
“Shall we race to the water?” Davies asked 5-year-old nephew Henry, who grinned and nodded.
“Auntie Lissa” was his favourite — an all-in kind of aunt.
“All fun, no responsibility right,” she said to me, with a giggle. “And I was always really close to my auntie, I always appreciated someone that wasn’t Mum and Dad who I could talk to things about.”
'Like learning a whole new language'
To Davies, whānau was everything.
When Dad Grant passed away from a severe heart attack, in his 50s, her world was shattered.
“Losing Dad was…” she said and choked up. “Sorry, I just need a minute.”
“It’s okay,” I replied gently. “Take your time.”
“So, I was 34, 35… and Dad and I were just good friends.”
The loss was devastating and on top of that, she had been named as executor of his estate.
“It was like learning a whole new language, understanding what probate meant, power of attorney, even just what an executor’s responsibilities were.
"And the first time you get exposed to it is when you’re in the middle of grieving someone you love so, so much.”
With that minefield though, came an idea — a new passion.
Some years later — after suffering and surviving her own extremely rare heart attack — her business was born.
“Yeah, it’s called Holdmine,” Davies explained. “Initially, I started thinking about a ship’s hold.
“It’s the place where you put all the important stuff and it steadies the ship and it’s just there — it’s the storage place.
“And then it was kind of like ‘hold my hand’.”
“Aww,” I replied.
Davies said while Holdmine was built on technology, that was really just the vehicle.
Its purpose is to be a one-stop-shop for anything and everything you might need to know about a loved one when he or she passes, so you don’t have to navigate all that complexity while grieving.
“The power it would give people to just be with their emotions if they weren’t having to be in their left-brain headspace,” she explained, eyes shining.
Hunting out details for her dad’s affairs had been difficult.
“It wasn’t until my step-mum went to sign some documentation and she picked up a pen and she was like, ‘this is the insurance broker’ and it was written on the pen,” Davies said.
“Wow,” I replied.
“I don’t want other families to leave it to chance that someone has a monogrammed pen lying around,” she chuckled, ruefully.
Using tech for good
Then there were the bills that just kept coming.
“Six months after Dad died, I was still trying to shut down and manage his internet account. I’d been dealing with a large telco provider for a long time who kept invoicing.
“I rang them to try and have another attempt and they said, ‘Oh no, we need to speak to the account holder’ and I was like ‘argh’,” she sighed.
“This must happen all the time. I was just like ‘You’re making a really tough time even more challenging' and I thought ‘Other families must deal with this, but with other pressures’.
“That was probably the 150th thing I’d dealt with.”
A mechanical engineer by trade, with experience in business and technology, Davies was passionate about “using tech for good”.
“If people are starting to think about what they want when they’re not here anymore, hopefully by thinking about it and writing it down… putting it somewhere safe… hopefully that encourages them to talk to their family about,” she explained.
If talking was too hard, they could merely pass on the app.
“Because I was like I don’t think… no matter how much effort I put into it… I think I’d struggle to find a way to make Kiwis be more comfortable about talking about mortality.”
“We love to chat — just not about our feelings,” I said.
“Yes. We’ll talk about the weather,” she laughed.
And who knows? Your Holdmine chat could take an unexpected twist.
One minute Davies was chatting to Mum Heather about her final wishes, the next, they were planning a trip to Las Vegas.
“Mum was telling me she had money in her bank account for her funeral and I was like ‘You just worked your butt off your whole life, spend that money and go travelling’.
“We looked at each other and had a bit of a giggle and she said, ‘Well I’ve never been to Vegas’,” Davies laughed.
“And that’s the beauty of it,” I said.
“Yeah, that’s what I wish more families could have,” Davies said.
A gentle way to prepare for loss.
“So family can ask [beforehand] ‘When you say you want a memorial plaque looking out over the Whakaraupō basin, do you want it in gold or silver? Like, you can actually understand what they want,” she said.
In the meantime, life is for living.
And as I watched “Auntie Lissa” charge around, playing cricket with her family, that was clear.
“Go, Henry! Get him out!” she called to her nephew, lobbing him the ball. “Yeeeesss!”
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