When Sheena Hemens suddenly lost her daughter in a car accident she was in complete shock – and further so at the idea that parents who have lost a child are currently legally entitled to just three days bereavement leave. Three days – just a long weekend – after suffering the greatest loss imaginable. Barely enough time to organise a funeral. Here, in her beautiful own words, Sheena shares her experiences – the petition she currently has before Parliament, and how she rose from the ashes after losing nearly everything that mattered to her.
This year marks three decades in this beautiful country of New Zealand. I am British and an eldest daughter, so yes, I’m a fixer, a doer and a multi-tasker. I am also an entrepreneur, a divorcee, a mother of three grown children, and a grandmother to a five- year-old superstar. In 2023, I thought I knew exactly who I was. After more than 50 years I was happy with myself. I didn’t think I would ever really change.
I’ve run a PR and events agency, a little crêperie that smelled like Sunday morning, a marketing consultancy. I was business to the bone – the kind of woman who could run a function for 200 people, clock that table nine was quietly getting divorced over the entrée, and find every typo on a client’s website in one glance.
Maison de Crepe, my restaurant, was founded in 2016. I was franchising it. And then 2020 sauntered in and asked the entire hospitality industry – whose whole reason for existing is putting people together in rooms – to please, immediately, stop. We limped on for three more years before the end came. In April 2023, after seven years, I folded the restaurant up and put it away like a tablecloth nobody was ever going to use again.
At the time, I believed that was the worst thing that could happen to me. The loss of the thing I’d built. My baby. And oh! The shame of it; because business failure comes wrapped in its own special shame with a shiny ribbon of financial stress and trauma.
So here I was, thinking life couldn’t get any worse. But the universe heard me, and She has a dark sense of humour. She leaned in close and murmured: hold my champagne, darling…
And then she took Lauren.
My daughter. Aged 27. One of a pair – an identical twin, and twins are supposed to stay the same age aren’t they?
Lauren was hit by a man driving a lethal weapon disguised as a Ute. She was on her way to work as a fashion designer early on a dark winter morning in Auckland. A tiny young woman – delicate tattoos, Doc Martens, dressed head to toe in black as the fashionable are wont to be. She didn’t stand a chance. In one careless moment her life was ended, and he got six months’ disqualification.
There are no words that will help you understand it. Losing a child is not a season you pass through and come out the other side of. It rearranges the furniture within you, permanently, and you have zero control over how.
But I didn’t just lose Lauren. I lost everything: my relationship, my home, my income, even my dog, Alfie. If you’ve experienced loss, you’ll know that once the shock wears off, it is like an elephant sitting on your chest for months on end – suffocating you slowly while you breathe. Then come the waves: one minute you are treading water, calm, and the next you are in the spin cycle of a front loader, waiting for it to pass so you can come up for air.
The only thing that makes it better is time. Not to get over it – you never get over the death of your child – but for the rebuild. Or, in my case, unexpectedly, the reinvention.
I now understand why Madonna has done it so many times; reinvention is cathartic, empowering even. For me it was an accidental consequence of grief. Because grief cracks you open, and deep inside the cracks you find everything you’ve pushed down, ignored, or feared – the parts of yourself you have to deal with eventually.
We don’t talk about death here in NZ; it makes people uncomfortable. But what if grief didn’t have to be the pathway to never-ending sadness? What if it could reveal parts of you that you didn’t know you had? Sure, there were periods where I felt I was rebuilding the plane while it was going down in flames – but I realise now that at some point during the crash I had turned into a phoenix.
I miss Lauren every day, and my heart still aches for her. But her loss has shown me how short and fragile life is, taught me a lot about myself and it has led me to silver linings I never expected. The one I want to talk about here is finding my voice.
Because finding my voice led me to start the petition. Not for me. For you. Because if you lose someone you love, you will be entitled to just three days off.
Three. Days. A long weekend. Barely long enough to organise a funeral.
Under New Zealand law, three days is your statutory bereavement leave when an immediate family member dies. Three days to absorb the single worst thing that will ever happen to you, and then, apparently, pop back to your desk, refreshed, ready to “circle back” on that email.
During my research I found things I now can’t stop telling people at parties, which is exactly why I am no longer invited to many: in the first 24 hours after a major bereavement, your risk of a heart attack increases twenty-one-fold. Your body is, quite literally, trying to die alongside the person you’ve lost. The system looks at that and goes, “Righto, see you Thursday.”
Three days isn’t a grief policy. It’s an insult dressed up as productivity – except you are not productive. Research shows you are a liability: unfocused, exhausted, unable to make a decision. And yet nobody wants to address it.
So I did the only thing I have ever really known how to do. I built something to try and fix the problem.
It’s called Beyond Three Days – a petition to Parliament to extend statutory bereavement leave from three days to ten. Not because ten days fixes grief; nothing fixes grief, and anyone who tells you otherwise is hallucinating. But because ten days is roughly the difference between being treated as a human being and a unit of labour that has temporarily stopped producing. I started it in Lauren’s memory, because I want her death to mean something but also because Lauren’s twin had to go back to work after three days. It is inhumane!
So, yes – I rose from the ashes. Not gracefully, not on schedule. More of a controlled crash-landing into a new life; as a writer and marketer working with genuinely good people; an advisor helping businesses demonstrate leadership through adversity instead of just ticking a box; workshops, keynotes on resilience, a memoir, and a petition I intend to chase all the way to Wellington.
I did not mean to become a phoenix. Given the choice, I’d have kept my old, intact life – the one with my beautiful girl in it. But you don’t get to choose the fire. You only get to choose what you do once the ashes have cooled. And I chose to have purpose.
If you’d like to sign the Beyond Three Days petition please head here.
It closes on 10 August 2026. Three days was never enough. It still isn’t.
