Widowed at 32, this mum of two is breaking the taboo around death to help her children grieve

It wasn’t her first time running 10 minutes late to pick up her older son from after-school kindergarten student care, but Naadira Aziz had forgotten to update the teacher in time.

When she didn’t arrive punctually that day in 2023, her then six-year-old son, Ibrahim, had insisted, “My mum says she’s coming at 1.40pm. She’s coming. She doesn’t lie.” And according to the boy, his teacher had replied, “I don’t believe you. She didn’t SMS me anything. You don’t lie.”

By the time Naadira reached the centre, her son was in tears from being scolded for “lying”. It was then that the teacher saw his mum’s belated text message too.

“When my son came to me, he told me: ‘She didn’t believe me. How could you be late? Don’t ever do that again.’ He was so terrified,” Naadira recalled. She believed her son’s meltdown was simply grief.

Naadira’s husband, Hasyali Siregar Hasbullah, had died a few months before in December 2022 from Stage 4 melanoma – known to be the most dangerous form of skin cancer – after battling it for around one and a half years. She was 32 then, while her two sons, Ibrahim and Idris, were five and three years old respectively.

She had quickly informed her sons’ preschool teachers about Hasyali’s death, so they would be “a bit more grief-aware” that a child who lacks the vocabulary to describe their feelings could show their grief through behavioural changes. 

Still, she had to reiterate herself this time. “I hope you can be a bit kinder in the way that you talk to Ibrahim, because he’s going through a very difficult time right now and any change in routine is terrifying for him,” she’d told the student care teacher.

Naadira’s 10-minute delay to pick her son up was, to him, as drastic a change in routine as any. 

“My son has had the most destabilising event a child at that age could experience. Any destabilising change now (even if perceived) and he immediately draws very scary conclusions. So I have to always tell him what’s happening for the day,” she explained to CNA Women. 

SKIRTING AROUND GRIEF 

Now a programme associate and facilitator at social venture The Life Review, a job she found after her husband died, Naadira applied for the role after seeing the often-unexpected impact of Hasyali’s death on her young sons. 

The organisation aims to normalise everyday conversations about death, dying and bereavement through education and community engagement – and she hopes such conversations can start in the classroom.

When Ibrahim started primary school last year, Naadira forgot to mention her late husband’s passing to his new teachers. 

“My son had to painfully educate his teacher that his father had died during an in-class conversational exercise about how the students went to school. His teacher casually asked, ‘So Ibrahim, does your father send you to school before he goes to work?’” she said. 

“He just replied, ‘Oh, he passed away.’ When he told me, I asked how that was for him, and he was like, ‘It was okay, I guess she didn’t know.’”

Even after teachers knew, “there was still a certain distance in talking about death”, added Naadira.

When Ibrahim was appointed class monitor last year, she expressed her concerns to his form teacher about the additional responsibility as she believed he was already having a hard time. The teacher reassured her, saying, “Despite what happened, he’s one of the most emotionally mature seven-year-olds I’ve ever met in my life.”

Curious, Naadira replied: “What do you mean ‘despite what happened’?” 

The teacher repeated: “You know, despite what happened to him in his life.”

“She was so uncomfortable she didn’t want to say it. So I said it for her: ‘Oh, you mean despite the fact that his father has just died?’” recalled Naadira. “I just wanted to say that, because at that point, nobody had said my husband’s name in months. It’s like he never existed.”

The teacher then uttered “yeah, that” in response, Naadira added. “You could really feel her discomfort.”

But Naadira is no stranger to having the people around her sidestep grief. When her husband was alive, he avoided talking about his imminent death too.

FEAR AND AVOIDANCE OF DEATH

Four years older than Naadira, the late Hasyali was a man of strong principles and few words, adopting a “less talk, more action” philosophy to life. By their fifth date, he knew she was his life partner and wasted no time asking her parents for her hand in marriage. They wed in August 2015, 11 months after meeting.

But after his initial diagnosis of Stage 1 melanoma in June 2021, his stoic personality influenced his unwillingness to talk about “things that needed to be talked about”, said Naadira. 

She had been a stay-at-home mum since giving birth to her first son in 2017 while Hasyali was the sole breadwinner as an immigration officer.

“I wanted to have all these conversations about finances. But I was so afraid that the topic might indicate to him that I’d given up hope – and hope is a very tricky thing when you’re dealing with someone with cancer – so we avoided it.”

When he initially refused treatment, Naadira felt increasingly helpless. 

“I took it personally, like do you not want to see your kids grow up? Do you not want to fight to stay with us? But I think his entire worldview was so shaken, he didn’t know how to react; he froze up,” she said.

Hasyali agreed to undergo major surgery in August 2021 for the tumour at the side of his head, but less than a year later, his scans revealed the cancer had progressed to Stage 4.

By September 2022, the cancer had entered his brain. His oncologist told him he could either do an emergency surgery or accept that death was at the door. 

But two months after surgery, his tumour returned.

Eventually when the treatment stopped working, Hasyali returned home from the hospital for his final days in early December 2022. This also meant Naadira could no longer avoid the important conversations with her kids. They could see their dad’s personality changing due to the tumour.

Hasyali had been “very goofy” before his diagnosis. He would “talk nonsense” and “score way more brownie points” with the boys during their bedtime. But he was now often angry, and Naadira believes “we lost him before we actually lost him”.

Nonetheless, the oncologist had told the family they had about two to three months left with him. “And because of that, it framed me to think that we had time to talk about the things that needed to be said,” Naadira said. 

Hasyali had 12 days.

IN SEARCH OF CONVERSATION AND COMMUNITY

After her husband died quicker than expected, Naadira constantly thought about all the things she had left unsaid. 

“I really stayed in that space for a very long time," she said. “I wrote letters after he passed, not knowing what to do with them. I just wrote them because I felt like there was so much to say.”

When Naadira re-entered the workforce, she returned to her previous profession as a social worker, but eventually quit. She then found a new job as a financial advisor – which gave her control over her time – and applied to work for The Life Review.

The latter was partly prompted by the isolation she had felt when Hasyali was dying. He hadn’t wanted anyone knowing about his illness besides his immediate family. She had to inform his friends “one by one” about his cancer after he died.

In search of community for herself and her kids, Naadira came across Death Over Dinner, an initiative by The Life Review in which people talk about their personal experiences with loss while sharing a meal.

Prior to the experience, she was often fed words of encouragement like “you’re strong”. Such support, while well-intentioned, usually angered the young widow. It felt “very othering”, as though “they didn’t want to enter that space with me”. 

“I really want to tell you about my husband. I want to tell you about (my sons’) father. Just because he’s no longer here doesn’t mean he never existed. He’s a very big part of their narrative of who they are. I just wanted somebody to say his name,” she said.

At Death Over Dinner, Naadira found people who did just that.

“At the end of the night, I just felt, wow, that is what’s possible. It’s possible to have that kind of conversation, even for kids,” she said.

“Imagine if Ibrahim had returned to school (after the December holidays), and his teacher sat with him and asked him, ‘Would you be okay with the class knowing what you had gone through?’ If he had been okay, his friends would be able to have conversations with him, instead of him trying to hide the fact that his father died, from his friends.”

OPENLY TALKING ABOUT GRIEF FROM YOUNG

With Naadira’s candour about grief with her sons, they have become more emotionally aware than the average child since their father’s death.

Idris, her younger son who’s six this year, once told her while she was quarrelling with his brother: “I realised our family always fights, but actually we are just very sad.” And Ibrahim has developed “so much empathy” that teachers and other parents have said he’s always looking out for his classmates, she said.

But outside the family’s healing, she has realised that death in Singapore is more a “social experience” than a biomedical event.   

More than medical support, social support is necessary. And she believes this could even start in preschool, with close monitoring and communication between teachers and parents. There would be at least one child who has experienced some form of loss in any given cohort.

“We could talk about how to support somebody, or we could just get comfortable around the topic of death, grief and loss, and being more grief-aware in conversations. Because if teachers are not comfortable, then students will not be comfortable. That’s when (those like) my children will experience that ‘othering’ feeling,” she said.

Ibrahim, for example, has said he feels he “will never be normal again because grief just won’t leave me alone”. 

“What we learnt about grief in children (at The Life Review) is that they want peer networks – other peers who have gone through a loss, whether it’s divorce or a death. They want to feel normal. They want somebody who understands the fears they have but that they cannot say to their parents,” Naadira said.

And that is what grieving adults need too, she added, highlighting that her late husband might not recognise her now. After all, she had once been afraid to talk about the end of life.

“Fear of the topic didn’t serve us in the past, and in fact, prevented a more dignifying experience for him. But I’m not afraid anymore, because the worst has already happened,” she said.

“If anything, what I find scarier is what my husband went through, feeling like time is running out and not being able to say the things you want to say and do the things you want to do.”

So, when she engages with The Life Review’s participants, from public outreach events to in-depth workshops about end-of-life literacy, Naadira’s message is simple: Being more aware of death helps one live “more widely and more deeply”, because nothing is taken for granted anymore.

“It’s worth finding the courage to talk about topics that are very scary with your loved ones. (But) I find that participants are ready to talk; they just don't have the vocabulary,” she said.

But what is the right vocabulary when time is running out? Naadira now believes there are just four important things to say.

I’m sorry. I forgive you. Thank you. I love you.