CAMBRIDGE NEWS | 1
THURSDAY MAY 26, 2022
Celebrating Life - Your Way
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MAY 26, 2022
Tea without Marg
Mary Anne Gill talks to whānau and family and tells the story of Margaret Evelyn, a victim of last week’s storm in Cambridge, which claimed two octogenarians.
Margaret Evelyn was on her way back from a regular workout at the gym and walking towards her Queen Street home in Cambridge shortly before 10am on Friday when the freakish winds hit. She sought shelter at a picnic table in Victoria Square under an 80-year-old pin oak tree – ironically about the same age as Marg - which seconds later was uprooted and fell on her. For 45 minutes Cambridge volunteer firefighters, police and passers-by helped to shift the giant tree’s foliage covering the retired social worker. A woman from a nearby café sat comforting Marg and later reassured the family she was very calm, answered all the questions being asked of her and was aware of everything that was happening. But soon after noon in Waikato Hospital her heart stopped. Doctors could do no more for the energetic grandmother who always insisted she did not want a funeral service – just an afternoon tea “without Marg”. Her youngest son Kristen Hapi, who lives in Hamilton, got a call from police about 10.30am to say his mother had been in an accident. Her close friend and neighbour Penny travelled in the ambulance with Marg to Waikato Hospital where Kristen soon joined them. Medical staff quickly assessed her and told him his mother had no head injuries, but they were going to get some CT scans and he could go and pick some items up for her. Although she was heavily drugged for the pain, medical staff said she could hear him. “So, I gave her a hug and I said, ‘I love you Mum, I’ll be back in an hour’ but half an hour after I left, I got a call ‘you’ve got to come back now’ and when I got there, they
said her heart had stopped and they’d done all they could.” That was at 12.30pm. The fit and feisty 81-year-old mother of three and grandmother of three had died, the victim of an accident in the Town of Trees, the town where she settled nine years ago after a working life helping young people and advocating for her three children. Kristen told The News on Tuesday that his cousin from Auckland was right when he arrived at the hospital and said to him: “The tree didn’t kill your Mum. The wind killed her and the tree.” “They were two 80-year-olds going out large,” said Kristen. “Mum loved trees; she wouldn’t have blamed the tree. Her number was up. Here’s the thing I know, she would not have wanted to be sitting in a wheelchair with pins in her. She would have said ‘stuff that, thank you and goodnight’.” She was born Margaret Evelyn Freundlich on July 26, 1940 in New Plymouth, the daughter of Jewish Austrians who escaped the holocaust and settled in New Zealand. She grew up in Taupo, ditched the surname in favour of her middle name and went on to train as a primary school teacher. She learned Te Reo at Waikato University so she could stand up for the rights of her three Māori sons. She went on to become one of the country’s first bi-lingual teachers at Rakaumanga Kura Kaupapa Māori. Long-time friend Sue Duignan of Cambridge said Margaret was passionate about young people’s rights. She moved to the Children and Young Person’s service (now Oranga Tamariki) in the late 1980s working in Huntly and then as a community liaison social worker.
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Ever stylish: Margaret Evelyn as family and friends will remember her.
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