This is brutally close to home for me as kaituhi and kaipānui – yet also reassuring. Acknowledging the difficulty of reading and writing in these anxious times paradoxically makes it easier to do both.
Although this pukapuka is set before the pandemic (People gather! With their bodies! In large numbers! Good god, they may as well lick each other's shoes), it shows a recognisably covidious world in crisis. One character gives public talks about how climate change will definitely result in the extinction of humans and we've missed our chance to stop it. He holds out no hope – and he refuses to take questions from the audience, simply leaving the stage when he's done. His listeners are left in silence, drained and baffled.
Nunez does not make this mistake. What Are You Going Through faces up to ageing, illness, pain and death; but through the grief Nunez never loses sight of aroha. The unnamed narrator and her dying friend grow to love one another all the more dearly as they prepare for her death, finding moments of joy. "Sunlight falling at an angle across the lawn so that it touched our elevated feet, then moved up our bodies like a long slow blessing, and I found myself a breath away from believing that everything was as it should be … Life going on, in spite of everything. Messy life. Unfair life. Life that must be dealt with. That I must deal with."
At a time of great anxiety, Nunez helped me exhale – and then get on with my messy life, in spite of everything.
