The tight-knit communities to whom these families belong are in deep shock, and I know throughout Whangārei we are all desperate to offer some sort of comfort to the families involved.
But, we are an answer-finding species. Our instinct when disaster strikes is to look for patterns, reason, causation and blame, not least so we can learn how to avoid it ourselves. We imagine ourselves right into the situation and with all the benefits of hindsight we judge the choices made.
Anger is a normal part of grieving – and it can be merited. Anger and blame can also be comforting; Anger is a fire people use to scare off tragedy. What it doesn’t do is support the actual victims.
We’ve all been in situations where tragedy was barely avoided. It pales into insignificance, but I know what it is like to spend weeks in hospital with your child following a major accident.
The best decision we made then was not to blame. People around us getting angry didn’t help.
What helped was the people who picked up our other kids and took them home to stay, fed our pets, made us dinners, and those friends and workmates who cut us some slack through the months and months of recovery.
Until the time is right to pick apart the evidence, while our neighbours struggle with tragedy, we need to put our arms around them and keep them safe, including safe from our anger, so that they can process this as they need.
There are so many ways to help, whether in donations to givealittle pages, showing up to cook for a meeting at marae, walking a scared workmate to their car, or coffee with a friend for whom events are triggering their own grief.
Hardest of all is reaching out before tragedy strikes, to offer a hand to someone you fear is struggling. In memory of all our children: E moe mai ra, e tamariki ma.
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