SMART THINKING
As we reflect on the 10-year anniversary of the Canterbury earthquake which killed 185, and the two-year anniversary of the Christchurch terrorist attacks that left 51 dead, we examine how a nation grieves, and the surprising role of the COVID pandemic in
On the anniversaries of the Christchurch terror attacks and the earthquake, we reflect on how a nation grieves and heals.
The attack on two Christchurch mosques on 15 March 2019 was one of the darkest days in our nation’s history, devastating New Zealand’s Muslim community and plunging the rest of the nation into a collective state of mourning.
While no grief timeline is linear, it’s understood that for those at the centre of sudden disasters, acute grief and distress won’t often present in the days, weeks and even months that follow, “because they’ll be running on adrenaline or ‘holding it together’ for those around them”, says Associate Professor Jay Marlowe from the University of Auckland, whose research focuses on grief, loss and trauma following major disasters.
But what about the effect of a national tragedy on our collective psyche? “A large-scale tragedy, such as the Canterbury earthquakes and the mosque attacks, which we have seen impact people across New Zealand and beyond, has such a profound effect on the collective psyche because it represents a threat to our sense of belonging and identity,” says Marlowe, echoing the idea that when major crises occur, people often grieve for a world they thought they once knew – what British psychologist Colin Murray Parkes refers to as losing one’s ‘assumptive world’. “These events can disrupt our assumptions about the world as being safe, fair, kind and predictable,” Marlowe explains.
Just a year after the attacks, the country was flung into a different kind of crisis with the pandemic. But while you might think this compounding of crises would cause citizens to spiral into despair, many found solace in rallying together as ‘a team of five million’, the solidarity a balm to a fractured nation. Of course, the healing and evolving of any society depends on its confronting the social problems that permeate within it. In this sense, there’s an argument that it’s the inequality the pandemic has exposed, moreso than the unity, that holds the key to our moving forward.
“Major events shine a light on the existing social fissures that run across society. Becoming aware of these is an uncomfortable but necessary process to engage in to prevent similar events happening again,” says Marlowe. “A silver lining to the very dark clouds of the earthquakes, the terrorist attacks and COVID-19 is that these events and their aftermaths have forced us to examine how these things were allowed to happen in the first place.”