At times of sadness we cherish courage and kindness

We have had more than our fair share of tragedy this year – and indeed, over the past decade.

Book-ended by the Pike River mining disaster in 2010, which killed 29 men, and last Monday’s violent eruption at Whakaari/ White Island, for which the death toll is likely to rise, the decade is ending as it began – shockingly, and with a tragic loss of life.

Sadly we can rattle off a string of other disasters over the past 10 years. When the Christchurch earthquake occurred, killing 185 people, we were still reeling from the loss of so many lives at Pike River.

In a speech the day after the quake, Prime Minister John Key acknowledged there was ‘‘no reason that can make sense of this event’’.

‘‘Many people have lost their lives. Families have lost their cherished loved ones. Mates have lost their mates,’’ he said.

It’s been a recurring sentiment.

Mates lost mates, and family members lost cherished ones in the terrorist attack on two Christchurch mosques this year, in which 51 people were killed.

But it’s how we responded to these events, not the events themselves, that have defined us.

For every tragic event, there has been kindness, and also acts of great bravery; in Christchurch, hero rescuers dragged the injured and dying from the rubble, putting their own lives at risk. At the Linwood Mosque, where a gunman opened fire, Abdul Aziz didn’t hide. Instead, he fought back with the first thing he could find – an efpos machine.

After White Island erupted, tour guide Hayden MarshallInman

appears to have died after going back to help others.

And in an extreme act of bravery, an SAS squad carried out a daring mission on White Island on Friday, operating in extreme conditions, and in the knowledge of another possible eruption, so the bodies of the dead could be returned to their families.

There will rightly be questions in the weeks ahead about whether safety precautions were too lax at White Island, just as there were questions after the Christchurch earthquakes and Pike River.

But it’s these stories of heroism and individual acts of kindness that we will remember.