Four Years On: Commemorating February 22, 2011
Today is the fourth anniversary of the devastating February 22, 2011, earthquake that devastated much of my home city of Christchurch, New Zealand, killing 185 people and badly injuring many more.
Today, I would like to remember those 185 people and also their families: I am sure the gap left by their loss will always be deeply felt.
I would also like to remember those people who were badly injured, many of whom now have to live with the constant ongoing pain of injuries, such as that arising from amputations of the entirety of both legs. We hear very little of these people in commemorative reflections and yet I suspect the emotional and physical burden they and their families carry is enormous. So today, I particularly wish to remember the injured and ask that they and their needs not be forgotten.
In terms of my personal experience, when my novel, The Gathering Of The Lost (completed during the Year of Awful in 2011), came out in 2012, a large number of interviewers asked how I thought living through such a major disaster would affect and/or influence my writing. I answered then that I did not know, but suspected the effects would take a long time to work through. I believe that answer is still true and the effects are still working through—not unlike the physical landscape of Christchurch, which remains a mix of gaps and the derelict, juxtaposed with the new and exciting rising in some places.
What I do know is that in some ways the demands of the books, first finishing The Gathering Of The Lost and then writing Daughter of Blood, kept me insulated from the day-to-day of “awful”. However, with completion of the edit of Daughter of Blood toward the end of last year and a respite, time-wise, to draw breath and play catch-up, I have been aware of a deep, pervading sense of sorrow and loss. Although one often experiences a reaction on completion of a major project, I am quite sure that some of that sense of sorrow and loss arises from the devastation—what has been termed a “landscape of loss”—of the earthquakes and the ongoing challenges, physical, emotional, and financial, of the four aftermath years. What effect this legacy will have on my writing I still don’t know. Now, as then, I am still, like everyone in Christchurch, very much in it. And when you’re inside something, it’s very hard to see it with cool, objective, 20/20 vision, let alone analyse and interpret what it all means. But the one thing we can do is observe and record effects, both on ourselves and others.
The personal major” that still lies ahead and that I have good hope shall at least commence in 2015 is the repair of my house, significantly damaged in the February 22, 2011 quake. Although this is primarily a books’n’writing blog, I shall “observe and record” the experience here from time to time, (somewhat tongue-in-cheek) as the Year Of Living Heroically.
In fact, definitely tongue in cheek, because when I return to the remembrances at the beginning of this post and particularly the injured survivors, carrying on everyday despite pain and disability, I know that no matter the difficulties of my earthquake and aftermath experience, I have not been called upon to live heroically at all.
But they have, and do: day after day. So let us remember their everyday, but no less true, heroism today and honor them every day—by not forgetting all about them.
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Apologies for the recycled photos---I wanted to get out and get some new ones but the camera is not cooperating.