{"id":38919,"date":"2021-02-22T06:30:50","date_gmt":"2021-02-21T17:30:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/?p=38919"},"modified":"2021-02-21T15:43:08","modified_gmt":"2021-02-21T02:43:08","slug":"faultline-my-decade-from-february-22nd-2011","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/2021\/02\/22\/faultline-my-decade-from-february-22nd-2011\/","title":{"rendered":"Faultline: My Decade From February 22nd, 2011"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today is the 10th anniversary of the February 22nd, 2011, earthquake<\/a> that devastated my home city of Christchurch and the surrounding Canterbury area.<\/p>\n

\"\"

Dust over Christchurch: in this case, minutes after the February 22nd quake<\/p><\/div>\n

The period from 4 September 2010 through to the first quarter of 2012 was one of continuous seismic activity, with over ten thousand events recorded, four major earthquakes and an additional three to four that were also significant in terms of damage. The most significant event, however, in terms of loss of life, injury, physical devastation, and human and economic cost, was the February 22nd event.<\/p>\n

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This was a friend’s neighbour’s home<\/p><\/div>\n

The aftereffects of the earthquake were years of disaster recovery slowly transforming to the rebuilding process that is still ongoing, along with ongoing insurance processes that were as traumatic as the preceding natural disaster; a failure of leadership at the government level, and widespread hardship for many, including unprecedented demands on mental health services. This is, of course, only my personal summation, but reading some of the material appearing in national and local news media in the leadup to this 10-year anniversary, I am not alone in my view.<\/p>\n

\"\"

A close friend’s car: fortunately he wasn’t in it.<\/p><\/div>\n

In posting on the tenth anniversary today, I was intending to look in more depth at some of these factors and also to note some of the positives that helped me and others to keep going through the past decade. Short version: the people, the people, the people at personal, neighbourhood, and the wider community level. All these matters are addressed, to some degree or other, in the Categories Earthquake Reports<\/a>\u00a0and Earthquake Poems<\/a>, right here on the blog. (Look in the far-right side bar \ud83d\ude42 )<\/p>\n

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The people, the people, the people: helping dig out at our place, which took a week all up.<\/p><\/div>\n

This past week, though, led me to understand that while I could have written such a post, my heart just wasn’t in it. The beginning of that understanding was last Sunday, 14 February, while listening to the Sunday Morning<\/a> programme on Radio New Zealand<\/a>. (That’s NZ’s main public radio broadcaster, for those of you who are not NZ-ers.) The host was talking to a documentary filmmaker<\/a>, Gerard Smyth, about the about-to-be-released sequel to his 2011 documentary, When A City Falls<\/a><\/strong>.<\/em> The new documentary is called When A City Rises: The Peoples’ Story<\/em><\/strong>, and no doubt charts the course of the past decade.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

I say “no doubt”, because the moment host and filmmaker began talking I found I could not listen. I had to get up and switch the radio off.<\/p>\n

The moment was painful, both because of the door it blasted open onto all the difficulties of the past decade, but because it illuminated that for me, those much vaunted processes of “healing” and “moving on” are—at best—still very much a work in progress.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

I believe this realization began toward the end of last year, when visiting friends said, “You’ve got on with your life. You’ve moved on.”<\/em> To which I replied “Sort of.”<\/em> I could not be more positive than that, because in the moment of replying, I realized that having moved on was not my truth.<\/p>\n

\"Leaving

An anthology of poems from the earthquake era<\/p><\/div>\n

My truth is that the past decade has left a faultline through my life, one that begins with February 22nd and the damage to my home, and ends in my heart. Rather than narrowing as the decade progressed, it was significantly widened in places, not only by the government-led*\u00a0 “recovery” and “rebuild”, but chiefly the brutality of the insurance process. Perhaps not surprisingly, once so major a faultline occurs, subsequent life events that are not directly connected to it, from terminal illness among close family and friends, through the massacres at two Christchurch mosques on March 15 2019<\/a>, to Covid-19<\/a>, all become fractures off the main fault.<\/p>\n

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Hearts on trees, March 2015<\/p><\/div>\n

“All right?” became a catchphrase for mental health and community wellbeing promotion in the aftermath of the Christchurch earthquakes. When I apply its lens to my personal journey through the past decade, my truth can’t manage more than that “sort of.” Then again, maybe that’s what surviving looks like: it may always be a process rather than an endpoint.<\/p>\n

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Keeping Going: awhi-ing** Christchurch’s Sir Julius Vogel Award finalists & winners, 2015; Photo :Wei Li<\/p><\/div>\n

And if you’ve read to the end, thanks for bearing with me, and for being here. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

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Still smiling — it must be OK… \ud83d\ude00 WORDChristchurch 2016<\/p><\/div>\n

—<\/p>\n

*For me, there must always be a question mark over the \"led\", as in my view leadership \r\nat that level has been almost entirely missing-in-action.\r\n\r\n** \"Awhi\" means to embrace and cherish, with a strong nuance of emotional support, \r\nin the Maori language.<\/pre>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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