16/09/2026
How Will I Ever Get Through This?
I’ve spoken to about five people this week who have experienced grief in one form or another. A couple are dealing with it more recently, while for others it has been years, but those conversations have stayed with me because they were all different and yet there was something familiar about each of them.
It got me thinking about how much grief we see around us without necessarily stopping to think about it.
If you spend any amount of time following what happens around the Eastern Bay, you will know what I mean. Working around local stories, you see the names come through. Someone is missing, someone has died, there has been an accident, a family is asking people to help find someone, and then, at some point, comes the pānui for the tangi.
There are the stories that become news and the many more that don’t. And every day, somewhere on Facebook, another tangihanga pānui appears. Sometimes you know the person. Sometimes you know their parents, their children, their cousins or their mates. Sometimes you don’t know them at all, but you still stop and read.
Having been involved in covering some of these stories, I think you become conscious pretty quickly that there is a person and a whole whānau behind every line you write. You spend hours trying to establish what has happened, checking details, talking to people and putting together something that is as accurate and respectful as possible, and then, because there is always another story waiting, you move on to the next one. The whānau can’t do that.
For them, there are messages coming into their phones, people arriving, kai to organise, arrangements to make and a hundred things that suddenly need to be dealt with. The marae fills, people turn up, people sit with them, and there is that incredible outpouring of aroha that we are so familiar with here. Then eventually everyone goes home.
I think that is the part of grief we probably don’t talk about enough. We are generally pretty good at showing up when something has happened. We know how to take kai, make a phone call, turn up at the marae or simply sit alongside someone when there isn’t really anything to say. But once the tangi is over and normal life starts again, the person who has died is still gone.
I think about some of the people I have spoken to over the years. You can hear, sometimes quite casually, that the person they lost is still very much part of their life. A memory comes up, a story is told, something reminds them of that person. It might be years later. There might even be laughter in the conversation. Grief doesn’t always announce itself as sadness.
That has been sitting with me this week, particularly because of those five conversations and because of the sheer number of stories we encounter. So when I saw the title of Dr Lucy Hone’s keynote, How Will I Ever Get Through This?, it felt like a question that could have come from any number of conversations I have had with people.
Lucy brings something quite personal to this work. She is a researcher and author who has spent years looking at resilience, but her understanding of grief was also shaped by the death of her 12-year-old daughter, Abi, in a car crash in 2014.
What followed became part of the reason Lucy went deeper into the subject. She has spoken openly about her own grief and about trying to understand, through the research, what actually helps people keep going when something happens that changes their life completely.
I find that part of her story remarkable, not because it makes her someone with all the answers, but because she has taken something deeply personal and difficult and used it to help other people.
And I think she is careful about the way she talks about grief. There is no suggestion that there is a formula for getting over losing someone, because anyone who has experienced significant loss knows there isn’t. Her work is more about what we can do with what has happened, how we navigate the days that follow and how we support ourselves and the people around us.
That feels particularly relevant here. We don’t have to look very far in the Eastern Bay to find someone who has been through something. We see it in the stories we cover, in the pānui that appear on our feeds and in the people we know who are carrying a loss that most of us may never fully see.
Dr Hone will be in Whakatāne this Friday for the Eastern Bay Community Foundation’s Community Keynote and Expo, in partnership with Gateway Funeral Services. The community expo begins at 11am at the Liberty Centre, with Lucy speaking at midday. Tickets are $10 through the Eastern Bay Community Foundation.
If you are somewhere in the middle of grief yourself, or you are supporting someone who is, perhaps it is worth going along. Not because two hours can somehow fix something that hurts, but because sometimes hearing someone put words around an experience can make you feel a little less alone in it.
I keep thinking about those five conversations this week. Different people, different losses, different lives, but all of them still carrying someone with them. And perhaps that is what makes the question How Will I Ever Get Through This? such a human one. Most of us won’t know the answer until we are asked to find it.
Date/Time: Friday 18th September, 11:00 AM – 1:30 PM (Keynote at 12:00 PM)
Venue: Liberty Centre
Tickets: $10 via www.ebcf.nz/events
