There’s a river of grief running through this town. Over the last few weeks this community has lost young men and children to accidents and to violence. I don’t have answers for any of it right now.

One day soon it will be time to pick over the rights and wrongs, to propose change, or apportion responsibility. That time is not now.

This moment is for grief, and we are all in some way immersed in it. I’m writing this today not for those of us directly involved but for those of us on the outside.

When a child in our community dies, we feel an immediate and terrible connection, even if we have never met the family. When a young man doesn’t come home we feel as if they are in some way our sons. When a daughter is hurt she is our daughter.

When babies are killed the impact is immediate. The saying is that the grief of losing a child is unimaginable, but as parents, from the moment of their birth, the terror of losing our children is there in our minds. The death of a child rocks each of us to our core.

The tight-knit communities to whom these families belong are in deep shock, and I know throughout Whangārei we are all desperate to offer some sort of comfort to the families involved.

But, we are an answer-finding species. Our instinct when disaster strikes is to look for patterns, reason, causation and blame, not least so we can learn how to avoid it ourselves. We imagine ourselves right into the situation and with all the benefits of hindsight we judge the choices made.

Anger is a normal part of grieving – and it can be merited. Anger and blame can also be comforting; Anger is a fire people use to scare off tragedy. What it doesn’t do is support the actual victims.

We’ve all been in situations where tragedy was barely avoided. It pales into insignificance, but I know what it is like to spend weeks in hospital with your child following a major accident.

The best decision we made then was not to blame. People around us getting angry didn’t help.

What helped was the people who picked up our other kids and took them home to stay, fed our pets, made us dinners, and those friends and workmates who cut us some slack through the months and months of recovery.

Until the time is right to pick apart the evidence, while our neighbours struggle with tragedy, we need to put our arms around them and keep them safe, including safe from our anger, so that they can process this as they need.

There are so many ways to help, whether in donations to givealittle pages, showing up to cook for a meeting at marae, walking a scared workmate to their car, or coffee with a friend for whom events are triggering their own grief.

Hardest of all is reaching out before tragedy strikes, to offer a hand to someone you fear is struggling. In memory of all our children: E moe mai ra, e tamariki ma.

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