WHILE THE WORK OF THE MOUNTAINEERS, POLICE officers, embalmers and funeral directors is nothing short of inspiring, I also feel hollow and sad as I sit with their stories. Something is missing. One moment I feel fine—I read family love letters and I feel hope. But then I speak to someone closely involved, and it feels like I’ve made no progress at all. There has been no a-ha! moment, no flash of understanding or resolve.
I flip-flop. It’s complicated. I wonder if this grief is not all mine.
When I spoke to embalmer Peter Strong he recalled attending a conference with grief expert Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, and her reference to each of us having a ‘personal pool of pain’—the notion that unprocessed grief is akin to unfinished business, that we can’t move through grief until we’ve dealt with whatever comes up from the past.
Australian writer and doctor Gordon Coates, who spent time in the late seventies studying under Kübler-Ross, agrees. In his publication Wanterfall, he writes, ‘Old feelings can sometimes erupt with astounding intensity, when a current event provides a strong enough reminder of the circumstances which originally caused them. I think the analogy of an abscess is most appropriate here.’
Similarly, in her book Recovering From the Loss of a Child, grief researcher, author and columnist Katherine Fair Donnelly writes, ‘The honest gut emotion of cleansing the soul with tears of grief is akin to lancing a wound to drain the infection.’
These sentiments describe what others have said, and echo my own experiences: Erebus is like a scab that keeps being picked at, that never fully heals, and at its core is darkness and deception and pain. Each time something comes up—an article on the news or an anniversary date—that wound is reopened. Just when you think you have finally let go of the past, another disaster in another city reminds you of the magnitude of what you once lost, too. Maybe you think you’re coping quite well, until a preview of an Antarctic-themed airline safety video arrives in your inbox while you sleep. And, for the recovery team, just the mention of the word ‘Erebus’ (or a smell, or a sound) can bring everything back to the fore. As several of these men have already told me, even the date looms painfully dark on the calendar. And you can’t put a plaster over a gaping wound.
We really don’t realise how many anniversaries there are until after a loss. Not just the anniversary of their death, but also their birthday, special celebrations like weddings, Christmas and a million other little things. And Fair Donnelly supports this experience, explaining how, at times like these, any joy our loved one once brought can become overshadowed by memories of deep loss.
In a disaster like Erebus or the Christchurch earthquake, personal loss is combined with community grief. In their book On Grief and Grieving, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and David Kessler explain how, in a disaster, we move from normal human experience to a realm outside of this. We have no prior knowledge of how to deal with this, no foundation to prepare us for what has happened. Personal and community loss become inseparable.
An entire nation in shock.
Everyone knew someone.
Everyone knew someone who knew someone.
The collective pain heightens our sense of loss. We all feel shock and grief after tragedies.
We are all connected.
In my family, time and distance have not helped to heal the core of the wound. I think of the family I was raised in, of my younger sister and cousins who weren’t yet born when Erebus happened but who still have strong emotional reactions when they are surrounded by others who are ‘just like us’.
After loss, grief takes a seat at the centre of our being and has a prominent place for a while. Following interviews with grief experts and people in grief for the documentary Like Minds, British researcher and journalist India Rakusen reported that, as time goes by, grief doesn’t just disappear. Instead, our life gradually builds and develops around our grief, and eventually it will take up less space—but, make no mistake, we are never completely healed or free of grief. We can’t ‘get over it’. We can’t just move on, despite our very best intentions. When we are reminded of the person we lost at an anniversary or special occasion, our grief is given energy and it grows, taking up more space for a while. This is why time does not heal in quite the way that we are told it does, or expect it to. Grief is just something we learn to live with. It isn’t always present on a day-to-day basis, but it is always there.
Academics Beverley Raphael and Warwick Middleton discussed the concept of pathological grief in a 1990 article ‘What is pathological grief?’, noting that it relates to those who are unable to work through their grief despite the passage of time. Pathological grief means acknowledging that resolution of the grieving process is delayed for some reason. That it is stuck. Unprocessed. Insurmountable.
Where Erebus is concerned, this comes as no surprise to me. How could we be expected to work through our grief when the people we were grieving for were pushed aside, when their deaths became a dirty secret, when we were too ashamed or grief-stricken or traumatised to even mention it? We couldn’t help it—we were fully immersed, drowning even. In On Grief and Grieving, David Kessler confirms that you can’t process what has happened because you can’t separate the grief from the trauma.
Because of our grief, no one in my family can remember Frank’s funeral—but, because of the trauma, everyone remembers exactly where they were when they first heard that his flight was overdue. Every family of Erebus was visited by police. They had to collate photographs or hair samples or items to fingerprint to assist with the identification process. They had to verify samples of clothing or jewellery or footwear. And then they waited, and some had no news at all.
I wonder how grief affected the clarity of their memories. I wonder if other families constructed their own ‘truths’ like mine did. I wonder if they can remember their loved one’s funeral.
And what of those (supposedly) too young to remember? What of those not born at the time of the Erebus Disaster? Why, when it comes to Erebus, are they just as affected as those who were there?
The idea that trauma can be inherited is something that I had never considered before. Inherited trauma (or ‘transgenerational trauma’) is described as trauma that is transferred from the first generation of trauma survivors to the second and subsequent generations of offspring of the survivors. It has even been suggested by some researchers that a parent’s experience of trauma may change a child’s stress hormone profiles—those who survived the Holocaust, for example, or survivors of the 9/11 attacks in the United States. These studies are varied and their results are as opposed as the experiences contained within, but the idea that someone has even studied inherited trauma, that I might have learned my grief, or that my sister and cousins may have inherited theirs, fascinates me.
While the families and recovery and identification staff of Erebus are now more willing to talk about their experiences, their emotions remain very close to the surface. My family all have ‘unfinished business’. For many, this has had a profound effect on their lives. It has had a profound effect on the life of this granddaughter in particular, who saw her grandmother pull herself through every anniversary, transported back to that moment as if it were yesterday.
As Kübler-Ross and Kessler state, if you work with grief, you will come across unfinished business of your own. I didn’t anticipate the depth of grief that I would experience in researching and writing this book about my grandfather. It has brought my family’s grief to the fore in the mightiest of ways. I have chosen to explore it, to work through it, and in the process I have learned that some of this grief doesn’t even belong to me.
I also learned that my grief wasn’t just for my grandfather, but for everything I had lost in my life. For the lives of my grandparents, for the passing of my mother-in-law, for my lost childhood, lost opportunities, lost pregnancies and lost love.
And I have learned that I was also grieving for the remaining 256 people who were on board that flight.
I am captured by the notions of collective grief, inherited grief and transgenerational trauma. The findings are overwhelming in their complexity. Some support how I feel, and in my despair I clutch on to them as the truth. Yet others refute my experiences—Well, they must be wrong—so I return to my hunting and gathering, making sure that one side of the ledger outweighs the other. With Erebus, the stages of grief are still very much alive and well.
I know in my heart that I am trying to find something irrefutably validating, something that will say, ‘Sarah! Don’t worry, your feelings are normal. Promise!’
But there is one finding among all my research into collective trauma that I cannot look past. It is repeated several times, and it resonates with me strongly: trauma can remain chronic and will reproduce itself as long as social causes are not addressed and perpetrators continue to enjoy impunity. This finding leaves me feeling frightened and angry, my heart fluttering at the thought of being reliant on someone or something else to help me feel better.
If this is true, if the underlying issues around Erebus are never adequately addressed, how can we possibly move on? Is my healing dependent on a government or an airline properly addressing their role in our largest peacetime disaster? A disaster that tore my family apart and, despite our best efforts, still leaves us stuck.
This, I cannot accept.