On a drizzly Sunday morning, it was awesome to see a full house for Dr Lucy Hone's WORD Christchurch 2026 event, How Will I Ever Get Through This? I came prepared with my notebook and wearing my waterproof mascara, and watched as the crowd eagerly rushed to fill up the front seats, chattering heartily amongst each other. A thought kept turning around in my mind: all of us, with out different backgrounds and ages and experiences, are all connected - we've all encountered grief and loss in some form. Though no person's singular experience with loss is the same as another, grief is an unavoidable, universal feeling. As Dr Hone puts it so aptly in her recent book, which she read a short passage from to begin her talk:
"Loss is everywhere... Loss seeps into every aspect of our communities. Our dinner tables, our schools, and university campuses, the pub, the cricket pitch, the office teams meeting, the boardroom, the bedroom, and the bingo recording."
"The toll of loss in our lives is truly staggering. Loss is the price we pay for love and attachment... It leaves its mark upon us, changing us irrevocably."
"We grieve people, places, possessions, projects, and status. All types of loss can trigger grief, not just death."
How Will I Ever Get Through This?
Dr Lucy Hone knows a thing or two about loss. A psychologist, resilience expert, and a person who has experienced great loss herself, her work has taken her throughout New Zealand and around the world, providing compassionate guidance and effective strategies we can harness to remain resilient through tough times. Though her WORD talk with the Breeze's Sarah van der Kley was only an hour long, I think it provided a truly excellent toolkit for dealing with grief and loss. If you've been struggling with loss, have a look through some of the conversation - perhaps you'll pick up a method that works for you, or discover something you didn't previously know, or maybe just feel a little less alone in this strange world of grief.
Different types of grief
People do not often realise that there are many kinds of grief, and that they are all valid. Dr Hone was reminded of this when an attendee at one of her courses mentioned that she'd "only" lost her dog - and what was that in the face of people who had lost family members and loved ones? The woman did not have a partner or children, however, and for her, her dog was her life. This was the first time Dr Hone understood that we put an unspoken hierarchy around grief, about what is "acceptable" grief and what is not.
The earthquakes also taught her that you can grieve all sorts of things. Working with people on resilience in the aftermath of the earthquakes, she found herself thinking "why am I feeling so awful, so miserable, so sad all the time, when I have not lost a loved one and our house is fine?" When someone mentioned to her that nobody has to die for you to grieve, it completely changed her perspective. She was, like many of us that experienced the earthquakes, grieving the loss of our city, the loss of our sense of safety, the loss of the lives we led before such a catastrophic event, the loss Ōtautahi Christchurch had experienced as a whole.
Is grief comparable?
Sarah van der Kley questioned whether someone losing their pet could or should be compared to someone losing, say, a family member. Dr Hone emphasised that your grief is your grief. It is subjective, and you can feel how you feel without needing to compare that experience to anyone else's. Not only are there different types of grief, but everyone grieves differently. She recalled the recent passing of her family's dog, saying that when she was preparing to say goodbye to her beloved pet, she didn't think she would cry - yet she ended up sobbing uncontrollably.
And even then, displaying emotions is not the "right" or "wrong" way to grieve, either. People feel grief at varying intensities, and your relationship with the person or thing you have lost will impact how you experience the loss. Research has shown that people often fall into two categories, instrumental grievers and emotional grievers:
- Instrumental - People in this category want to get out and do things. They process their grief by going for a run, cleaning the house, doing work, and importantly NOT talking about it. For instrumental grievers, getting on with life or focusing on things they can do helps to ground them.
- Emotional - People in this category outwardly manifest their grief. They will cry, ask for help, talk to people about it, and display it externally.
To outsiders, emotional grieving might look like what we expect grief to look like - but again, there is no one right way to grieve. People may experience both instrumental and emotional grieving. The important thing to remember is to not pass judgement on each other for the ways that we process loss.
"Griefphobia"
We are seemingly so afraid of grief - it is depressing, it makes us uncomfortable, and we don't tend to want to see or hear about it. But for Dr Hone grief is not uncomfortable - it is her life's work after all, and she is deeply curious about how we navigate it. She noted something on a wider level that truly stuck with me - there is a certain beauty about life that lies on the edges of the awfulness. Though grief can push us to our lowest moments, it is times of loss that force us to reflect on what is important.
Why does grief change over time?
The common phrase "time heals all wounds" suggests that with the passage of time, our grief will diminish. Dr Hone doesn't view it this way. Instead, she prefers the theory posited by Lyttelton researcher and counsellor Lois Tonkin, who developed a model where the size of grief stays the same - it only feels smaller relative to all the other things in life that expand around it as time goes on.
When you're in the thick of grief, how do you get through it?
Dr Hone's approach to grief and loss is never about "just getting on with it." When an awful thing has happened, it is important to give yourself time and space to do what you need to do. You don't need to rush around and sort everything out. You only have one job - to do whatever it takes to get through the next hour, day, or week of your life. Have the compassion to be kind to yourself.
It's also important to "sit with the awful". We are generally not practiced enough, as humans, at being able to sit with the negative emotions of sadness, jealously, anger, and fear. But the truth of life is that you can't have the good without the bad.
One helpful theory Dr Hone spoke about was the oscillation theory. In this theory, there are no "5 stages of grief", and no linear pathway to feeling better again. Instead, there are two zones that you will feel the ebb and flow between:
- the emotions and coping mechanisms that come with loss, including the crying, the lying in bed, the feeling of not wanting to do anything;
- the rest of your life that you have to get along with, including work, chores, exercise, spending time with or taking care of family and loved ones (the restoration zone).
We naturally go back and forth between these two zones when we experience loss, generally spending more time in the first at the start of our grief, and then later feeling readier to get back into daily life. But it is important to allow ourselves to be in both zones, and not ignore one or the other. Don't avoid any good moments when you are swamped with your grief - you're allowed to laugh, or feel proud, or enjoy things. It will all help you on your journey. On the other hand, don't be afraid of the "grief ambush" that may suddenly overtake you in the supermarket, or at work, or at a seemingly insignificant moment. It might tend to happen at the most awkward, inconvenient time, but it's a natural part of grief. Dr Hone quipped, "I think we should all learn to just cry in public and be done with it." I'm all for that!
What if you're dealing with feelings of guilt about these good moments? Happiness is as much of your grief experience as all of the negative emotions. The glimmers of hope we feel in our darkest times are a human experience; they serve an evolutionary purpose, to keep us going on when all seems lost.
Dr Hone then read a passage from her first book, which details her experience with grief when her daughter Abby tragically lost her life in a car accident:
"I suspect that our grieving experience has in part been made a deal easier by the fact that we know that Abby had a good life. Her twelve short years were kept full of living. She was profoundly loved, and this is the crucial bit - she knew it."
"We often hear the bereaved long for just one more minute, or just one more chance, but one more minute holds little appeal for me. One more minute is no use at all. It is the decades of her life... We have no need for one more minute, because we have nothing more to say. We said it all while she was here."
"So even if, sadly, it's too late to tell these things to the person you are grieving today, there's always someone else out there who needs to hear it."
There was scarcely a dry eye in the house after Dr Hone's reading, particularly when at the end, she quoted, "we never stopped loving you." Grief is simply love continuing on.
It also reminds us how to live; about who we are, what we care about, and about what matters the most to us. It is what it means to be alive.
The "resilience recipe"
Resilience can sometimes be a polarising word - Ōtautahi certainly seemed to be fed up with it by March 2011, Dr Hone joked. But whatever word we want to use for it, it's important to remember that resilience is not about "hardening up", or the classic Kiwi "she'll be right" attitude. Rather, it's about knowing what you need to do for your long-term health and wellbeing. To demonstrate this, Dr Hone recounted a funny anecdote in which a woman she had met told her she felt really pathetic because she had gone to walk the Camino and ended up doing part of it in an Uber. When conversing with the woman, Dr Hone told her that she was simply making the right choice in the moment to ensure that she could function well in her life, given the exhaustion she was going through at the time. Resilience is having the psychological flexibility to listen to yourself.
Of course, this means that everyone's needs are different, and the way that we practice resilience will differ. The important thing to remember, however, is that everyone has a resilience "capacity" that can be built upon. Sarah van der Kley asked what Dr Hone's own "resilience recipe" looked like, and she imparted the following wisdom:
- Focus your attention on what you can change, not what you can't. There will be many things you wish were different, but ruminating on it won't actually change it. Look at the little things you can do in your everyday life to help yourself.
- Is the way I am thinking or acting helping or harming me? Reminding yourself of this can steer you out of some dark spaces and get you exercising a little more compassion towards yourself.
- What is my survivor's mission? If there are people out there that need you, or an important goal, that can be enough to get you out of bed in the morning.
- Do little things to help yourself. Research shows that our self-control wanes throughout the day. If you feel yourself slipping into destructive thought or behavioural patterns, come up with a strategy to make things easier. A few examples Dr Hone provided were putting your phone somewhere else to avoid spending so much time on it, or carrying around a small trinket that, when looking at it, prompts you to remind yourself about the positives.
Overall, mental health is a difficult thing to look after. But, as Dr Hone joked, in the same way that we can't do one gym session and proclaim "Physical health - Done! Nailed! Solved!", we can't try resilience strategies only once and expect that our mental health will instantly be better. It's all about the build-up over time.
How do I respond when someone says or does something that hurts while I'm grieving?
According to one person Dr Hone spoke to recently, the new best response to the kinds of statements like "you look terrible lately", "your loved one is in a better place now", "it's time to move on" and so on is, "OUCH!" I quite like this strategy myself, but there are plenty of responses that can let people know that their words or actions are not what you need right now. Dr Hone's advice was to come up with a few that feel natural to you that you can whip out when needed, so you're not completely caught off guard. Sarah van der Kley thought that "OUCH!" might not be the best response to people telling her, the mother of an autistic son, "well we're all a bit autistic, aren't we?" But she did ponder how nice it would be if we could all tattoo a response on our arm and show that instead of repeatedly explaining ourselves.
The other thing to keep in mind is that people may ask questions or make statements without any ill intent that can still hurt because of the context of your experiences. Dr Hone recalled feeling uncomfortable being asked the common, innocuous question "How many children do you have?" after Abby passed. The best thing you can do, she said, is gently but clearly correct inaccuracies and give yourself the respect to say what you want to say.
What do I say to someone who is grieving?
Knowing that different things help different people, it can be hard to know what to say to someone who is suffering loss. The question of what to say was posed to a Facebook community group about grief, and there were varying responses. Some liked being told they were strong - for others, it was the worst thing they could have heard. But some of the commonalities that popped up again and again were that people did not want to be ignored. They simply wanted people to walk with them in their grief. Even saying "I don't know what to say" was far better than not saying anything at all.
One of Dr Hone's favourite phrases is "How are you doing today?" The emphasis on "today" recognises that the person's experience is changing all the time, and they might be having a better moment or a worse moment. But you're also acknowledging that you know they're going through something. If they say they aren't doing well, then you have the opportunity to sit with them and listen.
Christchurch, resilience, and gratitude
Is Ōtautahi as a region more resilient, given all that we've been through? Dr Hone certainly seemed to think there was truth behind that. Research has shown that, excluding the military, about 60% of people who have gone through traumatic events actually experience post-traumatic growth or gain, rather than PTSD. They have changed in multiple ways:
- They have realised they were stronger than they thought they were
- Their relationships with other important people in their lives have strengthened
- They can "smell the roses" more; experience gratitude for the good things
- They have changed their outlook on what is really important to them in life
- Their religious / spiritual / existential outlook has changed
As a city, Christchurch has experienced a lot, but it has also brought our communities together. There's also a sense of being grateful for what we've got. Studies have shown that if you can focus your attention on the good things in life, and the role you have played in it, you are more likely to experience higher levels of happiness and life satisfaction. That doesn't mean you have to diminish the crappy bits, but make sure to look out for the "glimmers" of hope and happiness.
Dr Hone mentioned that she didn't particularly like the word "gratitude" - "glimmers" was much better for her - but each person will have their own language that works best for them.
Questions
The floor opened up to a few questions from the audience:
- What about reactive grief (i.e., preparing for grief - perhaps you have aging parents or a sick loved one)? What tools should I have in my toolkit? It's definitely worth sitting down and thinking about other significant transitions and changes and losses in your life. What helped you with those challenges? What were the people, places, practises, and even possessions that helped you get through that, and how might they be helpful to you in the future? It's also I also think it's really helpful to think about what you could do differently while the people you love are still here. What do you need to say to them and do with them now, so that you are avoiding regrets later on?
- We're a culturally diverse city and country. What have you learned from other cultures about grief? Dr Hone spoke about the practices of tangata whenua - bringing the body of a deceased loved one to a home or marae, and spending that time with them, your whānau, and other visitors. After seeing her mother's body, she was so glad she did, and she later did the same when Abby passed. Psychologically it takes the brain time to process death, so spending time with the person after they have passed can help with that. Dr Hone's work takes on the principles of te ao Māori, and she places important value in ako - reciprocal learning. She does not approach people as an expert, but someone that wants to learn from others and to pass on her own knowledge.
- What about survivor's guilt? With survivor's guilt, you are assuming you had more control over the situation than you did. You couldn't have changed those circumstances. You couldn't have been anywhere else or been anyone else. It's important to show yourself compassion and kindness, to enable you to live with that pain.
- I find myself wishing I lived in a culture where if I wore black everyone would automatically know I'm grieving. Is there something I can do or say to indicate to people what I'm going through without having to tell them the whole story? You could certainly wear black, and tell people why you're wearing it. It would be nice if we could all have a big sign that says "Don't hug me!" or "I'm not doing well today!" But it is hard to cope when the world seems to be going on around you while your entire life has been uprooted by grief. There's no one solution, really, but you can let people that you're going through loss or grief and leave it at that.
Conclusion
With that, the session came to an end. Dr Hone's māramatanga and experience was evident throughout her talk - she spoke clearly, engagingly, and sprinkled humour around the more serious topics. There were some excellent questions from Sarah van der Kley, with thoughtful and well-considered answers that left the audience with plenty to reflect on. All in all, it was a moving discussion prompting more than a few teary eyes but also a lot of compassion for the people around us, and it gave us the urge to talk to each other about our grief more. I felt privileged to be able to experience the energy in that room, and extra glad I had worn my waterproof mascara.
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