Living in New Zealand as a migrant, during the worlds craziest unified experience ever has been surreal. It has been a mix of emotions.
Guilt, watching my friends and family around the world. How did we get so lucky to be in the safest most stable place.
Relief, knowing we are here and we are safer than most places.
Grief, watching people I love lose people. Losing people I love.
Grief. Fuck this keeps being a theme in my life. Losing my grandfather and being across the world from him and my family was hard. Continues to be hard. Guilt. I should have called more. You never feel you’ve done enough when someone dies. You akways feel you could have done more. You are always left wondering if they knew how much you loved their inappropriate sense of humour and their kindness and the interest they had in you. Gosh I miss my grandafather. He died during lockdown – when I was overwhelmed with working a full time job and coping with parenting and I didn’t call him. I kept thinking, I should call him.
But I didn’t and then, my mother called me and I heard her voice and before she said anything – I knew. And I live with that guilt of “should have done more.” We had an online funeral and it was awful. I mean, funerals are never fun. Why the fuck is there fun in there? But that was hard. We were so far away and I was far away from my mother even though she lives just down the road but lockdown. Death continues to be something I don’t know how to deal with and so I just blunder along adding bits of grief to my ever growing collection. Because people die in my world. A lot. I guess that’s true for everyone but it never gets easier. Should it? I don’t know. I hope I’m never so used to losing people that I stop feeling.
I would rather feel sadness than feel nothing.
Exhaustion. I am tired. The world is tired. We are struggling to get by. One step at a time. One foot in front of the other. Eat an elephant bit by bit. Blah blah blah – all the things we tell ourselves to get through this day, this week, this year. 2020 has been hard.
I know we are lucky to live here. I also know we worked very hard and made very big sacrifices to be here. I know we chose this place but some days, I feel like it chose us. All those years ago, when I visited as an innocent and clueless 18 year old and I knew New Zealand was home. I cried on that plane – okay back then I was crying over a boy I met here that I was leaving behind but I felt like I left my heart behind. I’m still friends with that boy – which is funny because I’m not friends with the friend I actually came to visit but maybe in some ways, my conversations with him over the years kept bringing me back to the weeks I spent here – the life he lived that I wanted. And now, here we are. The world is weird.
Anyway this is a blog post about being in New Zealand when the world is going through a shared hell – life here, is as weirdly normal as possible. Even though we are all acutely aware of the fact that there is no real normal and that normal is now just a shared life in the times of Covid-19. When you don’t even ask, do you know anyone who has had Covid? Because we all know someone… and yet there are still those that deny it really exisits. So what should this blog post have been about? Well, I guess for me, it’s just the same old things I always write about… rambly unstructured thoughts. Just out there. So here you go.
A post about covid-19, about life, about death and about how fucking shit the weather is in Wellington because you can’t beat Welly on a good day but now I know, they weren’t talking about the weather when they made that up.
xx