When terrible things happen, how much raw pain do we want see shared in the world? How much of other people’s pain, especially strangers’ pain, is it good for us to take on?
We probably all discussed these tender topics when we saw the pictures of the beautiful Weekes triplets, killed at only two years of age in the shopping mall fire in Doha.
We cringed at the horror of it. We wondered how their parents could ever cope with such a terrible loss. How could they stand going back to their apartment to face three empty cots, all the toys, the clothes, the emptiness?
We saw staunch, stunned grandparents leaving on the first plane out to get to Qatar as fast as they could. God, what a terrible journey it must have been for them.
People are quick to speak of the parents’ loss when children die too soon, but grandparents have a dreadful burden too, grieving not only the shock absence of beloved grandchildren but having to comfort the bereaved parents as well, one of whom is your own child. Always your child, even if they’re hitting middle-age. Their pain is your pain.
That private pain spilled into our living rooms as the shattered parents sat down before TV cameras to give an interview, somehow finding in their bruised hearts the ability to be gracious about Qatar and to refrain from blaming anyone.
At least one friend told me she couldn’t bear to watch any of it.
In the same week, news bulletins showed us the wrapped bodies of children butchered in Syria. That, too, was dreadful, but we cared about
this family because they’re Kiwis, part of our larger ‘family’. We are affected like we were when Pike River exploded and Christchurch crumbled, but the Weekes tragedy is unique in its poignancy.
The triplets’ very lives were miraculous, only made possible by IVF, born achingly early, born because they were so very wanted and because Jane Weekes, especially, must have gone through hell to even bring them into the world.
Journalists squirm a little (if they have a well-tuned sense of ethics) when such stories crash into our consciousness. When TV1 brought us the interview, news bosses were obviously conscious some viewers might see it as intrusive. It wasn’t our idea, they asserted. The Weekeses offered to do it, they said. News anchors talked a lot about 'paying tribute'.
On
Breakfast, Petra Bagust struggled not to weep and said, a bit desperately, that it was a chance for the parents to 'celebrate their children’s lives'.
Oh, I thought, but did they really want to do that in front of the whole nation, stared at by all those millions of us who did not know them before, and now feel desperately sorry for them, but can’t really do anything to ease their pain or make it right?
A tragedy like this is utterly wrong. It will leave a wound for the longest time in the hearts of those who know the family well and love them dearly.
None of us can know what we'd do at such a time. Choose privacy or disclosure? Quiet mourning or open grief, recorded in close-up by a camera on someone’s shoulder?
I hope the interview helped Martin and Jane Weekes. I hope that the huge sorrowful sigh that went up from the whole country might, in some indefinable way, help this family and others who are grieving in a thousand ways for their own separate tragedies.
Perhaps, somehow, sharing such loss is a sort of glue that helps us stick together.
Or maybe seeing strength in others gives courage to the rest of us. It's about the only small gleam of light that can shine out of such a sad space.
The grand old New Zealand Herald, which
has been talking to Aucklanders daily since 1863, has been shrunk
from broadsheet down to compact size and been given a big revamp. But in one way it’s not so new because while the old masthead has been
sidelined, we are still left with one lonely letter, the capital H, printed
in what’s known as blackletter font. 
Blackletter
is closely linked with German history and much used by Hitler's lot for nasty propaganda publishing, which is why
it fell right out of favour after World War II. 
Book lovers used to talk about things literary but now the literature word itself is being chunked down into 'lit' genres... as in chick-lit, that disparaging little term used for lightweight reads aimed at women.
No attention is ever paid to how hard it is to actually write an engaging, lightweight read.
Never mind, also, the big money such books make for the publishers. Women are, after all the major buyers of books and popular fiction does best of all.
Despite that, chick-lit is considered by critics to be fluff and therefore mockable.
I hear farm-lit (also known a rural-lit)is very popular in Australia, where they love novels set in places where there’s lots of open space, grass and animals.
Dinner at Rose’s – written by New Zealand vet Danielle Hawkins is a case in point, just published in Australia and new Zealand.
And the other day I got introduced, via Bitch Magazine to priv-lit – standing for self-help books.
Priv-lit, suggest Joshunda Sanders and Diana Barnes-Browooks, is a first-world kind of con-job because poor people in real need of help don’t have time (or money) for reading about self-help; they’re too damn busy trying to survive. Good point, gals! In other words, it’s only the privileged who have the luxury of taking time out to spend money on 'finding themselves'.
For an example of priv-lit look at the immensely popular memoir Eat, Pray, Love, which Joshunda and Diana suggests could just as well have been called Wealthy, Whiny, White.
Interesting that these 'lit' genres are all books for women. Nowhere yet have I seen mention of footy-lit, fish-lit or auto-lit. 'Bout time, isn't it?
