Sam Brooks reflects on the end of lockdown, and what it all meant.

For most of lockdown, my main companion was boxes. I moved house about a month into lockdown, and the process of removing those boxes, slowly and methodically, from my apartment into the too-small rubbish and recycling bins has been an unnecessarily arduous one. 

It also seemed that as I moved boxes out, more simply came in to replace them. I bought things that came in large, cumbersome boxes – an air fryer, a countertop dishwasher, a vacuum – that would require cutting up and breaking down. Eventually, I stopped moving boxes out. 

What was the point? Nobody was there to see them. Only I had to live with them. I learned to weave in between these boxes. They weren’t a forever thing, of course. They’d leave when lockdown was over.

Throughout lockdown, especially in those last few weeks, when there was a clear finish line, I ended a lot of thoughts with “… when lockdown is over”. When lockdown is over, the sun will come out, little birds will do my skincare routine for me, and I’ll have a crystal clear soprano belt.

Then came December 3. The boxes were still there. The sun was out, but the only birds in my apartment were feral interlopers, and my voice remained an instrument not suited for singing. 

Nothing had changed.

There’s a human need, or at least tendency, to craft our experiences into stories. Beginning, middle, end. Climaxes, twists, turns. We experience so much of the world in this way that we can begin to believe that our lives follow the roadmaps laid out by stories.  That’s not true. We reverse-engineer our lives to fit into stories; lives become stories only in the retelling of them, not the living.

We’re trained, through years of consuming stories, whether in books or onscreen or in music, to treat life as a series of chapters or episodes. It’s how we learn to comprehend so many things that make up the world, whether it’s the speed of trains hurtling across the countryside or the unfathomable weight of grief. The word “closure”, for example, makes sense from a narrative standpoint, not from an actual human life lived standpoint. People don’t get closure, they just stop thinking about something.

If you were writing a satisfying story about these last few months of the pandemic, the end of lockdown should represent a big shift in the protagonist’s life. It might come with a realisation that they hadn’t appreciated something or someone in their life, and now they had the opportunity to right that wrong. They might learn something, or do something to represent their change in circumstance. 

If you were writing a bleak story, they would learn nothing at all. They would not change. They would continue to live life as though August 17 had slipped straight into December 3, with nothing lost or gained in between. I imagine there are a few people who feel like they fit into this latter category.

I built up the end of lockdown like it would be the former. Every time I ended a sentence with “when lockdown ends”, I was putting a lot of pressure on a lot of things to immediately become better in my life. It’s so easy to blame everything on the lockdown. Lockdown is why I’m sad. Lockdown is why this friendship fell apart. Lockdown is this, and lockdown is that. Sometimes, it might just be you. It just might be me.

That’s not to say that I’m unhappy with my life now, not at all. I love my friends, I love my work, I can honestly say that I enjoy most of the things I do in my days and I don’t underestimate how much of a gift that is. 

But there’s that niggling thing that makes me look back, as a storyteller, or at least as a human trying to beat the past few months into the rigid frame of a story. What on earth was it all for? If I didn’t learn anything, if I didn’t change, what was the point of all this hardship?

And look, I know what it was all for. But the emotional reality of “what was it all for” is vastly different from the physical, actually-existing-in-the-world reality. There are only so many times you can repeat – we had to get to 90% (or as close to it as wherever we are now), we had to keep it away from vulnerable communities, we had to, we had to – before it starts to sound insincere. 

The problem is, I was thinking of “when lockdown ends” as a full stop when it was really a comma. The person who decides the rest of that sentence is me.

Those first few days, I did the things we were meant to do. I went to the place with the chicken salad sandwiches. I got a massage. I went to my favourite bar. I saw the people who meant the most to me. 

I moved the boxes. When lockdown ends, life keeps going. That’s what it was all for, I guess.

While the implementation of the new legislation is unknown territory, hospices will continue to do all they can to ensure patients live as full and comfortable lives as possible, no matter how their life ends, writes Craig Tamblyn of Hospice Waikato.

As CEO of the second-largest hospice in New Zealand, I’ve been bewildered by how silent our community has been as the End of Life Choice Act came into force on November 7.

As our country fiercely debated the legalisation of end-of-life choice last year, I likened the passion surrounding the issue to New Zealand’s amendment of abortion laws in March 2020. But if I compare the debate leading up to the referendum to an erupting volcano, legalisation seemed to sneak in without so much as a faint puff of smoke.

A quick review of the small handful of media articles written over the past month shows many covered how hospices will – or will not – work with end-of-life service providers. Frankie Bennett’s opinion piece in The Spinoff earlier this week is one such article.

My fear, however, is that without a balanced view of the reality on the ground, the community could read these articles and conclude that hospices are not putting patient choice at the forefront. But Hospice Waikato is working in harmony with end-of-life service providers.

At any one time, we are working with around 400 patients to deliver palliative care primarily in homes throughout the region from Coromandel to National Park. And the key message to our patients and their families as the act came into force was: our palliative care service remains exactly the same.  

If one of our patients chooses to access assisted dying services through an approved provider, they remain a Hospice Waikato patient up until the end of their life. And their family and whānau can still access bereavement counselling.

Like many hospices, Hospice Waikato has chosen not to become an approved provider of assisted dying services. That means interventions will not happen at our 11-bed in-patient unit in Hamilton, and our staff will not participate in interventions or be present when they occur.

But if you only dwell on these two things we will not do, you miss what Hospice Waikato will do. 

Our team will always respect a patient’s choice to access assisted dying services and will refer them to SCENZ if they want to investigate the option. We will support patients who choose end-of-life services up to the time of intervention and they will not be discharged from our care. We will support family and whānau with bereavement support just as we do now.

And most importantly, Hospice Waikato will continue to do all we can to ensure patients live as full and comfortable lives as possible, no matter how their life ends.

There may be misunderstanding by some that because Hospice Waikato is not an end-of-life service provider, we will block access to the service, not facilitate open discussions, or even “turf” people out of our in-patient unit and onto the streets to fend for themselves. This is simply not the case. We put patient respect at the centre of everything we do and implying Hospice Waikato – or any other hospice, for that matter – would act in such a way is incredibly disrespectful to our highly skilled and caring staff.

While I can make the above commitments with complete certainty, I do acknowledge that implementation of the new legislation is unknown territory for Hospice Waikato. The fact is, we are still working “in theory” as we haven’t had a patient access the service yet. Our team of 130 nurses, doctors and administrators certainly feel like we are all on a new journey together – a journey whose roadmap is not entirely clear.

For instance, we haven’t yet received well-defined guidelines from the Ministry of Health or SCENZ regarding the detailed aspects of the service or how referrals from hospice will work in practice. We understand these are still coming.

A further unknown is how our counselling team will navigate the complicated situation of when a patient chooses – as the legislation allows – not to involve family and whānau in their end-of-life decisions. Our team of bereavement counsellors will have an entirely new set of challenges helping whānau who did not know about their family member’s decision or did not agree with it. Cultural issues surrounding end-of-life choice, particularly for Māori and Pasifika whānau, will add another complex layer to bereavement support.

So while the team at Hospice Waikato is not quite sure what to expect as implementation of the new legislation plays out, some things are for certain: we will continue putting our patients’ needs first, always respect their choices, and be there to support their family and whānau as we always have.