The phrase “a year that was bookended by tragedy” is too neat, somehow.

Tragedy moves through time differently from other events. Time seems to stop then start again fitfully. As it gathers momentum, its passing feels cruel, as if demanding that we gain perspective and return to our ordinary lives. Those early and late events of 2019 in Aotearoa – the massacre in Christchurch in March, and the eruption of Whakaari in December – did strange things to the future, too.

A time when anyone might come to terms with what happened felt like light years away. It would mean acknowledging that a deep hatred exists in a place that likes to think of itself as good-hearted. It would mean accepting the total randomness with which lives can be set in freefall. And so, it’s hard to write about this year as a defined period of time. We know that it will follow people for the rest of their lives; we don’t yet know how it will change them.

So much has been written about tragedy this year. But language has often felt like it’s too small, or too big and too clumsy, heavy with mythologising. After the massacre in Christchurch on 15 March, in which 51 Muslim men, women and children were killed at Linwood and Al Noor mosques, there were declarations about who “we” were and what “us” meant, offered as a way forward, but people argued over the definitions and who could speak for them and who couldn’t. What if the “us” we’d thought we were didn’t even exist? (It’s hard to avoid using “we” and “us” in a piece like this. I use these terms with the understanding that they are never fixed. They are ever-shifting, and are always fractured in some way.)

One thing the country has turned to in agreement, though, is heroism. The pilots, medics, police, scientists, and members of the New Zealand Defence Force who retrieved the dead and dying from Whakaari. The locals who rallied at Whakātane hospital. Stories of heroism, especially by “ordinary New Zealanders”, are a ritual in this country, and like all rituals they seem to hold chaos at bay. They help us to defy the feeling of existential dread that disasters give rise to. They let us imagine that we would’ve done the same. I think we see in these stories the spirit in which we’d hope to go on. When father-of-four Abdul Aziz threw an Eftpos machine at the Christchurch gunman, he encapsulated a change of tack we badly needed. It was more than pointless, after all, to try to understand “both sides” of racism – it was damaging. Actually, white supremacy needed a blunt heavy object thrown at it and then to be tackled to the ground.

A life without meaning?

Many of us have an old habit of hoping, after a disaster, that time will make sense of everything. From some point in the future, we’ll see a shape to things and a meaning that wasn’t apparent now. But time can so easily lose its healing power. You can see this in the 40 years since the 1979 Erebus disaster. Families were left in limbo, unable to re-enter life fully, after 257 people on board an Air New Zealand sightseeing flight to Antarctica were killed when the plane crashed on the slopes of the mountain.

At a ceremony in Auckland last month to mark the 40th anniversary, families gathered to hear Jacinda Ardern speak. Entirely unexpectedly, she gave a full apology on behalf of the government and the airline for the errors that led to the disaster and the errors that came in its wake. “In 1979 so much was lost, and the ramifications were immense,” she said. “And time hasn’t necessarily diminished any of that.” At last, after such silence, there was something for victims’ families to hold on to.

Still, even now, what meaning is there to make of Erebus? What meaning is there to make of the eruption of Whakaari? What meaning can be made of the deaths of 51 people who were at prayer? We look for meaning because it’s terrifying to think that there is none. But it is cruel to ask of those who have suffered loss to find meaning in their suffering. If there is meaning, it must be carried by everyone.

The rituals that have been most uplifting have been those of Māori

Through Christchurch, Whakaari, the murder of 21-year-old British woman Grace Millane, and in many ways the peaceful occupation of Ihumātao, where the legacies of the New Zealand Wars can still be felt, Aotearoa has leaned heavily on ritual. Vigils, candles, and silences, but also the rituals of handmade cards delivered from schools, deliveries of food, people just turning up to offer help. And flowers, so many flowers, some later photographed, digitised and composted as if to preserve compassion in the earth. Then there are New Zealand’s other, bleak rituals, like defensive think-pieces and talkback radio callers, the trolls, the online arguments, the racist cartoonist crying for his freedom of speech. These too must roll through their cycle. Maybe it’s unrealistic, but my hope is that each time they grow a little weaker as they’re brought out into harsh sunlight.

In grief and trauma, the rituals that have been most uplifting and sustaining have been those of Māori. Although specific rituals vary from region to region, the principles of generosity and support are constant. Tangihanga – the Māori ceremony of mourning – happens over several days rather than just one, and all other priorities fall away as people urgently mobilise around those who are suffering. It’s essential to be there for the bereaved and to give time to mourn, and, at later gatherings, to continue to acknowledge the dead as a vital part of oneself. Generosity is all-encompassing. In March, the South Island iwi Ngāi Tahu opened its marae to anyone needing a place to gather and mourn. In November, the iwi Ngāti Awa opened its marae too, offering manaaki (hospitality) and support to victims’ families.

Family and friends of the victims of the Whakaari eruption gather at Mataatua marae along with the local community on 16 December. Photograph: John Borren/Getty Images

In a recent essay on loss, former Green MP Catherine Delahunty describes how tangata whenua (people of the land) helped her to survive the loss of a best friend and her two daughters in a car crash. The purpose of the mourning rituals of tangata whenua is to ground people in time, place, and love, she writes, allowing them to grieve openly, but also to begin to heal. “When we fully enter grief with full support, we can more fully re-enter life.”

Part of that re-entering means seeing ourselves more clearly. Just as stories of heroism emerge, attention turns to the other stories of this country, many of which are at odds with the popular perception of New Zealand as a kind of refuge from the rest of the world. Stories of the many women each year who are killed by partners, like Grace Millane was; of the racism encountered every day by indigenous people and those who came to Aotearoa as refugees and migrants; of our relatively recent, violent history of colonialism. If tragedy holds any meaning, it’s in what we see of ourselves afterwards, both the abhorrent and the hopeful, and it’s in what we then do with that knowledge.

For a long time New Zealand has held on to a tradition of talking around difficult things, before striding blindly into them and spilling forth a cascade of terrible “hot takes” on the subject. This is especially prevalent at Christmas and New Year.

A lot of us, by which I mostly mean Pākehā, are very good at silence and at deftly steering our way around the past as if we think we’re invisible, as if silence is inherently more dignified. Somewhere within this silence, there is shame. It’s hard to acknowledge it. But it feels that, this year, there has been a collective realisation that silence moves us backwards rather than forwards, and makes the passing of time more painful than healing. I think we’ve begun to speak more openly about life in this country, and also, finally, to listen. In this, the oldest rituals have led us, ones that rose out of empathy and hope, and which were there all along.

• This article was amended on 2 January 2020. The eruption of Whakaari occurred in December, not November.