After the horror of a disaster, common phrases include “recovery,” “return to normal,” “build back better,” and “closure.” The meanings and implications of these notions for mental health are not always clear. Timeframes, paces, and ways of healing and coping differ.

When family members perish, when homes are rubble or ashes, and when everything about community is altered, disaster recovery is not straightforward. Life continues for those remaining, while livelihoods, infrastructure, families, and networks can be created. Whether or not that means “re-created,” “rebuilt,” “recovered,” or other “re” words is uncertain and can be about supporting mental health.

Grief counselling, psychosocial support, and therapy might be essential in deciding to try to reconstruct as much as possible to be as similar as possible, or to follow life pathways that are completely different from before. Death is one tragedy from which there is no return. A return to normal is not possible.

Continuing to live might mean stumbling along day-to-day or decade-to-decade with a hole in one’s heart. It is not recovery. It is managing life and livelihood with grief and memory. Nothing is ever the same. Nothing can ever be the same.

Communities, too,........

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