Wave

by Sonali Deraniyagala

London, the thought of it, I felt horror. Our home. Their school. Their friends. Taking the Piccadilly Line to the Natural History Museum. The jingle of the ice-cream van. What do I do with all this? I wanted to shred my knowledge of our life.

How is this me? I was safe always. Now I don’t have them, I only have terror, I am alone. My stomach cramped. I pressed a hot water bottle to my chest to calm the hammer blows to my heart, but they wouldn’t stop. I stabbed myself with a butter knife. I lashed at my arms and my thighs. I smashed my head on the sharp corner of the wooden headboard of the bed. I stubbed out cigarettes on my hands. I didn’t smoke, I only burned them into my skin. Again and again. My boys. I don’t have them to hold. What do I do with my arms? Soon, very soon, I have to kill myself. I was never left alone. An army of family

What I did for my boys never stopped. Now I have to give that all up? During those months and months after the wave, I clutched the side of my bed, reeling with this thought.

The torment of wanting them when they came up close like this. I will kill myself soon. But until then, how do I tame my pain? I need to prise them off me. But how? I must stop remembering. I must keep them in a faraway place. The more I remember, the greater my agony. These thoughts stuttered in my mind. So I stopped talking about them, I wouldn’t mouth my boys’ names, I shoved away stories of them. Let them, let our life, become as unreal as that wave.

Still, whenever they emerged, I panicked. I must be more watchful, I told myself. I must shut them out. I couldn’t always keep this up. I’d find myself tracing their outlines on my bed, remembering their sizes and shapes. They were so real, these imprints, almost warm. I wanted to fix them on those sheets, pin them down. But I must stop this. I must turn away from them.

The wave was more than thirty feet high here. It moved through the land at twenty-five miles an hour. It charged inland for more than two miles, then went back into the ocean. All that I saw around me had been submerged. I told myself this over and over. Understanding nothing.

I want to put them back in here, I just want to put them back. They would so want to be here, they loved this house.

But here in my home, I will be destroyed by getting too close to the life I lost.

Still, I am relieved to reenter the warmth of our life, even though I know that reality will get me, later.

When I lie in our bed the power of their absence assails me.

But it was not simply that I had forgotten about something as commonplace as school dinners that got me that night. As I stared at the stub in Steve’s checkbook, I was held for a few moments in the coherence and safety of the life we had, when so much seemed predictable, when continuity was assumed. There would be more bills for Steve to sort out, more sunsets for me to get distracted by while he did just that. And as the wind gusted against those windows, I saw how, in an instant, I lost my shelter. This truth had hardly escaped me until then, far from it, but the clarity of that moment was overwhelming. And I am still shaking.

None of that assurance now as I shudder on this bed. I recoil at my desolation. How I have fallen. When I had them, they were my pride, and now that I’ve lost them, I am full of shame. I was doomed all along, I am marked, there must be something very wrong about me. These were my constant thoughts in those early months. Why else did we have to be right there just when the wave hit? Why else have I become this shocking story, this wild statistical outlier? Or I speculated that I must have been a mass murderer in a previous life, I was paying for that now. And even as I have discounted such possibilities over time, shame remains huge in me.

But my arms are empty now, luckless mother that I am.

It seems shallow, my shame, all about being trounced and not having, but that’s how it is, and it won’t dislodge. My time at home in London on that visit was tinged with it. I looked in the boys’ wardrobes. They would have grown out of those clothes by now, I thought, and this felt like my defeat. It was half-term that week, and the tumble of children on trampolines filled neighboring gardens. I only had the silence indoors. So this is me now, loitering on the outskirts of the life we had.

I lost my dignity when I lost them, I keep thinking.

I am in the unthinkable situation that people cannot bear to contemplate. I hear this occasionally. A friend will say, I told someone about you, and she couldn’t believe it was true, couldn’t imagine how you must be. And I cringe to be bereft in a way that cannot be imagined, even though I do wonder how impossible this really is. Occasionally an insensitive relative might walk away if I mention my anguish, and I reel from the humiliation of my pain being outlandish, not palatable to others. Such a puny life. Starved of their loveliness, I feel shrunken. Diminished and faded, without their sustenance, their beauty, their smiles.

I think I also don’t confess because I am still so unbelieving of what happened. I am still aghast. I stun myself each time I retell the truth to myself, let alone to someone else. So I am evasive in order to spare myself. I imagine saying those words—“My family, they are all dead, in an instant they vanished”—and I reel.

I think of that day now, and I cannot reconcile it with the impossible horror of how they were severed from me in an instant.

I know it was me, of course, but that knowing is cloudy and even startling at times. Strange. For one thing, they are dead, so what am I doing alive? I must be heartless. I am their mother. I am tortured, true, my dreams howl for them most nights, I am still as mutilated as I was in those first weeks when I couldn’t step beyond the door because they weren’t beside me. But this is hardly enough, surely my reactions nowhere near match the awfulness of their death. Yet nothing can, I suspect, fantasize as I might about hurling myself into that heaving ocean in Yala, doing it properly now, no clinging on to branches this time. Is it because I am still dazed that I can’t grasp the reality of being their mother? Is it because I am stunned by the way it ended that the truth of being their mother is muted? Maybe I willed it this way, in shock and desperation, when in an instant they were gone. I was so tightly wrapped around them, their moods and needs tugging at me always, but then I tried to unwind from them, determined and furious, insisting to myself that it was pointless keeping close to them, because I was no longer their mum. And even now, some four years on, I am hesitant to grab them with my heart, fierce and tender, the way I used to when they were alive. How can I bear to do that in this void? So I shy away from knowing Malli’s weight in my arms as I carried him indoors when he’d fallen asleep in the car. I don’t want to hear Vik ask me if he’d played well at his footba...

When that jeep turned over, we dispersed. We just slipped out, I guess, no moment of separation, not one that I was aware of anyway. It was not like I tried to cling to my children as they were torn from my arms, it was not like they were yanked from me, not like I saw them dead. They simply vanished from my life forever. In order to survive this bizarre and brutal truth, do I have to make murky the life I had with them?

Even so, I failed them. In those terrifying moments, my children were as helpless as I was, and I couldn’t be there for them, and how they must have wanted me. Their helplessness I can’t bear to consider, just as I turn away from the memory of Vik crying in fear as we sat for a few moments in that jeep before the water filled up. How can I hold the truth of being their mum when I have all this to live with?

These five years I’ve been so fearful of details. The more I remember, the more inconsolable I will be, I’ve told myself. But now increasingly I don’t tussle with my memories. I want to remember. I want to know. Perhaps I can better tolerate being inconsolable now. Perhaps I suspect that remembering won’t make me any more inconsolable. Or less. This house sparks and almost still chimes with them.

In these past years, I’ve pushed away thoughts of my children’s everyday hurts and fears, suggestions of their frailty and tenderness. It’s easier to remember my boys with humor or to recall their cheek. But now as I dare to peer more closely at them, they emerge more whole. For years I’ve told myself it’s pointless to cherish my children’s personalities and their passions, for they are now dead. But here in our home I am surrounded by proof of it all. I unlock my mind a little and allow myself to know the wonder of them.

But this does make me mad with wanting them. I let myself miss them more unreservedly now, at times at least. I rein in my yearning less. So I lie under the apple trees at the foot of our garden, on a mat still flecked with our picnics, and look up at two empty bird feeders that Steve once tied to the branches. And I want more than anything to hear my boys natter on a Saturday morning as they fill those feeders with “birdie nuts.” Maybe yearning for them more freely gives me some relief. When I tried to tame my ache for them, especially here in this house, it didn’t ease my pain. On my earlier visits here, in the evenings especially, their absence came bounding at me off walls and trees, the desolation clobbered me. There is a difference now. Their absence is not so heavy, not so leaden, it seems. I sleep wearing Steve’s sarong, and I remember trying to inch away from him as he insisted on sleeping wrapped up in me. And how badly I still want that. Yet I am warmed by this knowing and this wanting. It helps me to better tolerate the bareness of our bed.

By knowing them again, by gathering threads of our life, I am much less fractured. I am also less confused. I don’t constantly ask, Was I their mother? How can so much of my life not even seem like mine? I can recover myself better when I dare let in their light.

But I am an empty-handed mother. I can’t offer Vik to these girls to make them laugh at his silly jokes.

Now, in this house, I can bring my parents close. For six years I’ve pushed them and their death to the fringes of my heart. That’s all I could tolerate, my focus was on our boys and Steve. How hideous, that there should be a pecking order in my grief.

I want to put a fist through these last six years and grab our life. Claim it back.

In these six years since they died, I’ve found it hard to tolerate this landscape. I spurn its paltry picture-postcardness. Those beaches and bays are too pretty and tame to stand up to my pain, to hold it, even a little.

Somehow on this boat I can rest with my disbelief about what happened, and with the impossible truth of my loss, which I have to compress often and misshape, just so I can bear it—so I can cook or teach or floss my teeth. Maybe the majesty of these creatures loosens my heart so I can hold it whole. Or have I been put in a trance by these otherworldly blue whales?

This was a discovery. On days like this, birthdays, the anniversary of the wave, I want to be alone. Alone, I am close to them, I slip back into our life, or they slip into mine, undisturbed.

Seven years on, and their absence has expanded. Just as our life would have in this time, it has swelled. So this is a new sadness, I think. For I want them as they would be now. I want to be in our life. Seven years on, it is distilled, my loss. For I am not whirling anymore, I am no longer cradled by shock. And I fear. Is this truth now too potent for me to hold? If I keep it close, will I tumble? At times I don’t know. But I have learned that I can only recover myself when I keep them near. If I distance myself from them, and their absence, I am fractured. I am left feeling I’ve blundered into a stranger’s life.

For I am without them, as much as I am on my own. And when I hold back this truth, I am cut loose, adrift, hazy about my identity. Who am I now?