Wave

by Sonali Deraniyagala

I’d never heard shrieking like this before. So wild, wretched, it frightened me, rattled the wall I was holding on to. This noise was crackling into the numbness in my head. It was blasting the smallest stir of hope in my heart. It was telling me that what had happened was unthinkable, but I didn’t want this confirmed. Not by wailing strangers, I did not.

I wanted to escape the madness of the hospital, I wanted to get away from everyone at Mette’s house, but couldn’t I somehow stay suspended in my confusion? I want to sit in the back of this moving van forever. In a few hours it will be light. It will be tomorrow. I don’t want it to be tomorrow. I was terrified that tomorrow the truth would start.

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.

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.

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.

I am here because they are gone? That was when their absence, as well as their realness, was wavering and suspect. It’s different now. I know it is true that they are not here. An unfathomable truth, but maybe I am more accustomed to it.

More and more now I keep my balance while staring into us. And I welcome this, a small triumph, it lights me up.

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.

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.

I suspect that I can only stay steady as I traverse this world that’s empty of my family when I admit the reality of them, and me. 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?

Thank you most of all to Mark Epstein, my extraordinary therapist. This book would not exist without his guidance and persuasion. With him I was safe, to try to grasp the unfathomable, and to dare to remember.