Wave (Sonali Deraniyagala)
This book was unlike anything I’ve ever read. ‘Unfathomable’ is a word that comes to mind. ‘Colossal’ is another.
In December 2004 Sonali Deraniyagala, her husband and two young sons flew to Sri Lanka to visit her parents. The whole family had met up in Yala National Park and were staying in adjoining rooms at a hotel near the beach. The book opens with Sonali packing up in their hotel room, her boys playing with their new Christmas presents, her husband in the shower. She looks out the hotel window and notices the ocean seems closer than usual. Sonali calls for her husband; together they see the wave. They share a look of panic, grab the boys, and run. Within one minute, a 30-foot tsunami has separated them. Sonali’s children, husband, and parents are killed.
This book is filled with more despair than it seems possible for a human heart to bear. How to describe the immensity of such grief, a misery so deep that it drills down to a bedrock of insanity. Words can’t hold whatever this is. But I tried to touch even the edge of it – what it must be like to lose everyone you love in an instant. How crushing the overlapping grief from losing your children, your husband, and your parents, all at once, must be. I haven’t tried to turn it into a comprehensible thing yet. Maybe that’s not even possible.
This was book #46 for the blog. In a lot of ways, creating the blog has felt like constructing a scaffolding that can hold the story of death – something that withstands harsh truths. To date, what seemed to be coming loosely together was: death is natural, and an okay thing; mortality is what gives life meaning. “Wave” was a pressure test to this newly minted architecture. I can’t say it entirely withstood the test. To offer that “death can be okay” in the face of something like this… it feels deeply insulting. Is it possible to build anything that can bear the weight of such broken-heartedness?
Maybe life really is just sitting among the rubble and having no answers.
Maybe that’s okay too?