I think it’s fair to say that all grief memoirs are traumatic, but Wave by Sonali Deraniyagala is traumatic in an unthinkable way.

On the morning of December 26, 2004, on the southern coast of Sri Lanka, Sonali lost her parents, her husband, and her two young sons in the tsunami she miraculously survived. In Wave, she recounts the tsunami and the years following, when she spent time in Sri Lanka paralysed by grief, and then returned to her home in London.

My work involves hearing things that are distressing, and there are many ways that I manage the impact of that. I think it’s fair to say that there is a certain level of compartmentalising. Maybe it’s more than that… but regardless, hearing about grief is not scary for me in any way. To that end, reading about Sonali’s grieving was manageable (it is very, very sad but I was not sobbing). However, Sonali’s description of the actual tsunami and the hours immediately after were deeply distressing.

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?

In recounting the detail, Sonali also examines the guilt she has experienced since the death of her family, a guilt that is specifically focused on her children –

But I wasn’t there when they most needed me. I know I was too powerless in that raging water to get to them, not that I knew where they were. 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. … How can I hold the truth of being their mum when I have all this to live with?

When I had them, they were my pride, and now that I’ve lost them, I am full of shame.

Reconciling her grief and the constant reminders of her loss alongside finding a way to create a life without her family are the most striking parts of this book.

Sonali’s writing is plain and unflinching and in sections seems a little detached, which I think speaks to the extreme trauma that she experienced.

In terms of grieving from a theoretical point-of-view, Wave provides an exceptional example of continuing bonds. The theory of continuing bonds describes how a bereaved person needs to make a new relationship with the person that has died, so that the relationship can continue, albeit differently. The theory is a reminder that when someone dies, we don’t ‘forget’ or ‘move on’ or ‘let it go’.

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.

When Sonali eventually returns to her home in London (after years living in Sri Lanka), she steps into a house frozen in time – when she’d left the house last, her family was alive and on returning she is confronted by evidence of them and her loss at every turn – clothes that her boys would have long since grown out of; Christmas presents never to be unwrapped; tickets to a concert that they never attended.

But I can’t touch those schoolbags, each one now a scalpel.

How can there be an ending to this story that feels okay? There can’t. And boy, it’s not Sonali’s task to make the reader feel better. But, she generously provides her readers with a sense of ‘closure’ –

By knowing them again, by gathering threads of our life, I am much less fractured… 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.

4/5

During English winters, Steve craved her prawn curry, her signature dish. The fiery-red gravy was thickened with a paste made by grinding the half-cooked heads of the prawns, something she’d learned from her grandmother.