Day 6: A book that makes you sad: Wave by Sonali Deraniyagala

This is perhaps the most brutal and moving book about grief I have ever read. Deraniyagala’s family, her husband, her two sons, and her parents were all swept away and killed by the December 2004 tsunami across the shores of the Indian Ocean.

This is not an easy read, but it’s also not one you should shy away from. Deraniyagala reveals the black hole of her loss with stark clarity, made perhaps even more intense as we go along on her years long journey to finally return to their home in London, only to find the mundane, yet devastating, remains of their life before they went on holiday in Sri Lanka. Her prose is beautiful without being overwrought, though who would fault her for any overwroughtness to be honest. But I was struck at how she captured her state of mind in the initial minutes, hours, and days after the disaster with the structure of her writing, and then this continues as she and the grief keep on. There is an end to the book, but this is no novel, so there is no neatly tied up resolution and pithy comments on the processes of grief. This real, and like all real life, sometimes there is no real resolution or revelation, there is just remembering.

I almost picked this up to read again the other day, but in the midst of this pandemic, and with the recent loss of my father, just moving it from one shelf to another made me a bit teary. I’m not ready to revisit this one yet, but it’s waiting.