Claudia Putnam's Reviews > Wave

It's a little sad when a book that clearly took a long time to write, and to be able to write, takes only a few hours to read. I charged through this last night; could not put it down, as heavy as the material is.

Most basic response: ANGER at the negative or judgmental reviews this book has received. While Wave has received a huge positive response as well, I say SHAME ON those who feel there should be some kind of happy ending to this. I think of Barbara Ehrenreich's study Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. What a shallow culture we have now.

What this is: ONE woman's self-portrait while buried in extraordinary grief. Some have asked, well, is there really any difference between losing your family in a car accident, or losing them in a natural disaster? (Deraniyagala lost both children, her husband, and her parents to the 2004 post-Christmas tsunami that claimed 227,898 lives). Well, yeah. If that's not clear from the way she describes the wave and its aftermath, I don't know what to tell you. A memoir about dealing with the grief of a family wipe-out after some more mundane accident would also be interesting, but this story recounts something so overwhelming and world-breaking that it's worth its own account.

What this book asks of us: to stay present through someone else's unbearable pain while she tries to speak of it. That a lot of people are unable to do this is evidenced not only in the reaction to this memoir, but in what any bereaved parent will tell you about the comments people make after the death of a child: "at least you have your other kids," "you can always have more," "at least they weren't very old, you weren't too attached yet," "at least they were grown up," "time will heal," "god doesn't give us more than we can bear," "everything happens for a reason," "you should be over it by now," blah blah. If you've ever said any of these things to someone grieving, never do it again.

I'm sure most bereaved parents or widow/ers are glad to have this book. It's what we go through, writ large, and most people who go through an experience that makes you, as Deraniyagala notes, a statistical outlier, are glad for any validation. I wrote to Russell Banks to thank him after The Sweet Hereafter came out. One of his characters had already survived Vietnam, had become a pillar of the community, employing and helping rehab many other vets, had survived his wife's death to cancer, and now, in a school bus accident has lost both of his children. The novel follows different characters with different responses to the catastrophe, and this guy's collapse--he becomes a drunk and a womanizer--angered some readers. My mother said: I KNOW that grief is unendurable. So I want to read stories that are LESS real about it. I disagreed. Even if I didn't collapse as completely after the death of my son, I FELT as if I did. I WANTED to. Banks told the truth, through this character, of what this kind of loss FEELS like, even if you somehow keep coping, keep living, keep going to work. "It must be like having someone cut out a piece of your heart and then say, you can't have it back, ever," one friend said. But it's not even like that. It's like every single one of your cells has had something essential extracted from it, and from there on, they will replicate in a warped fashion. You will never be whole, nothing inside you will ever be whole again.

Psychologist Stephen Stosny writes of grief that "recovery" mainly means that eventually you can remember your loved ones with pleasure instead of pain. It takes as long as it takes (and most people think at least 5 years after a loss as devastating as a child; in this case it was her whole family, and it's hard to imagine how you even go about the work of grieving this. You think of one, and then you have to remember that all the others are lost, too. You don't even have your husband or your parents, with their shared memories of the deceased, to console you. How can it ever end?).

And yet, it's clear that Deraniyagala does make "progress." For some readers this isn't clear, and I can't understand why it's not. At first she can't think of the lost ones at all. She can't admit that this has happened. Nothing matters, least of all returning to her professional life. What for? She doesn't even care about her own physical injuries from the tsunami, because she should be dead. What's a cut, a bruise? Many of these? She can't accept people renting her parents' home, she doesn't even return to her own home for a very long time. By the end, though, she's not only able to take joy in her memories, but to describe her family to us so vividly we feel we know them, too.

One reader said s/he didn't shed a tear through this. Well, I did. Especially when she described the incredible feelings of guilt surviving parents feel. No matter how overwhelming the wave, she should have held onto her kids. No matter her state of shock, she should have looked for them. She should have identified the bodies. But she could not because that is what would make it real. And in the final analysis, she feels she should not have survived: her survival is a betrayal.

Any bereaved parent will understand this. It doesn't matter how impossible the task, where you were, what you believed or could not have known. A parent should protect her child. You can't escape this guilt, whether it's rational or not. It's in your cells, those cells that will be deformed forever. I even think the death of a child will reverberate spiritually into any afterlife. Even if you're somehow reunited, that pain of separation won't be repaired. That's what I think.

Another thing this book does spectacularly well: describe shock. Enduring shock. It's a wave, it hits hard, it erases all landmarks.

Some have also actually judged this woman for some of her behaviors when she was out of her mind with shock and disbelief. Fuck. Them. Whether or not any of us would behave in the same way is a) not determinable from our relatively sheltered perspective and b) irrelevant. Again, she is describing the way those who have suffered severe loss FEEL. I can see WANTING to do all these things. I remember another woman who had a due date near mine. She and her husband were TERRIBLE parents, I thought. Their older son was a spoiled brat. And yet, her baby was born healthy and mine had a fatal heart defect. Why? It's not that I wished a dead baby on them, but it's a mystery the mind cannot comprehend. You look at other children and you think, why are THEY so healthy? I loved Deraniyagala's honesty about this.

Most people who study resilience think we each have a set amount of resilience we're probably born with. Deraniyagala had led a very, very protected life, guided by the belief that talent, hard work, and good-person-ness should yield a good life. And she had nothing to disabuse her. Until. What kind of reference points can there be in such a circumstance? What's a good person after that? What kind of behavior is acceptable or at least understandable in such an obliterated landscape?

There's also been a criticism that this book, as a memoir, does not interrogate her experience enough. Well, okay. But I think this was probably all she could do for now. Just recount. For years she couldn't even speak of what had happened. It's a huge movement to be able to write this book (which is beautiful). And she does confess her dark behaviors, her deepest guilt. The things that are hardest to say are said.

That's enough for me. If Deranyigala wants to write another book in which she interrogates her experience, well, I'd read that, too. If she wants to write about other survivors in some other book, great. But again, fuck you to everyone who thinks she somehow owes more than what she's given.

I'm really tired of readers who think that because they get a window into something, they deserve the keys to the house.