this is a new sadness, I think.
While earlier, I compared my experience of reading Heavy by Kiese Laymon to taking in a masterpiece of visual art, I am now going to compare the reading of Wave, a memoir by Sonali Deraniyagala to witnessing the performance, by a mortal being, of a supernatural act.
Wave has no happy ending, no message of hope, no one to identify with. It can have none of these. It is the author’s story of losing her parents, her husband and her two sons to tsunami while on vacation in Sri Lanka. She was saved because she had gone out to buy food for breakfast.
The scene that most haunts me is when Deraniyagala describes how, a year after the tragedy, night after night, she stalked the family who had rented her parents’ home. She would ring the bell at two a.m. “I know what I’ll do, I thought. I will smash the car into the front wall. It will burst into flames. I will die. That will be fitting.”
Her friends warned that she would drive herself insane. “Finally. I was insane. I liked this.”
Wave ends with an observation of the depths of loss. “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.”
The author’s ability to use her narrating I to describe her narrated I astounds me. She at once, contains the version of herself that was crazy with grief and the version that could report the story in a simple, matter-of-fact manner. This integration feels to me huge, powerful, bigger than a transformation or any happy ending.
We do not need to refine our old narrative or create a new one. Our challenge is to hold the past delicately in the palm of one hand and the present in the palm of the other hand while feeling our feet planted firmly in the soil. In my imagination of this image, the soil is made up of the words, the sentences and the pages that form my story.
Read next: Memoir: Deconstruction and Reconstruction of a Life Story