“She couldn’t blame God. A God that exists does not take your entire family in one hit, no matter what his divine plan”
Boxing day 2004 and I’m watching the ocean swell and devour the beaches of southern Thailand and Sri Lanka. Much of the TV coverage is aerial footage making the movement of water look slow and calm, until the detritus crunching, crashing, tumbling. Animals are mostly invisible, the 4 legged ones felt vibrations when the ocean floor collapsed and headed for higher ground. The two legged ones perhaps with less feet to feel the rumbling wandered about as if the day was like any other. Soon the trench from which they evolved from several billion years earlier would claim them back. Or not. There is always satisfaction in the mass loss of human life, that is if you are far away and peering down from a great height, succinct in its exchange and balance. Taking back what was once lost.
A woman lost her husband, her two children and her parents in the sudden rise and fall of water across Yala, a national park on the south-eastern coast of Sri Lanka. Again loss like hers is darkly satisfying for those watching from afar. Imagining the terror and confusion crashing about in the furious wave and the random rooted object she must have clung to in order to survive. Imagining the loss as she allowed the brutal fact of her entire family drowning take hold of her consciousness. All of this is a state of empathy the objective observer can opt out of at any time. Again there is a satisfaction in our safety, the fact it wasn’t us. Some people heard her story and secretly envied her release from one life and her birth into another. A freak act of nature wiped her slate clean leaving her with no responsibility for another living soul. Once you’ve lost your entire family in one hit you can choose whatever path you want in life. No one will judge you. Oh for a wave.
The woman who lost her entire family couldn’t express her anger in a coherent way. There is no one, nothing to blame. She couldn’t blame God. A God that exists does not take your entire family in one hit, no matter what his divine plan. She couldn’t blame herself. With all her senses intact her two legs had failed to master the art of feeling distant seismic shifts in the earth. She couldn’t have done a thing. Perhaps hold on to her two sons with a firmer grip. But the wave swept away houses with effortlessly so no human grip could have stopped the turbulence below from chopping her son’s arms from hers. Her parents’ home in Colombo was eventually sold and the new owners moved in. The woman who lost her entire family started calling the new owners and hanging up on them. Unbeknown to them they’d stolen the life of another family just by purchasing a new house. She rang repeatedly and before long was making threatening noises down the phone. When you can’t attack the people closest to you, strangers will do. In the first few months of any breakup there’s phone calls that make sense only to the person making the call. It’s hopeless and there is no resurrecting the thing but you scream down the phone “why? just tell me why?” when you know the answer.
I remember walking behind a woman against the rush of peak hour commuters at Highbury Islington tube and even though we had an express lane to the far right she was veering into every second man and elbowing him in the ribs. When we got to the platform I caught up with her to see what her problem was. I expected to see an angry woman insane even but instead she was smiling.
Pain has to go somewhere, passing it on to anyone who happens to be in your way, is one strategy. But almost always it goes to the person that lies beside you in bed.