Wave by Sonali Deraniyagala

On Boxing Day in 2004 there was an earthquake and a subsequent tsunami in Sri Lanka that swept the author of this book and her entire family out to sea and only she survived.  The book opens with an account of the event itself.  She and her husband looking out the window at her parents sea side hotel and seeing a wall of water, realizing that it was not a dream, that is represented a clear and present danger.  They swept up their two small sons and ran for their lives.  They did not even pause to knock on her parents door as they ran by.  At first it appeared that they were in luck--a jeep stopped to pick them up.  The immensity of what they were facing became very real when one of the passengers in the jeep fell out and they did not stop to retrieve them--that simply could not happen.  Then the jeep was engulfed in water, and they were left to fend for themselves in the ocean.  The author managed to grap a tree branch as the wave was sweeping her out to sea--the rest of her family was not so lucky.

The rest of the book is about what it is like to be the survivor when everything you care about has been taken from you in the blink of an eye.  She struggles with finding meaning in life, she struggles with alcoholism, and she waivers between wanting to remember and desperately hoping to forget.  It is a moving and enlightening first hand account of learning to live with trauma.  It is a short, well written and raw memoir that is well worth reading and thinking about.