The Impossible

We have been receiving a few well-meaning warnings about the release of the movie The Impossible. In case you don’t know, it tells the story of a Spanish family who were holidaying in Thailand when the Boxing Day 2004 tsunami struck. They all survived, miraculously. The Spanish director, Bayona, enlisted two extremely famous actors to play the roles of the parents, María and Quique.

The other day I came across a lengthy newspaper article titled ‘Unidas por el tsunami’ (United by the tsunami), and signed by a Toni García. I was curious, so I read it. I can’t help but see it as part of the huge ongoing promotional campaign for the movie; I just cannot consider it any other way.

But for me, the only thing of value in the whole article is María’s words. She chose to sell her story, and that's fine. I suppose she did so because it's a story that ends ‘well’, so to speak. Had she lost any of her three children, I'm certain the movie would have never seen the light of day.

María says she now knows herself strong, “because I know I'm fragile”. I do know what she’s talking about.

She knows her/their survival was a miracle, but says that any religious connotations attached to the word need to be removed, dispelled. In other words, it was impossible for her/them to survive, but somehow, inexplicably, she/they did. I also know what she means, and I completely agree with her. I feel exactly the same way about what my two sons, my wife and myself went through on 29 September 2009.

She acknowledges that she did make an attempt to read a book about the survivors who lost loved ones that fateful day, but she was unable to. I read Pacific Tsunami: Galu Afi, but I doubt I'll ever read it again. María thinks that the proverb “Time heals everything” is just a big lie. And I agree with her. “Time does not heal anything, time is life […] . […] from afar everything becomes more bearable, everything has become more anaesthetised. The rest are clichés”, she tells the reporter.

The journalist, Toni García, writes the following: “[María] rescued one of her sons from the water, despite being badly injured.” Hey, welcome to the real world, Toni García! Any worthy parent, let me tell you, would try to save their child in such circumstances.

Asked whether it is good to talk [about the tsunami], María replied: “It depends on who you talk to. There are very few people who will sit with you and talk about the subject openly. Me, I ask a lot of questions, and if someone’s had an accident I will ask them, patiently. However, at least in my case, people think it is taboo to talk about it, about the wave, the tsunami. When I returned [to Spain], people would look at me with fear, as if saying, ‘Take it easy, I'm not going to ask you anything’.” I know all too well what María is talking about.

I read elsewhere a stupidly cruel review of The Impossible. It more or less said it was a very melodramatic film about a family of tourists who had lost their entire luggage in the Boxing Day tsunami. The point the reviewer wanted to make was that hundreds of thousands of people died, that so many thousands of families lost loved ones, children, siblings, parents, grandparents… so why make a movie about a Western family whose five members survived? Other reviewers have drawn attention to the fact that the movie basically ignores the Thai victims by focusing only on a Western family. I will offer no opinion on that, because I have not seen the movie.

But I have watched the trailer of The Impossible. Online. All I can say is, the tsunami scenes are incredibly realistic. It is very much like that. But I also want to emphasise the 'incredible' aspect of it. Don’t forget it's a movie. Reality is a f**king lot worse.

Luckily for the director, María had a lot of input in the script. I guess we should not be surprised if it were awarded an Oscar for the FX.

But what I really wanted to consider was this: I wonder what we would say to each other, if one day I met María. I have seen her photograph: I have noticed how her eyes look somehow lost, like they're glancing at something that is not there. That look is vaguely familiar.

She still has all her three children. I have only two left.

On the morning of Boxing Day 2004 we were on a beautiful beach in New South Wales, thousands of kilometres away from the death and destruction that was taking place in the Indian Ocean. Clea was almost two years old; she was running on the white sand, running away from the waves that came too close, and she was giggling, giggling, like she always used to do.

I will not watch the movie. But it's nothing to do with the tsunami images, it's nothing to do with fear. The truth is I don't need a movie to remind me.

I guess I just don’t enjoy happy endings that much these days.

Penyagolosa

Penyagolosa

For many years the idea of my own death and what would happen to my body thereafter did not worry me too much. I had never really contemplated my own death as an event that was near. ‘Dead’ was not a word that I used on a daily basis. All that changed on 29 September 2009, and ‘dead’ is part of the vocabulary that reality has assigned to my life, every day, when I wake up.

And it’s not that I had not witnessed death before. As it happens to most people, my grandfathers went first (I hardly recall my paternal grandfather, he died when I was a small child – I do remember my maternal grandfather fondly, he was a loving man who was always surrounded by children; he worked as a clown for a few years after the Spanish Civil War, during which he lost his only son, Rafael, just a few months old, to disease and malnutrition).

A few years later, and over an ever-worsening process that took several months, I saw my paternal grandmother die a slow, terrible death because of diabetes and poor blood circulation. My other grandmother died suddenly in late 1995.

My own father died when I was 25. He died of a heart attack on a hot August morning, and the ambulance that was sent did not have the equipment that might have saved his life. But I only found out ten days later. I was abroad and no one was able to locate me. Yes, I was young and stupid. Haven’t we all been young and stupid at some point in our lives?

As per his wishes, my father was cremated. My mother suggested that I might want to bury his ashes. I agreed, of course. I buried them under the Norfolk pine tree we had always mistaken for a fir-tree; the Norfolk pine tree now towers majestically above my mother’s house. After digging a hole and pouring the ashes in there, I put a rock on top.

I had always held on to a somehow idyllic plan for my own funeral. I had always thought I would die before anyone else in my family. I would be survived by my wife and three children. My wishes were (still are) that my body would be cremated.

My (somewhat romantic) dream was that, eventually, my daughter Clea would make the trip to Spain and fulfil my wishes by climbing Penyagolosa Mountain [the picture above was taken in summer 1992] and scatter my ashes, that what once was me out to the wind, not necessarily from the top, but at least from a good vantage point, somewhere with breathtaking vistas. Just somewhere beautiful in a place that once meant a lot to me.

I do not want my ashes to go to Valencia now. The bond that once joined me to those lands is very fragile, to the extent that apart from family and very few friends, I have no business there any more. But even if my sons offered to carry out the task when the time comes (and it will), I would say no. No, I would rather have my ashes scattered in the land of the Ngunnawal, on the petal-coated lawn beneath which my Clea is buried.

Still, I do hope that my boys will travel to Spain, and that they have a great time, or even move there for good if they wish to do that when they are older. They’ll be able to do that if they wish. They could even climb Penyagolosa, and admire the views. It’ll be their choice. But there will be no need for them to take my ashes over there, to a place with whose people I no longer feel a truly meaningful attachment. Another part of me died over the months and years after 29 September 2009, and it cannot be resuscitated.

Call that a radical shift? Yes. Is it justified? You betcha!

The Magpie

Spring in Canberra can be a beautiful time of year: flowers are blooming everywhere, the grass is greener than ever, and daytime temperatures are usually mild and pleasant. Yet springtime is also the magpie swooping season. Australian magpies are very curious, inquisitive birds. They are known to approach people with some confidence and easily accept a feed, but they are also extraordinarily territorial animals; so much, that for as long as their little ones remain in the nest, they will harass anyone who approaches.

I was walking back from school the other morning, reading a book as is my custom, when I was suddenly attacked from behind. The magpie gave me a bit of a fright; my sunglasses fell to the ground. Much more hassled was a girl who was riding her bike to school; she eventually had to dismount because the magpie would not stop attacking her.

It feels as if it were only last year when Clea came running into her grandparents’ house, crying and holding her head. She had been playing outside, in the paddocks near the hay shed, when a magpie swooped down from one of the old gum trees on the farm and scratched her, drawing a little blood. She was very upset. I recorded the episode in a poem I wrote more than a year ago, ‘Whisper Her Name in the Wind’.

The magpie was simply protecting their little ones, I tried to explain, and did not mean to hurt. All animals have developed a sense of protection in one way or another. It is in every parent’s nature and instinct to protect our little one. Like the magpie, I would have done anything to be able to protect my little one.

When you lose your little one, the world becomes meaningless, and perhaps it can regain some semblance of consequence and logic after a long time.

The Force of Nature

This is one of the last photographs of Clea. Our own camera was of course lost in the 29 September 2009 tsunami; all the photographs we took while we were in Samoa – and there quite a few of them – were gone with the wall of water.

This photograph was taken at the top of the Telstra Tower in Black Mountain, on the 24^th of September 2009, less than a week before she died. Clea went on a school excursion that day; she was so excited! It was going to be her last day of school for the term – it ended up being her last day of school ever. The next day we drove to Sydney and boarded our flight to Apia.

On the plane, Clea was sitting next to me during landing. In those days, you had to cross the dateline to go to Samoa, so we arrived the day before at night time. The dim lights we were able to glimpse through the window were those of Apia: little shiny specks amid the immense blackness the ocean is at night. The plane appeared to be shaking a lot while we approached the runway, far more than I am used to, to be honest, so the landing felt kind of bumpy. Clea got a little scared until the plane touched down and ran the length of the tarmac.

For some reason, this image of Clea haunts my imagination in ways I cannot describe – nor would I like anyone to have to imagine. I see a vulnerable little girl, recoiling, holding on to her hat (which, actually, she lost that day!) and grimacing against the very strong, cold winds that swept Canberra that early spring day. I see the image of my daughter against the force of nature; I don’t think anyone could argue that, the impression you get on seeing the image is that she was not having fun as her teacher took the photograph – by the way, I have cropped it so that other students are not seen. Her jumper is zipped up tight; her hair is a real mess, hardly held in place by the pink hair band I now wear on my left wrist every day, wherever I go.

No, her facial expression definitely says that at this moment she was not enjoying being up there, at the top of the Telstra Tower.

For a few months after our return to Canberra, I had frequent nightmares, reliving the tsunami. Even now, nearly three years later, I occasionally may wake up with a start in the middle of the night, and it may take me a long time to settle again into a normal rhythm of sleep, if or when I do at all. Normally, I have no idea of what is it that woke me up. Yet something wakes me up. Believe me: it’s neither the carbon tax nor the prospect of another boatload of asylum seekers approaching the very remote islands to the north of the very remote northern coasts of Australia. Those are not things I would lose any sleep over.

It’s not as if I were consciously trying to keep memories of those horrifying moments. In fact, I wish I could forever forget the panic and the terror; if only I could erase those from my memory for good… But the truth is I cannot. Our imperfect brains: We forget what we want to remember, but what we would like to forget keeps coming back to haunt us.

This is not too dissimilar from the widespread notion that with time we, the grieving parents, have to somehow “get over” our child’s death. I’m sorry if I disappoint somebody: we just don’t. We never will. We just cannot “get over” it, because we will never be able to retrieve such a big chunk of our future. yes, it is their future that we have lost forever. How can one get over the fact that your child’s future (which is also yours) suddenly snaps and then is gone? Does anybody know?

I do know, however, that my daughter Clea died a terrible death. She perished under the unstoppable violence of nature, the victim of an incredibly powerful, relentless natural force. It is almost impossible to comprehend – and even for us, who were there and survived, it seems unreal now.

After the Japanese tsunami happened more than a year ago, for a while I kind of expected people would ask me about it. For the first time in human history, a tsunami was broadcast live on TV. It was possible for people to gain a better understanding of what it is like to be there, so vulnerable, so small under the colossal force of nature.