It will never just be Boxing Day

This time of year, like for so many (more than you’d think) is incredibly difficult. It is a huge trigger of fractured relationships, family hardships, and for missing those who are no longer with us. Christmas is a time where families traditionally come together, for some it is pure joy, for others, all the things that aren’t pleasant or present, come to light.

Growing up, it has been so starkly bittersweet: We would have a really lovely Christmas Day filled with delicious food, quality time and Christmas magic. I’ve got to credit my mum for always making sure we’d have a really special Christmas! But we all knew once we’d fall asleep on that jovial day, we’d wake up to an empty sadness of the anniversary of the Boxing Day Tsunami. To most people, known as just ‘Boxing Day’, the 26th always carries a heaviness I can’t quite describe.

20 years ago today, was not only the worst day of my family’s lives, but one of the worst natural disasters to happen in recent history. The Indian Ocean Tsunami took the lives of 230,000 people, and thousands more that were never recovered, including my Dad.

We were on holiday with some family friends when the most inconceivable happened. An underwater earthquake of 9.1 magnitude struck the coast of Indonesia. We weren’t too far away having a wonderful time in Khao Lak, Thailand, where not one but two tsunami waves hit. We were scattered, and instantly all separated- my then 10 year old brother rescued by locals from the water after climbing up a palm tree; and I was saved by my big sister scooping me up as the wave quickly approached us (I was 7, she was 13). We all found each other again by taking refuge on the hotel’s rooftop, along with what felt like (to my tiny person perspective), hundreds of other people, slowly being reunited with their loved ones. Except as the day went on and the swells of water subsided, my dad never came up. 

20 years on, and we've still never found him. There has never been a funeral, and therefore no closure. The closest we've had actually happened this year, we thought we had something but it didn’t work out the way we hoped. This close-call to closure brought us to a place where we thought we could finally have an official goodbye, only for it to be taken from us very quickly after as a dud. This experience brought up a lot of buried trauma for us collectively, and repurposed the grief we thought we had a handle on as a family. Of course, it’s always important to work through things rather than sit on them, so I see this now as a blessing.

But it’s been hard. Working through this grief as a 27 year old unsurprisingly has been poles apart to when I was a 7 year old. As I’ve gotten older, I grieve the relationship I would have had with my dad, the adult conversations we could have had. What we’d have in common, his opinions on current matters. Of course I’m only telling my account, but I know my siblings have equal grievances, if not much harder due to their older ages.

All we have now are our early memories, and a portrait painted by those who knew him- memories collated with other people’s memories, of someone who seemed like the most brilliant man. He was the type of person that friends would say walked in to the room and everyone wanted a bit of him. Although he was definitely not perfect- he was a dynamic man, a great story teller, an incredible father, a hero to us.

What we’ve experienced is an amalgamation of trauma and loss, subsequently creating a huge fracture in our make-up. However it also made us far more thick skinned as kids, as we’d experienced a side of life not made for a child. As I understand life more as an adult, as the long-term trauma really sets in. That’s another thing- the day itself was so horrendous, my family and I are not only left with the grief of not growing up with our dad, but have had 20 years of long-term PTSD manifesting in us. I’ve been in therapy multiple times throughout my life and try and learn as much as I can on trauma (The Body Keeps the Score for eg. has opened my eye up to so much). I suffer with extreme anxiety disorder which can be really debilitating in my everyday life.

Despite efforts through therapy it seems to linger like an unwelcome headache. And I can’t speak for my family but I’ll say it has definitely been the epicentre of all our problems, naturally. Candidly, I’ll say it has throughout these years both equally torn us apart and brought us closer together. A bond tied by something so rare and terrifying, sometimes it feels like I can’t even connect.

Of the 150 British tourists who died, my dad was one of 6 unconfirmed and never found. And of the 230,000 people that died, around over 200,000 of them were Indonesian, Thai, Sri Lankan and Indian locals. People who not only lost their family members like I did, but who lost their entire homes, communities, their lives as they knew it. I will never fully understand how that feels, I feel a tenth of that life trauma. Numbers that large are so difficult to fully comprehend the scale of it all. It took years to rebuild any infrastructure, with so many places 20 years on and still not as it was.

There have been dramatisations of the Tsunami, such as ‘The Impossible’, (based on a book written by a family who stayed in the exact hotel that we did), but I urge anyone who’d like to consume more realistic media on the subject to watch the recent docu-series on Channel 4, which my mother and brother bravely took part sharing their story in. It’s called ‘Tsunami 2004: The Day the Wave Hit’, and shares real life accounts of survivors. 

This Tsunami was like a secret beast, it felt like it literally crept up on the affected areas. No one knew that the sea being pulled out so far like that meant a catastrophic 100 foot wave was about to hit. If I’m correct there were no prior warnings, because it had been so long since a tsunami of this scale, that modern society simply weren’t prepared (because of this, you’ll now see tsunami warning post signs up in any potential affect zone). 

I wasn’t quite sure what I was going to write or if I was going to say anything at all, and this is such a minimised effort of going into detail of that day. It just doesn’t feel it’s truly been 20 years. So much has changed then, in society and in our personal lives. Well I suppose we have lived on, with that day embedded into us. We wouldn’t be who we are today without it. Despite the incredibly horrific times we’ve experienced we at least all have each other, and a hope that our dad is looking down on us and giving us a guiding hand. 

With our Dad technically a ‘missing person’ growing up there was always a part of my siblings and I where we found solace in thinking he was a spy living out his new life on a beach living the dream. Perhaps he is.

Dad, I love you so much, and I hope you’re proud of us all.