Tsunami Survivor Fights Losing War With Grief

The bleakness comes late at night, after the little shop is closed and her family is asleep, and the pain from her son’s death tears at her like a raw wound.

Lately, that’s when the neighbors have heard her crying, her sobs clearly audible through the roughhewn wooden shelters where most people have lived since the tsunami destroyed this seaside village on a December morning. In a place where nearly every home is burdened by its own mourning, the sound frightens people.

Sriyawathi Malani Gunathilaka had always been a strong woman. Her grief sometimes seemed overwhelming in those early days, after her son’s grip slipped from a palm tree during the tsunami and the waves swept him to his death, but she was able to cope. She had a family to care for, she repeatedly insisted; she had to be strong for them.

But coping has become increasingly difficult.

“As time goes by, I think about him more and more,” Sriyawathi, 54, said on a recent afternoon, sitting on a plastic child’s chair in the one-room shelter she shares with her husband. In her hands, she kneaded a thin blanket. “It’s the only thing on my mind ... the hole he left in our lives.”

Three months have passed since the tsunami savaged 11 Indian Ocean countries, destroying thousands of homes and killing as many as 300,000 people. In Peraliya, much of the wreckage is still here, but most has been shoveled into piles, and the sound of hammering and the smell of freshly sawed timber are constant reminders that the village is rebuilding.

Things look better for Sriyawathi too, at least outwardly. The ruins of her house, reduced to little more than a few badly cracked walls, have been cleaned up, and a plastic tarp has been strung over the front room so that the family could open a small grocery store there, selling bananas, onions and Elephant-brand ginger beer. She and her husband sleep in the shelter, really little more than a shed, built by Danish aid workers in the meticulously swept dirt backyard.

But in the quiet of that home, it’s clear that Sriyawathi is fighting, and sometimes losing, a war with her own grief.

“She’s having a difficult time holding together,” said her daughter, Sujeewa, 23. “I’m really frightened.”

Pradeep was 19, the baby of the family and his mother’s only son. At the time of his death, he was an insurance salesman and was preparing to take the university entrance exams for a second time, hoping for a better score.

It was what his mother, a fiercely determined woman, wanted. She had spent years saving a few rupees at a time from her husband’s pay selling vegetables and her small income from sewing. With that money, she educated the children and built the house. She was the center of the family’s life. She made the decisions, she made the rules, she set the tone of relentless middle-class aspiration.

But Pradeep was the center of her life, and his loss has all but shattered her.

She hasn’t had a complete meal in weeks, and her two daughters hide pictures of their dead brother, afraid of bringing their mother to tears. She takes little interest in the rebuilding of her house, set along a sandy dirt road that cuts through the middle of the village.

The strong, independent woman is buckling under the weight of her own independence.

Across Indonesia, Sri Lanka and India, millions of tsunami survivors are struggling to rebuild their splintered lives. Most have found ways to keep going: building new homes, holding together broken families, caring for neighbors and friends, going through the bureaucratic tedium of requesting government assistance.

But for some, the burden of loss has been too heavy.

Some effects are obvious: excessive drinking, domestic violence, habitual gambling. But sometimes the signs are more oblique. If Sriyawathi is outwardly getting by, with her little shop and her cleaned-up house, she and her husband, Punyasiri, a silent man weakened by a stroke two years ago, are suffering terribly. When she cries in the night, he begins to cry with her. Their daughters worry that the unrelenting grief will make them both sick.

In the United States, people would look at Sriyawathi’s situation and might talk about the stages of grief, and the depression she appears to be battling. Therapy could be suggested, or anti-depressant medication.

Here, most mental health professionals prefer a different approach. In a country with strong community support systems and less emphasis on individualism, families and neighbors are often better help, they say.

“We don’t have a tradition of counselors here,” said Dr. Palitha Abeykoon, an advisor to the World Health Organization in Colombo, the capital. Without community support, “even if the whole country is flooded with psychiatrists, it’s not going to help.”

But Sriyawathi has little such support. Her independence and drive, the qualities that helped her take her family from near-destitution to Sri Lanka’s lower middle class, have left her isolated. It’s not that she’s unfriendly -- she’s a warm, motherly woman who cares deeply for the people around her. But she was also intensely single-minded about bettering her family’s life.

In a village where sharing is a constant -- wandering into someone else’s house to borrow a cup of rice or a handful of spices is common -- she kept mostly to herself. She despises asking for help. As a result, she has few close friends.

“My family always kept our privacy,” she said simply. “I don’t want to depend on anyone, not even my daughters.”

At a critical time, that has become a weakness.

A few weeks after the tsunami, she and her husband left her elder daughter’s large house, a few minutes’ walk away, where they’d been staying, and moved into the temporary shelter behind their destroyed home. It’s where she belongs, she says, the place she built and where she reared her children. Most important, it’s where her son grew up, even if she hates to walk past what remains of his bedroom.

“This is my house. I can’t cry the way I want at someone else’s house,” she said.

But if Sriyawathi can appear very fragile, some of her strength remains. When she needs to, she can sometimes break through her grief.

She managed to set up the shop, for instance, and still carries much responsibility for her family: encouraging Sujeewa to apply to nursing school, taking care of her infant granddaughter and cooking many of the meals.

She speaks sadly of the village men who have come to depend on handouts.

“Now they don’t have to work, so they just get drunk and sit around,” she said. “But I don’t want to do that. If everyone did that, the country would fall apart.”

She’s also not really as alone as she thinks. When the neighbors heard her crying long into the night, some spoke to Sujeewa, who was living at her sister’s.

“They came and told me I should stay” with her parents, Sujeewa said, fighting tears.

Many of the family’s burdens now rest on this cheerful young woman who loves horror movies and can’t understand how people could be drawn to city life, which she has seen on a couple visits to Colombo, a three-hour drive to the north.

“When you smile, they don’t smile back,” she said, stunned.

Now, she is the one who keeps track of the family’s important papers -- a photo of Pradeep’s corpse, her application for nursing school -- in a child’s plastic book bag decorated with smiling panda bears.

“I have to look out for them,” she said quietly, looking to make sure that her mother wasn’t listening.

“It’s better for them when I am here.”