Sea of Sorrow
Tricycle - Ronna
Kabatznick
On the eve of the 10th anniversary of
the Indian Ocean Tsunami, a psychologist who volunteered to help
survivors in Thailand recalls her staggering confrontation with
death and considers how a Buddhist country coped with the truth of
impermanence.
On the morning of December 26, 2004, shortly after
the sun rose over the Andaman Sea, three killer waves swept over
the southwestern shores of Thailand, swallowing—and spitting back
out—5,385 people. Thousands more vanished completely in the sea. As
this was happening, I was miles up in the air, returning from a
pilgrimage in India to northern Thailand, my home for the previous
two and a half years. A few hours earlier, I had sat in the Bangkok
airport, awaiting a connecting flight, as planeloads of tourists
seeking fun, relaxation, and novelty took off for the coastal
resorts that now lay in watery ruins. The first images I had of the
devastation unrolled on my TV screen later that day in the lakeside
town of Phayao, where my husband and I were living during our
sabbatical.
There were shots of bikini-clad corpses on beaches
and stunned survivors frantically searching among them for loved
ones. Video clips showed demolished homes and hotels, capsized
fishing boats, crushed cars, and acres of debris. Seawater still
gushed from broken storefront windows and down streets and alleys.
The Indian Ocean tsunami turned out to be one of the most
devastating natural disasters in recorded history, leaving an
estimated 227,898 dead, 125,000 injured, 45,752 missing, and 1.69
million displaced over a 22,540-square-mile area. In that idyllic
tropical setting, the day after Christmas, who could have imagined
that “this will be the day that I die.”
The next morning, I got a call from a rabbi friend
in Bangkok who had hurled himself into the disaster relief effort.
As he described the tragedies unfolding in the wake of the tsunami,
it occurred to me that I could provide psychological support to
survivors and told him I would fly to the southern beach city of
Phuket. At the time, there were just 40 to 50 psychiatrists in all
of Thailand and the Phuket International Hospital, inundated with
traumatized and wounded survivors, had no designated psychiatric
ward. When I arrived, the one resident Thai psychiatrist had barely
slept since the tsunami struck a few days earlier, so I offered to
cover for him while he rested. “Are you sure?” he asked and
proceeded to pile dozens of charts onto my outstretched
arms.
For the next two days and nights, I went from room
to room, visiting patients and hearing survivors’ stories as nurses
and doctors came in and out, delivering painkillers, changing IVs
and catheters, and conducting pre- and post-op consultations.
Embassy officials were frequent visitors, too, arranging medical
transport for wounded tourists who had no clothing, passports, or
money. Whether groggy from medication, panicked from trauma, or
alert with anticipation, most patients were eager to tell their
stories. “We were waiting for our omelets when . . . ” “I was
playing with my children when . . . ” “I was riding a motorbike
when . . . ” They described terror and chaos—people running,
yelling, hurling themselves into trees or holding on to railings
they prayed wouldn’t collapse. And then—the realization of who was
missing and what was destroyed. I listened carefully to each story,
aware of the teller’s need to narrate the details of the
experience, with all of its attendant confusion, pain, and
disbelief. I could feel each one trying to piece together the
events, like a puzzle, one memory at a time.
For the
previous 18 months, I had been living at forest monasteries in
Thailand, where I had learned to recite the short, straightforward
daily reflection on impermanence: “All that is mine, beloved and
pleasing, will become otherwise, will become separated from me.”
The reflection, similar to ones I practice every Yom Kippur, the
Jewish Day of Atonement, helps awaken us to the harsh realities of
life but also to its transcendent and eternal qualities. We’re
forced to think about where and what our refuge is. What can we
rely on? Our worldly pursuits inevitably end in sorrow;
acquisitions in dispersion; buildings in destruction; meetings in
separation; birth in death. These facts—the irrefutable laws of
nature—took on a visceral meaning as I met with those facing
sudden, irrevocable loss.
Regardless of their physical condition, nearly
everyone I visited was in shock, consumed by grief, uncertainty,
and dread. They were reliving the tsunami—the roar of crashing
waves, the desperate cries of victims—especially during sleepless
nights, as they tossed and turned in their hospital beds. Where
were their families and friends? How could they search for them?
“What about those searching for me? How will they find me here?
Where should I even begin?” I was asked, over and over
again.
One morning I looked in on a Dutch man who owned a
resort that had been reduced to splintered timber and rubble, and
who still hadn’t learned the fate of his family and 30 employees. I
had seen him earlier, when he was hysterical with panic and grief.
The nurses said he’d barely slept and had refused all offers of
sedatives. When I entered his room—curtains drawn against the
daylight, television blaring—he stared at me, expressionless. “How
are you?” I asked. “I just want to watch television,” he said, and
turned back to face the screen. I realized that the best I could
offer the survivors I met was to be an equanimous witness to their
broken hearts. There was so little to say that could make a
difference.
After several days in the hospital, I was asked to
travel to the resort town of Krabi, where a psychologist was needed
to counsel survivors and people attempting to identify the bodies
of loved ones. The van that took me to Krabi was packed with large
black boxes, like props from a James Bond movie, filled with
forensic equipment—microscopes, test tubes, DNA sample kits. We
stopped at one of the many beach areas that had become a body
collection center, staffed by the Thai Army, doctors, and
volunteers. The odor of death greeted us. The beach was still
littered with corpses, and people picked through them searching for
loved ones, exactly as my husband and I had seen on television.
Even elephants joined in the search for bodies washed into the
dense forest undergrowth nearby, and headed there with rescue teams
where heavy earth-moving machinery couldn’t go.
Body bags were lined up in neat rows in a grassy
area close to the beach. Large piles of crumpled corpses lay
nearby, decaying and covered with flies and insects. Mourners were
standing among them. I recalled the wisdom of the sages: do not
comfort the bereaved while their dead lie before them. The shock of
grief needs both honor and time. Near the piles of bodies,
volunteers were building makeshift coffins, their hammer blows
providing a staccato soundtrack.
I was taken to a makeshift morgue housed in a
wat [Buddhist monastery]. The floor of the building was
covered with about 500 bodies, with more lying outside. Masked
workers were spraying the grounds with disinfectant and, until it
ran out, placing dry ice around the bodies to reduce the stench. At
home in Berkeley, I had volunteered with the Chevra Kadisha, the
Jewish society that helps prepare the dead for burial. Nothing of
that work had prepared me for this. Just as at the body collection
center at the beach, the corpses had been drenched in seawater and
exposed to Thailand’s searing heat, leaving most blackened,
bloated, and unrecognizable. Some teemed with maggots and worms.
Although I was wearing a surgical mask drenched in menthol
ointment, the odor was sickening. Inside the morgue, I estimated
that the ratio of dead to living might be 50 to one. But there was
no way to tell for sure, as the corpses were so densely packed and
more were being delivered by the hour.
Among the
living were members of an Orthodox Jewish rescue service known as
ZAKA (a Hebrew acronym for “identification of victims of
disaster”). ZAKA members are trained to identify body parts after
suicide bombings, to ensure complete burial in accordance with
Jewish law. Clad in face masks and protective overalls reminiscent
of astronauts’ suits, the forensic experts—dental, fingerprint, and
DNA specialists—had come to Thailand intending to identify missing
Israelis (the country is a popular destination for Israeli soldiers
on holiday). But the demand for identification of the thousands of
dead was so extreme, they ended up collecting physical evidence on
every victim they could, regardless of faith, nationality, or race.
In the morgue, whenever someone spoke, the sound of the voice
punctured the silence and we all listened. At one point, there was
a crescendo of excited talking. The team had just identified an
Israeli woman by the Hebrew words on the label sewn onto the back
of her bra.
There was no shortage of body parts for the team to
collect and match. They were everywhere. Before our eyes, bodies
were disintegrating and returning to the elements. The temple had
become a massive, open charnel ground meditation, exactly as the
Buddha had described it—here a hand bone, there a foot bone, there
a tooth, here a skull. Outside the temple-morgue, monks from local
monasteries gathered around the clock to chant the traditional
funeral verses in Pali: Anicca vata sankhara,
uppadavaya-dhammino; uppajjitva nirujjhanti, tesam vupasamo
sukho: Conditions are impermanent, rising and falling away;
having been born, they all must cease. The stilling of all
conditions is true peace.
About 96 percent of Thais are Buddhists. Although
many don’t practice meditation, most have strong faith in the
Buddha’s teachings. Those who could not find the bodies of loved
ones believed that the departed would receive the merit of good
deeds performed in life, and also that of the good deeds dedicated
to their memory. The Thai way of grieving, from what I could see,
was composed, reflecting what is known as jai yen—a cool
heart. Mourners appeared to see death as part of life, not as an
injustice or a dreadful mistake, even when it was unexpected or
swift.
Expressing emotions wasn’t an issue for Westerners,
who had jai rawn—a hot heart. Many felt angry and betrayed
by the tsunami and by the experts who didn’t detect it in time to
transmit warnings. “They should have known! How irresponsible,”
they declared. Parents bitterly blamed themselves for not being
able to protect their children from death. “I’m a bad parent, it’s
my fault,” they confessed, as if they were personally responsible
for the natural disaster.
This
difference between the two perspectives demonstrates one of the
Buddha’s key teachings: our minds are habituated to relate to
suffering by resisting it through blame, bitterness, anger,
resentment. That resistance is what the Buddha called “the second
arrow,” which follows the first arrow, the direct experience of
pain. So much additional suffering comes from believing that
“things shouldn’t be this way”—when in fact they are that way.
Although tragedy and loss feel personal, they are not. Suffering
and loss are built into the human condition. I spoke with one local
woman in her late twenties who stood beside three stacked caskets
containing her young son, daughter, and husband. “Pen tamada,
pen tamachat,” she whispered in response to my
condolences—“this is natural, this is nature.” Her house and family
swept away, she was staying at the nearby monastery of Ajahn
Jamnian, a well-known meditation master. Along with a thousand
other displaced people, she received food, supplies, and medical
attention. Ajahn Jamnian, meanwhile, spent his days and nights
walking up and down the beaches strewn with corpses and caskets,
chanting and spreading metta and goodwill to the dead and
to the living.
Back at the morgue, I met a mother searching for the
body of her 8-year-old daughter, Ploy. The girl had been out
playing at the beach with some friends when the first wave struck.
While combing through photos of the dead posted on the Internet,
the mother thought she recognized her child, a decaying corpse
dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, with a three-digit number painted
across her chest (part of the identification process set up by the
Thai Army). We held hands and tiptoed up and down the aisles of
corpses in various stages of decomposition. With just Kleenex over
our mouths and noses, we tried to find a cadaver bearing digits
that matched the ones written on a scrap of paper in the mother’s
hand. We saw bikini-clad bodies crawling with maggots, a toddler’s
body infested with worms. But we couldn’t find the child’s numbered
body.
Ploy’s mother
continued to search while I took a break outside. There were still
a few hundred bodies in the morgue we hadn’t yet seen, and hundreds
more were being unloaded from pickup trucks. I gazed up into the
hot, star-spangled night sky and then at some teenagers and Thai
soldiers delivering bagged cadavers. On the trucks, I could see
leftover limbs, belonging to no one. My phone rang. It was Ajahn
Anan, one of my meditation teachers. “Sabai dee
mai—how
are you?” he asked. I couldn’t respond. There was no coherent
answer to the question. “Mi upekkha. Glap pai chuay
kon,” he
offered. “Have equanimity. Go back and help people.” I could think
only of the fact that I had lost track of the mother looking for
Ploy.
At the entry to the morgue, a line of people had
formed, numbers in hand, waiting for me to accompany them. I
escorted a few inside, but the sight and
smell was so overwhelming that they turned and left. Could I assure
them that their loved ones would be identified through DNA testing?
No one could make that guarantee. I returned to the morgue to talk
with the workers. With so many new corpses arriving every hour, was
there any order to the bodies on the ground? I noticed that the
numbers of the dead were not in sequence—number 473 was next to
112. The only thing I could understand from their replies was that
babies and young children were on the left side, wrapped in white,
like mummies.
For days,
survivors and family members continued to comb through photographs
of the deceased and fill out lengthy missing-person forms. There
were computer banks at the hospital and outside the morgue.
Internet databases were filled with images of documents retrieved
from the dead—credit cards, passports, driver’s licenses—and large
bags of these items overflowed on a table close to the morgue’s
entryway. A kind of camaraderie emerged. Survivors swapped
suggestions on how to hasten body identification and retrieval:
Start with the numbered photographs of jewelry—fingers with wedding
rings, wrists with bracelets, ears with earrings, and necks with
necklaces. Then switch to pictures of moles, scars, and
tattoos.
Over the days that followed, I worked with dozens of
grieving families, helping identify the corpses of their loved
ones, attending cremations, arranging rides to the airport,
administering tranquilizers to survivors too distressed to
function. I met the parents of a Korean bride who perished during
her honeymoon and whose body I helped to lug out of a refrigerated
truck and accompany to a monastery for cremation. There were the
Scandinavian father and son who left the country ebullient—because
they had managed to identify and claim the bodies of a missing wife
and daughter. And there was the Thai father searching photo
databases for his son, a young monk. Another monk told me that the
father was optimistic about finding the body, amid the hundreds of
photos of corpses. “A small monk with a shaved head, dressed in
robes, is easy to spot,” he explained.
My ability to keep people’s stories and needs in
order finally began to crumble. It was time to leave. As I packed
my clothes, cosmetics, and notebook, I recalled how the Buddha had
instructed his monks to sew their robes from scraps of burial cloth
found in charnel grounds: the smell of death would focus their
attention on the fragility of life and the certainty of death. But
I’d had enough of the stench. My skirts and blouses were saturated
with it, and I threw most of my clothes away.
An American news team took me to the airport, which
was teeming with tourists from around the globe. In the departure
lounge, I recognized several volunteers, but none of us greeted or
even acknowledged each other. I took it as a silent agreement to
put the past behind us. What else was there to say? Besides, maybe
death would take a few days off. That thought dissolved as I headed
across the tarmac, toward my plane. Stacks of caskets, interspersed
with luggage, rolled up the conveyor belt into the airplane’s
cargo, tagged for their final destination.
From Bangkok, I went to visit my teacher Ajahn
Anan at his monastery about two hours south of the city. I returned
to the kuti (meditation hut) where I
had lived for many months, hoping to find some solace. But my mind
raced and rambled with memories, images, and stories. I wandered
around the monastery, perched on the side of a mountain, hoping to
exhaust my body and quiet my thoughts, but when night fell I was
still in turmoil. Hoping a book might distract me, I went in search
of a volume in English. I entered a large room in the women’s
section and was shocked to see bodies littering the floor—but these
were alive and engaged in the ordinary act of sleeping. I had
become so accustomed to the sight of decomposing corpses that it
took me a moment to readjust my perception. I listened to the
gentle snores of the women and girls, admired their healthy skin,
and appreciated that their heads, limbs, skin, and internal organs
were still intact. These living beings would eventually die and
decay, just as I and everyone I loved would. I understood that in
trying to deny that things are always changing, we lose our sense
of the sacredness of life. It’s easy to forget that life and death
are part of the natural scheme of things, intrinsic to our lives in
an eternally shifting universe.