Dispatches From the Edge_ A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival - Anderson Cooper [12]
I slipped into the guest room where he was sleeping—his old bedroom was being used largely for storage—and sat on the edge of his bed. That night, he seemed scared, fragile, and that frightened me, made me angry. I resented his weakness. I asked him how he was, and we talked about his job a bit, but I really didn’t want to know too much. It sickens me now to realize all this, to see how selfish I was. I could have done something that might have helped. I could have talked to him, opened up, let him know that he wasn’t alone. But I didn’t. I left for school early the next morning.
A few days afterward, my mom told me that Carter liked the therapist and had returned to work. He’d also decided not to move back home. I was relieved, eager for any reason to stop worrying about him, to pretend that his crisis had never happened. I assumed that whatever problems he was having he’d confide to his therapist. I later learned he did not.
IN EVERY TRAGEDY, people search for miracles, signs that sustain them even when surrounded by death. We’ve been in Sri Lanka for more than a week when Chris, our interpreter, tells us about a small church in the town of Matera.
“Very strange comings and goings,” he says, clearly excited. “Levitating statues, miracles even.”
The church is named after a five-hundred-year-old relic, Our Lady of Matera, a finely carved figure of the Virgin Mary and the baby Jesus that has stood in an alcove near the altar for as long as anyone can remember.
When the first wave struck, Father Charles Hewawasam was at the altar, preparing communion for some one hundred parishioners seated on simple wooden benches inside. The choir in the balcony had just begun to sing the first few lines of a hymn, “While Shepards Watched.”
Father Charles didn’t see the wave. He remembers hearing a crash, which he thought was a traffic accident on a nearby street. Seconds later, he was swimming in water. There were screams, and bodies, cars floating in the nave, chunks of stone and wood. Everything smelled of the sea.
“I remember three bodies floating near the altar,” Father Charles tells me when we arrive at the church. He is in his early thirties with black hair combed neatly and parted on one side. He still limps slightly from an injury to his leg, and speaks soft British-accented English, looking you straight in the eye when he talks.
Father Charles introduces us to a nine-year-old boy named Dimaker, who was standing in the balcony when the water swept over the congregation beneath him. Dimaker sang in the choir, and was still holding his hymnal when he says he saw the statue of Our Lady of Matera rise from its pedestal in the alcove and leave the church.
“She was not taken by the water,” Dimaker explains, motioning with his hands to show how the statue seemed to levitate. “She went on her own. It was a miracle.”
Twenty people died in the church that morning. Some were killed by the initial impact; others drowned trying to escape. Father Charles didn’t notice that the statue was gone until later that day, when Dimaker told him what he’d seen.
“I believe she went out to sea to be with the people, her children,” Father Charles tells me. “She went with the people and she carried Jesus. She had the same struggle as the other people.”
For three mornings after the tsunami, Father Charles tells me, he went to the ocean’s edge and prayed for the return of the statue. “We need you,” he’d say out loud. “You have to come back.”
Each day, he attended to the burials of his parishioners and looked after the needs of the wounded. Several people from his congregation were missing,