Dispatches From the Edge_ A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival - Anderson Cooper [8]
I DIDN’T KNOW it was going to happen. I guess kids never do. I was ten. My father was fifty. That seemed old at the time; now its frighteningly young. My father died on an operating table at New York Hospital while undergoing heart bypass surgery. January 5, 1978. That was the date. I still mark it on my calendar every year. I should celebrate his birthday, of course, gather together friends who knew him, tell stories, keep his memory alive. Twenty-seven years later, it’s still too painful even to try. Too raw. The nerves are still exposed. For years, I tried to swaddle the pain, encase the feelings. I boxed them up along with my father’s papers, stored them away, promising one day to sort them all out. All I managed to do was deaden myself to them, detach myself from life. That works for only so long.
The morning my father went to the hospital, I was sick and stayed home from school. He came into my room and kissed me goodbye. He said he’d be back soon. He was hospitalized for nearly a month, and I got to visit him only once. They didn’t allow children in the intensive care ward. I hated seeing him like that: lying in bed, an IV in his arm, a brown disinfectant stain on his hand. He seemed so weak, waiting for his heart to fail once again.
For Christmas he’d asked my mom to give my brother and me audio cassette recorders. I think he wanted me to tape my feelings, my fears. I never did. I wish now he’d recorded his voice, left me a message, one for each year he’d be gone. We planned to go to the hospital on Christmas Day, record our conversation. He had an attack that morning, however, and I never saw him alive again.
I was asleep when my mom came into my room to tell me he had died. I can’t remember what she said, but I know she was crying. Soon my brother and I were as well.
She brought us into the living room. Al Hirschfeld, the cartoonist, was there with his wife, Dolly. They were close friends of my parents, and must have been with my mother at the hospital. I remember that Dolly told me about how she felt when her father died. From then on, every time I saw Hirschfeld’s drawings in the Sunday Times, I thought about that night.
The day my father died, my life restarted. The person who I was disappeared, washed away by the turn of the tide. From time to time I still catch glimpses of the child I was when my father was alive: swimming through warm water in a crystal blue pool. Playing Marco Polo with my mom and dad. Dissolving into giggles as they get close. My hands reach out, touch their arms underwater. My legs wrap around my father’s waist. My mother’s hair is pulled back in a bun; my father smiles as I hold him tight. A seashell wind chime gently blows in the breeze. I can hear waves crashing somewhere through the hedges and over the dunes.
ON A STRETCH of pale sand, a group of novice Sri Lankan monks in crimson tunics, children not yet teens, play with the outgoing tide. A thin boy in hand-me-down shorts and a mud-stained T-shirt watches from a distance. His name is Maduranga. He’s thirteen years old, and his brother and sister were taken by the sea.
We’re in a village called Kamburugamuwa. We found it quite by chance. There are no stores, no main street, just a cluster of simple homes and a mud path to the sea. Before the tsunami, visitors to the village were told to look for a Buddhist temple between the main road and the water. The temple is gone now; a slab of concrete, the building’s foundation, is all that remains. There are children’s schoolbooks and small colored plastic cups scattered about in the sand.
When the tsunami struck Kamburugamuwa, the temple was crowded. A Buddhist ceremony was taking place. Fifty-nine people had squeezed into the main room. Most sat facing the head monk, who was seated on a slightly raised dais, his back to the sea. Had there been a window behind the monk, perhaps some of those assembled would have seen the