'Pain on top of pain is terrifying': The reality of life after tragedy

Hannah recoiled. “Is he okay?”

The answer was devastating. Matt, only 41 years old, was dead on the beach even before the ambulance arrived. Everything Hannah had assumed about their future together, about the order of the universe, died along with him. The police said she needed to call somebody to come and sit with her but she didn’t want to. That would make it real.

Almost exactly two years later, I ride my Vespa to visit Hannah in a leafy part of Sydney’s inner west (and no, it’s not lost on me that riding a motorcycle is a provocative act for somebody writing a book about sudden, life-changing disasters).

It is just the type of day on which Matt would have loved to go surfing – there’s a nip in the air but in the sun it’s crisp and pleasant. The sky looks freshly scrubbed to a gleaming blue. It’s exhilarating to weave through the alleys and laneways to her cottage.

Hannah is putting the rubbish out when I arrive. She wears ugg boots, jeans and a loose jumper and still manages to look stylish.

Inside her house, it’s cosy and inviting. The kids’ art is stuck to the fridge and one of the drawings has a caption that reads “I love my dad so much”. Matt’s handsome, open face smiles warmly from a framed picture. Hannah makes tea and we sit at the kitchen table, sharing some treats she’s bought from a local patisserie.

Hannah distinctly remembers the overwhelming feeling, when the police told her that Matt had died, of not wanting to tell anybody.

“I just said, ‘I don’t want anyone to know,’ ” says Hannah. “It was this extreme feeling of embarrassment. I don’t know why I was embarrassed. It was like, ‘This can’t be happening to us,’ and not wanting it to be real.”

Reflecting on it now, it seems crazy to Hannah that her first feeling was embarrassment, but that was how her brain and body reacted to the shock.

“I didn’t want the house filled with people, because in my head I couldn’t believe it had happened,” she says.

“My biggest concern was the kids. I felt this overwhelming need to protect them and somehow make it not as awful as it was for them.

“That’s probably why I didn’t tell them until the next morning, because I felt like I wanted them to have one more night where it wasn’t real.”

At one point late that afternoon, Hannah asked the police if they were sure it was Matt. He had told her he was going to go to Maroubra, a beach further south. Maybe there’d been a mistake?

It was definitely him, the police insisted. Soon afterwards, more police officers arrived with Matt’s car.

“They turned over his wallet and his wedding ring. That was quite a moment, to be handed a zip-lock bag with his wedding ring and wallet. Okay, now that feels real.”

By that time, Adam had already formally identified Matt’s body, which meant that Hannah didn’t have to go to the morgue if she didn’t want to.

The question of whether or not to attend a viewing, as it’s called, is something many bereaved people grapple with. Some of us are terrified and don’t want to. Hannah, though, instantly knew that she needed to see her husband’s body.

“It was a bit scary to see him, but not him. He was like a sort of Madame Tussauds model. He didn’t have much hair. He had a very shaved head, so you saw the stitches. I was like, ‘That’s not Matt.’ But it was Matt,” says Hannah softly.

“The detail for me that felt the most personal – because they had washed him and put him in a hospital gown – was when I took hold of his hand, there was sand in his palm still. I felt … It’s you.”

One of the hardest things after a death is that life keeps relentlessly rolling on. Hannah says, “I remember being in the supermarket and someone bumping into me. It was the first time I’d been to the supermarket since Matt had died, probably only two weeks after.

“I was walking around with the trolley and you’re confronted by all the things you no longer need to buy. Matt used to have gluten-free bread, for example. I thought, ‘Well, I don’t need to buy that any more.’ It’s the most mundane detail, but it kills you inside.

“And someone bumped into me and didn’t say sorry. I didn’t do anything but I just wanted to turn around and go, ‘You don’t know what’s happened to me! I’m grieving!’ It can be the tiniest thing that wounds you.”

“Was there ever a time, as irrational as it might be, when there was a sense of irritation or a feeling of ‘Where is he?’ ” I ask.

“All the time, all the time,” Hannah replies. “I remember ‘Where are you?’ constantly. It felt like someone had literally just rubbed him out. It’s baffling, utterly baffling.”

The reaction among Hannah’s friends was mixed. Some had a fix-it mentality and constantly offered solutions as to how Hannah could stop feeling so wretched. Some couldn’t handle her grief and backed away. Some had their own problems and had no capacity to take on somebody else’s.

And others, of course, were amazing. Many offered practical support, like food or babysitting. A kind few had the emotional intelligence to just sit with her and let her fall apart or be in pain. They didn’t try to change it or offer platitudes. Hannah found that was some of the most valuable support.

“Having had this experience, if a friend was going through the loss of a partner or dealing with cancer or something like that, would you behave differently?” I ask.

“I would for sure. I wouldn’t be so scared to be with them. It is scary being with people who are in extreme pain. The fear is you’re going to do something that makes it worse. But I know now the worst thing you can do is ignore it or pretend it’s not happening and not be there for them.”

Because Matt’s death was a public event, it was the subject of a coronial inquest to find out what had happened. Everyone who had been at the beach that day – the other surfers, the lifeguard, the fisherman on the rocks – was summonsed to give evidence.

Before the inquest started, Hannah thought she already knew all the details, and yet the process was so forensic that new information emerged, and for that she was grateful.

“Having a witness, someone who was there, who was the person with Matt when he died, was incredibly comforting and helpful to me,” she says. “For me to work through everything, that sort of detail was invaluable. If it had been shrouded in mystery and I was left with loads of ‘How did it happen?’ kind of questions, I think it would have been a lot harder.”

The formal finding was that Matt died from “misadventure” when the surf swept him against the rocks of a sea cliff, inflicting incapacitating head injuries that caused him to drown. The inquest report specifically noted that Matt was a sensible and careful person who surfed responsibly and was well aware of his limitations. The coroner called it a “wretched” event.

The hearings were very rough on Hannah, who spent most of the time in the public gallery weeping quietly. “I got very drunk the night after the inquest finished, went and drank margaritas with my sister,” she recalls.

By the time the inquest ended, almost two years had passed since Matt’s death. But a few days later, Hannah noticed that she felt different.

“I felt this lightness settling on me, which was new. It’s not closure, because I will live with Matt’s death and the pain of it every day and the grief will stay with me.

“I just felt that I was carrying it differently. It was in a place inside me that was more contained, it wasn’t all of me.

“It wasn’t like raw, open grief. It was almost like the scab had grown over. Occasionally you pick at it, or it might come off when you’re not expecting it and you start bleeding again.”

Hannah has written, in her own words, “three overwrought diaries”, just to let all the grief out. She has had a lot of counselling and done a lot of reading. Some days are better than others.

“My biggest fear now is that I have to go through this again. What’s next? Because I know unless I die next, I’m going to lose someone that I love, and the thought of that pain on top of the pain I already carry from Matt feels terrifying.

“But what do you do then? Do you stop loving people? Of course not. That’s why we’re here, to love people and to give of ourselves.

“So I just try to keep myself as open as possible.”

There is something beautiful about sitting and listening to Hannah. What she says is deeply insightful. And although we have spoken about such sad things, the atmosphere in the room isn’t sad at all.

The room feels full of life. Hannah positively pulses with it. It’s very attractive, almost magnetic. It’s hard to describe but it is as if she is drawn very sharply. I don’t know Hannah, we are not friends, and yet we’ve had a conversation as intimate and real as any I’ve ever had.

“I understand now that happiness isn’t some goal that we’re working towards,” she says near the end of our talk, “it’s just in the daily living of life.”

“It’s that we just had a cup of tea and a nice pastry,” I say.

“Exactly. It’s just appreciating the small moments. Sitting with you, having this conversation, is really lovely. So it’s finding happiness in the day-to-day.”

This is an edited extract from Any Ordinary Day by Leigh Sales (Penguin Random House Australia), out now.

This article appears in Sunday Life magazine within the Sun-Herald and Sunday Age on sale October 14.