How a tidal wave in the Indian Ocean brought me to the shores of the Seven Sisters ...

And why it's important to travel back there..

This image of my daughter Delia and I on Birling Gap Beach was taken on Boxing Day, 2018 when she was 14. Birling Gap is the beach in Sussex at one end of the Seven Sisters chalk cliffs where we cast my mother’s ashes in 2005, the year after she was killed in the Boxing Day Tsunami of 2004 in Phuket, Thailand.  

My mother loved this part of the coastline, not far from where she first settled (Eastbourne) after migrating from Iran. It has become an emotional touch-point for me, a place where I feel myself most resonantly at one end of a channel of water that connects me with the beach she died on, 10,000 kilometres away. 

The journey Delia and I are planning to soon embark on – as mother and daughter in honour of our maternal ancestor and those who died alongside her – is to walk the West Coast beaches of Phuket before and throughout the time of the 20^th Anniversary of the tsunami. This walking journey  echoes that of the coastal walking, dreaming and future visioning thousands before me have made in honour of ancestors and which I dropped into more deeply in my role as writer in residence for the South Downs National Park 2020-23,  across the Seven Sisters and Sussex Coast. Walking, I realised especially in high places (where our ancestors found most safety), is also a trauma processing response, a way to regulate myself in times of stress, as it has been for many over millennia. It is also joy, rest, respite.

Our journey together is one that will connect the two coastlines through our footsteps, encounters, dialogues with people and contact with the water itself as we meet it every day, and as we process the enormity of the context of her death – and all those who died – in our writing, drawing, recording and bonding process together.

Having never been to Thailand, and having avoided all exposure to most ‘tsunami media’ until now,  (especially as mother to a new baby at the time it happened) it is time for me to face up to the existentially confusing (yet sometimes strangely comforting) fact that my mother’s death was not ‘personal’ (however much I have raged at the sea..) and that I am ready to grasp this on a deeper, cognitive level – by my own presence on that shoreline, that farthest edge from here. 

My younger brother, who went out to search for Mum 2 days after the wave hit and made his peace with her leaving back then, assures me that once I arrive in the place which has lived with the impact of this major event for two decades, and knows how to hold those who were affected, I will in some sense be grounded in the ‘normality’ of the loss, layered with local regeneration since, and that this will be healing.

My mum was one of quarter of a million killed globally – 5,046 people dead, 3,810 people missing in Thailand alone. Despite this, I came to realise the sea was not an enemy that killed her, even if this was how I and many of those more directly affected related to it in the aftermath of the wave along that entire coast. Many feared the water for years, as I did myself. Having once lived alongside the ocean and loved it back in my Brighton beachfront days, I then recoiled from it for a few years after my mother died, unable to go anywhere near the water as if it were a toxic. I slowly began to make peace with the shoreline here in Sussex, in a very active sense when Covid arrived and, like many, coastal walks became my balm and place of freedom.(I still have thalassophobia – fear of deep water – but I am slowly making friends with the discomfort of being just slightly out of my depth when the waters are calm).

(photo above by Paul Musso)

I also found over the last two decades that being close to the sea makes it easier for me to ‘speak’ to my mother and download creative ideas and thoughts, as if we were collaborating in some way, and that is how my storytelling for We Hear You Now began. It is also how my podcast The Colour of Chalk started at Birling Gap beach on a sunny day in my pop up beach tent in 2021… and the entire body of 14 audio stories with a group of incredible fellow writers was birthed.  None of this would never have happened if it weren’t for my sole walking and simultaneous longing for my mother. You do not need to walk or feel this alone - in my prologue story it is the chalk cliff itself that speaks this to the girl in their encounter. 

Some call this post-traumatic growth, I call it legacy. If you listen closely to some of my stories you will find traces of her in song, storyline and in poetry about the stars (much of it published on this Substack as previous posts). 

Similarly, I am curious to see what Delia's creative response will be, as next generation in our trio and I know she has ideas brewing..

According to Buddhist teachings on life, death and suffering, which I immersed myself in most deeply during Covid (because they were the only teachings which made sense to me) it was my mother's time to leave, and sudden loss and precarity is just part of the cycle of change that humans have no choice but to learn adapt to. (Climate breakdown trains us in this, and I am sure we will learn more on the ground about this when we arrive). It is perhaps harsh to accept this for many who lost those whose time did not feel like it had come. I have layered much more drama over this loss in the 20 years since she left (drafted an entire memoir, perhaps this trip is its missing piece) but now it feels like time to try to shed another layer of this experience, and being there in person on that coastline with the Indian Ocean ahead of us will inevitably accelerate this.

As we travel from Global North to Global South, on the suggestion of a friend,  we will carry a small vial of chalky seawater from Birling Gap to Bangtao Beach and exchange droplets between the two bodies in water in which Mum once moved. 

I also know I will be letting go not just of my mother once I leave, but of Delia, who turns 20 this coming week and who will be leaving our home-nest within the next year….

I began walking and writing alone in grief along the Seven Sisters and I ended my residency in the joyous flourishing of creative community and public solidarity (especially when our work was stolen!). I now welcome in, as my very social mother would have, the more collective spirit of both remembering, gratitude and honouring of all those who are taken from us in this way, and next wave of creative speculating on what we do with the space that is left in the wake of those we love.

For me, creative writing and walking are part of the ways I tune into this space. What’s yours? 

19 Dec update - many thanks to those who supported us, we are now in Thailand and I will write again soon.