The Stages of Grief

Based on a commonly accepted psychological model for grief, there are five stages — denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance — through which a grieving person will pass on his way to emotional healing. In her memoir, Deraniyagala exhibits signs of having experienced all five of these stages at one point or another in her journey. She describes not only her anger at what had happened but also the deep depression that she suffered in the years after the loss of her family. It was almost seven years after the tsunami that Deraniyagala began to accept what had happened and feel whole again.

While Deraniyagala never denied what had happened to her and her family, she wanted to keep the truth at a distance—a form of denial. She refused to go to the mortuary with Anton the day of the tsunami because she was...