When my husband died in a surfing accident, life as I knew it was destroyed. Ten years on, this is what I’ve learned about grief

One crashing wave on one single day changed everything for our family. How would I keep going?

Before they enter the water, surfers will study the ocean. They consider wind and tide conditions. They analyse currents and patterns, break points and swells. They try to read the waves. I have travelled across oceans and a day to sit here on Tamarama beach in Sydney on a high-tide weekday morning in 2024. A notebook and pen lie beside me on the sand as I, too, attempt to read the waves, to find meaning in their unfathomable churn.

These past 10 years, this beach has loomed large in my mind. Even when absent, it’s as if my face has been turned to these waves and I have been buffeted, sometimes staggering, sometimes falling, always bracing for the next set to roll in. For I have learned that all it takes is one ocean, one day, to come along and knock you off your feet.

* * *

Sydney, 2014

It’s an ordinary Wednesday afternoon in Sydney, the first week of July, when two plainclothes police officers knock at our front door. I am not home to greet them. I am a few streets away, buried in my studio, wrestling with the tangled threads of a novel, when I receive a call from my husband’s PA.

“I’ve had a call from a Bondi detective,” she tells me. “They were asking for your address. I can’t reach Matt.”

I grab my laptop but leave everything else in place and try Matt’s number as I half-run, half-walk up the steep hill to our house. No answer. I call our childminder. “Weird question but has anyone come to the house?”

“Yes,” she says. Her voice is different, strained.

“Police?”

“Yes.”

The red front door to our tiny sandstone cottage is shut tight. Through the glass pane I see two figures in dark clothing standing in our living room. I fumble for my keys. The door opens and I cross the threshold.

“Hannah Richell?” they ask. I guess I nod, and they introduce themselves as police detectives. One of them, I think, has tears in her eyes.

I glance between them, my panic rising, until the more composed of the two comes right out with it. “I’m sorry to tell you your husband has been in a surfing accident.”

“Is he OK?” I’m already running through childcare options to make a hospital dash.

“I’m afraid he died.”

I’m still in my coat and boots. My laptop bag hangs from my shoulder. I look down at the old wooden chest that stands in the front room, doubling as a coffee table, and notice an unfamiliar box of tissues sitting on its surface – a box of tissues I have not bought or placed there. A small part of my brain, one not yet numbed by shock and disbelief, registers that the police must have brought it. I look at the tissues, then back to the police. My bag slides from my shoulder to the floor.

* * *

On the way to the morgue, I gaze out of the window. He is dead, I keep telling myself. You are going to view his body. But I don’t truly believe it. I will see the body and I will feel only relief, because of course it won’t be him. There is no way it can be him, my warm, vivid, drily funny, thoroughly alive husband. It will be another man, belonging to another family, who are at this very moment unaware of the tragedy that awaits them. I will leave the morgue dizzy with relief and return to the life I should be living.

But it is him.

And it isn’t.

The body in the blue gown lying on the gurney belongs to my husband, but it isn’t my husband as I knew him. What lies before me is a stiff wax model of the man I love.

Matt. But not Matt.

It is the longest, shortest, most loving, most painful hour of my life. One hour alone, to kiss and caress him. To stroke his stubbled cheek and hold his hand and lay my head upon his chest and weep. Kissing his temples, I see the cuts on his face and a diamond crosshatch line of stitches across the back of his head from the autopsy. The sight of those stitches makes me reel. They have cut open his beautiful skull. The one I absent-mindedly caressed while reading on the sofa, the prickle of his shaved head under my fingers. The one my three-year-old daughter would stroke while high on his shoulders and proclaim “spiky” with a giggle. I try not to think about what else they have had to do to him.

From our inauspicious beginning, when Matt joined the London publishing company to steal the promotion I had coveted, to a deep bond forged through travel, marriage and babies, I sit in this closed, quiet morgue and remember words written in my diary as our first new year together had raced towards us. “Don’t let him hurt me,” I had written, imploring an unseen, unknown power. I suppose I knew, even then, that a love like this could break my heart.

Wendy, a counsellor from the forensic science team, enters the room and sits quietly with me. “You’re very affectionate with him,” she says.

“I thought his eyes were opening,” I tell her, knowing how crazy I sound for still wishing that they might.

“That can happen,” she admits. “Muscles can relax.”

“He smells different.”

“They will have washed him,” she says.

Though not as carefully as they’d intended, perhaps, for when I try to hold his stiff hand, grains of Tamarama sand fall from his palm into mine. They feel like a last gift: a piece of the country he loved so deeply. Precious. I want to scoop the sand up and take it home with me, carry the grains around in a locket, but they slip through my fingers and fall to the floor, disappearing with the sound of my crying and the last kiss I leave on his lips.

* * *

I text Adam, the friend who was with Matt when he died. “Hi, this is Hannah, Matt’s wife. Yesterday must have been terrible. Are you OK?” We tread carefully, cautiously polite, until Adam offers to come to our home and talk me through what happened. He is a virtual stranger at my front door, but the moment he steps over the threshold, I am with him. The connection feels instant and real. We sit for a couple of minutes on the sofa in our front room, but the kids are noisy in the background and the house feels claustrophobic and all wrong. “I need to get out of here. Can we get some air?”

Adam looks relieved.

We walk to the park and sit on the grass. It is strange but, out here, in the sunshine and clean air, I feel calmer. Adam’s presence is comforting, like a blanket, muffling me from the horror of the last few days. Slowly, he begins to tell me about the accident. He talks of their joy paddling out from Bronte beach, two work friends choosing to talk shop on their surfboards rather than over lunch in an overpriced restaurant. “Surely this must be the definition of success?” Adam had said.

“Yep,” Matt had replied, and when Adam says it, he delivers it just as Matt would have. In that one word I can see Matt in his wetsuit, straddling his board, salt water in his stubble and a wide grin plastered across his face as he gazes towards the horizon.

Adam tells me of the suddenly shifting tide conditions and of seeing Matt’s board come loose. He describes the rip, pulling Matt dangerously close to the rocky Tamarama headland. I sense his internal struggle as he relives the tragedy, and I sit quietly, listening.

Adam’s explanation comes to its end. The swallows are dancing around us, twisting and looping over the grass. I lean back and close my eyes. For the very first time since I arrived home to find the police in my house, I feel my heartbeat begin to slow in my chest. It’s shock – madness – but for a moment it’s as if he is here with us. Three people, not two, Matt’s presence hovering lightly between us.

“Have you talked to Wendy?” Adam asks.

“Wendy at the morgue?”

“She offers counselling. You might want to call her.”

My mum appears at the far edge of the park with the kids. They have a soccer ball. I point them out and Adam sprints away to kick the ball back to my son. They play like any others in the park around them – a man and a boy kicking a ball back and forth across the grass – but watching them, I feel a deep pain radiate through my body for all that our children have lost.

* * *

Grief is a sinkhole, opening up where real life once stood. A cavernous black void swallowing everything I hold dear. Life as we know it has been destroyed in a single day by one crashing wave. The world feels tilted. How to process the enormity of what has happened when everything shifts and moves around me?

I visit Wendy for a counselling session. We sit opposite each other in a small windowless room, a box of tissues on a side table at the ready. I am getting used to their subtle placement. I never seem to be far away from a box of tissues these days.

Wendy exhales and smiles her greeting. “Hello,” she says. There’s a stillness in the air between us as we regard each other and the threshold we sit upon. Her opening question is to ask how I feel about coming to see her. I think about this carefully, trying to identify the fizzing adrenaline rush inside of me. “Excited,” I reply, then worry she will think me unhinged.

“And why is that?” she asks, her face unchanging.

“Because this was the last place I saw Matt. It feels like I am returning to him … although I know I’m not,” I add, certain she must think me mad. “I guess I’m excited to talk about him. Glad to be doing something.”

I feel that painful ache in my throat, of everything broken held so tightly. “I can’t bear this pain. I need to know how long it will feel like this. I miss him.” That’s all it takes for me to dissolve into tears.

There is no judgment from Wendy. No rules. Nothing off limits in our roaming conversations. As I discover in the coming months, sitting in this room with this woman, there is never any judgment, only compassion and a kind ear. Wendy gives me a safe place to explore everything Matt is and was to me, a space where I can crack open the dark chrysalis of grief. I think about her job title. Forensic counsellor. I like that. She allows me to examine the substance of my grief. Not just the macro experience of loss but all the tiny micro details I need to pore over. And afterwards, when I step out through the sliding doors of that building, I feel a lightness in my body that wasn’t there on walking in.

* * *

Days and months pass in lonely, blunt-edged monotony, a low, breathless panic beating in my chest. I try to return to my novel, but my brain is treacle. I don’t know if it’s single-parent exhaustion or grief, or if there is something physically wrong with me, but the focus required to plot fiction feels beyond me. I have no capacity for creativity or imagination. “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear,” writes CS Lewis. I am so full of fear. For the future, for my children, that they’ll grow up holding only the faintest outline of their father.

A friend tells me about “memory jars”, how they can help grieving children access happy memories and start conversations about their lost parent. We sit down with pens and paper, and begin to talk about the things we love and remember about Matt.

My daughter remembers swooping and giggling with her dad on the round saucer swing in the park. My son recalls curling into the crook of Matt’s arm when he read him a bedtime story. I remember the special light that shone in Matt’s eyes whenever he stepped from the waves after an ocean swim. We all remember the unique kind of grumpy he could get when he was hungry. I write each memory down on a slip of paper before placing it into the jar.

“Singing Frozen songs at the top of his voice in the car.”

“He made the best yorkshire puddings.”

“He loved us … and we loved him,” my daughter says.

The kids, needing sudden escape from the emotion, race outside. I can hear them squealing and laughing in the courtyard, on the edge of meltdown. It is heartbreaking to reduce the love of your life and the father of your children to fragments of memories scrawled on to pieces of paper, but it feels important. They remind us that he existed and the love was real. I turn the jar under the light, scraps of folded paper trapped in glass. How can it ever be enough?

* * *

It’s an early spring day when I take the kids to the beach, a gentle bay with a dappled park, a shark net and tapering cliffs that curve to embrace the thin crescent of sand. It has been chosen carefully. No surf. No swell. No obvious signs of danger. We lay our towels on the sand, unpack fruit and water, buckets and spades, before the kids make a break for freedom.

“Wait! Sunscreen! Hats!”

My son returns grudgingly and allows me to apply the necessary sunscreen, then turns and scampers along the shoreline, lost to the sensory experience of the gently lapping water. I see him stop, then run back. “I’ll put your suncream on, Mummy.” He looks worried, and I hate this new responsibility he bears.

Friends arrive. We drink coffee and watch the children dig tunnels in the sand. Go for a swim, Han. It’ll do you good. I hear it just the way Matt used to say it – teasing, goading, slightly exasperated at my reluctance to hurl myself into the cold waves he loved. I study the water, gently undulating, turquoise. I haven’t been into the ocean since his accident, but the water looks enticing, hardly foreboding.

Fine, I think. Have it your way.

I wade out quickly, eager to get through the chill and minimise the onslaught of emotion before diving under, my body tightening at the sensation of being enveloped. Not thinking. Just doing. Losing myself in movement.

A little way out, I stop and float on my back. Blue below me and blue above me. My skin has cooled enough to feel the water like an embrace. I let go and for a moment it’s as if I am not being held by the water but by Matt. I feel him, right there with me, the warmth and pressure of him, and it is the strangest, most unearthly feeling.

Settled there, I find the perfect, fleeting glimpse of him from another time, another beach. Shaved head, broad shoulders tapering to a slim waist, feet planted in the sand and arms folded. He is sun-speckled and his beard – longer in the holidays – is salt-crusted and scratchy. I notice how, even in this memory, his eyes don’t leave the sea. Whenever I think of Matt by the ocean, it is always like this. Turned away from me, his gaze fixed on the waves he was so drawn to.

More and more, I find myself thinking about Matt’s last moments. Not so much the actual sequence of events now, but the experience of them. The sensation. The decision, turning to paddle, feeling the wave lifting his board. The surge of the water. The snap of his leg rope, the surfboard going in one direction as the rip took him in the other. The wash of water. The scrape of rocks.

I think he must have had hope; he was a hopeful man. The hope of pulling himself out. The hope of survival, until that last wave, rushing at him, pushing him forwards. The cliff rising up. A churn of salt and sunlight – a final letting go to blackness.

I hope it was peaceful.

I hope he didn’t know he was about to die.

I hope he knew we were with him, holding his hand in that moment, loving him. Always.

* * *

It is Wendy who tells me, nearly two years later, that an inquest will be held. She explains it is not about pointing fingers or finding fault, but to see if things could be done differently in the future. She adds, gently, that as Matt’s death was so high‑profile and in such a popular beauty spot, it is deemed to be “in the public interest”. Such a jarring phrase for something that feels so intensely private, but I nod. The last thing I could bear is for another family to endure a loss like ours and to know there was a chance it could have been prevented.

For two days, over and over, the fast and treacherous chain of events leading to Matt’s death is relayed. The facts are given, all carefully gathered and noted by the coroner, until the last witness steps down from the box and the coroner closes the proceedings and withdraws to consider all the evidence.

In the more peaceful days that follow, I retreat to the coast. I find myself thinking more and more about acceptance. The formal procedure seems to have lifted something in my being. I feel calmer and more balanced. I know he is gone. I know my life is transformed.

But can there ever be a final stage to grief? I’m not sure there can. The pendulum keeps swinging back and forth, though with less sickening ferocity. And the pain still rises frequently, as consistently as the tides, the absence of Matt a deep ache. What feels different is how I hold myself, the pain more often tucked away inside, less obvious to others. The grief is a weight I hold almost sacred now, my body developing the muscle to carry it.

I realise that I have been looking at the concept of acceptance all wrong. It is not about rightness. There will never be anything right about Matt’s death. No, acceptance is allowing it to be, whatever it is. A letting go of the need for things to be different. Acceptance is seeing a new path open up before you. Not the one you thought you’d be taking. Acceptance is seeing this new path winding ahead of you and finding the strength to put first one foot on it, then the other.

* * *

I ready the house for sale, our belongings for the move ahead. Sifting through our life’s possessions is not an easy process, but it is the last hours in the house that are most painful. Wandering alone for the very last time, I revisit the empty rooms, my footsteps echoing strangely through the space. I look out at the Japanese maple we planted, new purple-green leaves shimmering in the morning light. I let my hand trail up the polished wooden banister, take the creaking steps to the first floor. It’s all so familiar – so touched by us. I know it almost as well as my own skin.

I sit on the floor in my son’s room by the window and let the tears fall. I think of all the moments that have made up our lives here. Big and small. Joyful and painful. Through the windowpane I can see the spire of the church across the road. I remember noticing it the first time Matt and I looked around the house. I think of the number of times we tiptoed into this room to check on our sleeping boy. To retrieve a fallen toy. To tuck his small body beneath a sheet. Time breaks my heart. I wonder what of ourselves we will leave behind. A lost note, fallen down the back of the mantelpiece? A stray marble caught between the cracks of the floorboards? Or perhaps just the lingering of feeling – of lives bound by love and loss – of the simplicity of our everyday, echoing in these empty rooms.

Our story here has ended.

I thank the house. I lock the door. I leave.

* * *

Tamarama, Sydney, 2024

Golden hour is settling over Tamarama, the sun sliding low on to the hill behind the beach. I’ve been here a while, traversing a decade of grief, honouring and assessing the shifting weight of our loss. With time and patience, I have returned to writing, found solace in books and reading. Slowly, I have relearned the world, restitched my heart.

Down at the tideline, I step into the shallows, the water washing the sand from my skin. It’s cold, but my feet are planted. Steady. I can breathe, my chest no longer tight and pained. These waves will not topple me today.

I know now that grief will never leave me. It will always be a part of me, just like the love it stems from. The shift comes in wanting to embrace it – to own it. And in the embrace, in pulling it close and examining it, the grief has shifted from something ugly and unthinkable to something softer, more akin to love than pain. So when I hear a song on the radio that reminds me of Matt, I can smile now and offer up my silent thank you.

The waves still come, yet we carry on, living lives illuminated by wonder and grief, the duet of both. I think of those on the path, a little behind me. Am I brave enough to share my writing in comfort and solidarity?

The surfers are still out, straddling their boards as the waves barrel in, occasionally chasing one down to the shore. I know everything has its time and that one day I, too, shall be called upon to take my place in the lineup, but as I stand here in this golden hour, facing the horizon, thinking about this ocean and that day, and all the days that came before, and all the impossible, joyous, wretched, beautiful ones lived since, I feel only gratitude to be here, holding this love and this pain.

You will survive your greatest loss.

You will be altered, but you will survive.

Listen to the breathings of your heart. They will show you the way.

• This is an edited extract from An Ocean and a Day by Hannah Richell, published by Bedford Square at £16.99. To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.