While covering the devastating impact of an earthquake in Thailand, journalist Maryn McKenna reflects on tragedy in her own life.
Maryn McKenna is an independent journalist who writes about public health, global health and food policy. She is a columnist for WIRED’s Ideas section and a Senior Fellow of the Center for the Study of Human Health at Emory University. She is the author of the 2017 bestseller BIG CHICKEN (tiled PLUCKED outside North America), SUPERBUG, and BEATING BACK THE DEVIL; her TED talk, “What do we do when antibiotics don’t work any more?”, is closing in on 1.8 million views. She lives in Atlanta.
This story originally aired on September 27, 2019 in an episode titled “On the Scene.”
Story Transcript
On the day after Christmas, 14 years ago, an earthquake tore open the floor of the Indian Ocean. The seabed split north and south and the shock waves rippled east and west. On the nearest coasts in Indonesia and in Thailand, the waves rolled backward from the beaches, bunching up under tension like the tightening string of a bow. And then the tension broke and the waves roared forward, a 30-foot wall of water moving faster than an airliner can fly.
The waves swamped harbors and jetties and beaches. They tore up trees and crushed concrete and flung steel boats like they were driftwood. They swirled into villages and sucked away people who were fishing and sunbathing and standing in their kitchens brewing coffee to start their day. The waves roared back out to the ocean as fast as they had come and then they calmed and rolled slowly back to the land again. When they reached the scoured beaches, they brought bodies with them.
A few days later, I landed in Thailand. I was a newspaper reporter and my job was to write about epidemics and disasters. I had scooped up a photographer and we made our way to the devastated coast and we did what reporters do, we asked people where we could go to see the worst that had happened in order to make it clear to our readers and viewers how dreadful this was.
Almost everyone we met said that we should head further north to a coastal province called Phang Nga and a temple, a Buddhist monastery known as Wat Yan Yao.
In Phang Nga, the villages had been erased. All that was left of the houses were squares of tile where the kitchens had been. But the wat was far enough inland to have escaped the destruction. It was intact in a landscape where almost everything was broken and it was bright where everything else was covered in mud. You could see the golden angels on its gateway glinting from a long way away.
The abbot of the monastery had opened it as a refuge and hundreds of people had gathered there, but they hadn't come alone. They brought the dead with them. By the time we arrived, there were almost 3,000 bodies lying in the temple grounds.
There's kind of a ritual that reporters indulge in when we've been doing this for a while. If we know each other well, we've been on the road for a while, maybe we've gotten a little drunk, we talk about our first bodies. Maybe it was a car accident, maybe you followed a detective to a homicide or arranged to spend the night with some charismatic doctors in the ER. If you've been doing this for a while, it's possible that you'll see as many corpses as cops and doctors do.
I had seen more than my share already by the time I got to Thailand. I thought I was hardened. I had no idea how wrong I was. It is impossible to describe to you what 3,000 bodies smell like.
The sky was blue and the sun was blistering but the smell was like a fog that you moved through but couldn't see. It had physicality and heft. It clung to our clothing and our skin. We could smell it even after the Thai military rolled in with a convoy of refrigerated trucks and locked the bodies away.
As much as we could still smell them, we could still see them too because photographers had come and taken thousands of pictures of the bodies. Someone had found giant boards of plywood and propped them against the walls of the monastery. The photographs showed scars and hairlines, birthmarks and tattoos, anything that would help distinguish one anonymous corpse from another.
Families who had lost someone to the waves came to the wat to peruse the photographs looking for a detail that would let them identify a body and bring a loved one home. And I watched them day after day patrol up and down the rows of photographs and I was in awe of their strength because I, too, knew what it was like to confront a photograph that encapsulated the worst days of my life.
When I was five years old, my mother died of leukemia. Family history says she only knew that she was sick for about ten days. I didn't know much about her growing up. My father never spoke of her and the trauma of her sudden disappearance had taken my memories away. But what I did have was photographs. Family members slipped them to me over the years thinking that I ought to know more than I did.
I never really wanted those photographs. People forced them on me but I never looked at them very hard. I never asked questions about them. I slid them in envelopes and I stuffed them into drawers. I thought I didn't want to know the middle of the story when I already knew its tragic end. Going to the tsunami changed my mind.
Over the weeks Wat Yan Yao had become a graveyard but it became, at the same time, a place of resurrection. From thirty countries, forensic teams flew in volunteering to help to clean the bodies and measure them, to document their teeth and their fingerprints and the length of their bones.
And random volunteers showed up as well: a Canadian who had been backpacking in Cambodia, a movie extra from New Zealand, a North Carolina fireman. They had never communicated before they arrived at the temple but they all had the same intention. Someone who spoke English wrote it down for them, found a long piece of paper and tacked it up above the gates of the wat and scrawled on it in big letters, “We will bring them home.”
Outside the gates, it got busier as well. The families who had come to look at the photographs didn't leave afterward. They came back again and again, day after day. And after a while, they brought their own photographs to add to the boards of plywood. A kid's solemn school photo, honeymooners hugging in the surf, an ID card from an office, girlfriends hoisting cocktails on a beach. On each of the photographs on the back, in the handwriting of a dozen countries, they wrote names and towns, ages and cellphone numbers hoping that someone would make a connection.
Side by side with the inexorable proof of death, they reconstructed the stories of lives. One of the volunteers had been a graphic designer in California and before he got on the plane, he loaded his laptop up with powerful photo editing programs. He took as his job to work on the photos that had been taken of the dead to improve them, reshaping faces, erasing lacerations, putting back the color and skin and hair.
One day, he was working on a picture that looked like it had been a young girl and another volunteer was watching over his shoulder. And after a moment, she stopped him. She said, “I know her. I've seen her face.”
The volunteer went running out the gates of the wat to the boards where the families had added their photographs. She came running back with a picture of a young girl with a pointed chin and a wistful smile. On the back there was a name and an age and a cellphone number. And she held the photo up against the laptop screen. They matched.
The girl's body was in the coolers. Her family could bring her home.
After I got back from Thailand, I took out the photos that I had never wanted to look at. I had watched the survivors of the tsunami confront the evidence of the worst thing they could have imagined. I thought it would honor their courage for me to do the same.
In the photos that I had never wanted to receive, I saw my mother as a healthy, young woman studying, smiling, getting dressed up to go to church with my grandparents. In some of them, she was holding hands with my father. In some of them, she was holding me.
I began to forgive my relatives for pressing those photos on me when I had not wanted them and I began to understand the message they wanted me to hear, the message I had heard from the tsunami survivors that when we retrieve the story of life, we can defy the finality of death.
Now, when I think of my mother, I think as well of the volunteers in the temple who ran from all around the world to help. I think of the families knowing how their loved ones’ stories ended, insisting that the end was not all there was to tell.
It has been 14 years and I have never forgotten their lessons. When we are shattered, someone will come to gather the pieces for us. When tragedy takes our stories, someone will arrive to tell them back to us. And when we are most lost, people will run to find us and they will bring us home. Thank you.