Wake up… wake up, we need you: When Hannah Richell’s husband died in a tragic surfing

With a twinkle in his eye, novelist Hannah Richell’s handsome, hyper-fit husband Matt mentioned one morning in July 2014, over coffee at their favourite pavement cafe in Sydney, that he’d arranged a ‘board meeting’ for that afternoon.

As the CEO of a publishing house, this was not unusual, but today he meant something different. He’d arranged to meet his surfing friend Adam for a good surf on Tamarama Beach.

He and Hannah kissed goodbye in the sunshine and Matt quoted something funny their six-year-old son had said in the car on the way to soccer camp that morning. Then they went their separate ways to their working days.

‘For a goodbye you never want to come – for a goodbye you don’t know is going to be your last – it is pretty perfect,’ writes Hannah in her unforgettably powerful memoir of grief.

Tragedy: Hannah and Matt met when they worked for the same publisher and were together for almost 10 years

She would never see Matt alive again. Later, when she was at work, struggling to write her third novel, Matt’s PA rang to say she’d had a call from a Bondi detective and they were asking for her address.

Her nightmare began. She arrived home to find two policemen who informed her that Matt had drowned in a surfing accident, thrown onto the rocks by a huge wave just as he was trying to gain a foothold.

Her first reaction was total confusion and an overwhelming urge to ring Matt and hear his reassuring voice. Numb with shock, she heard herself calling Matt’s father on the other side of the globe, on the Isle of Skye, and breaking his heart as she spoke ‘words that didn’t make any sense’.

Thus began a hellish new existence of veering from ‘brittle-automaton’ to ‘banshee, wild in my pain’. She decided to give her son and daughter, aged just six and four, one more peaceful night’s sleep. Breaking the news to them the next morning was ‘the very worst thing I shall ever do as a mother’.

‘There but for the grace of God go I’ will be the chief thought of every wife, partner or parent reading this heartbreaking but ultimately uplifting book, which evokes the joy of a happy marriage and the agony of loss in equal measure.

Surfer: Matt was a keen surfer and was killed in a surfing accident in 2014

In her forensic evocation of all that happened in the next days, weeks and months, Richell plunges us into what she calls ‘the sinkhole’ of sudden-onset grief.

She takes us on a tour through its hideous nooks and crannies: disbelief, confusion, sadness, rage, and excruciating loneliness as you somehow have to carry on with the mundanities of daily life – in Hannah’s case having become a single mother overnight.

You may think, ‘thank goodness this kind of grief hasn’t happened to me’, but it will also occur that ‘it might, and why shouldn’t it?’

If it does, or has, this book will be your guide to remind you you’re not alone in the poisonous cocktail of feelings that will accost you day and night, alongside grief’s ghastly physical side-effects: hair loss, insomnia, dizziness, sweating at night, and food tasting like cardboard.

When someone refers to Hannah as ‘Matt’s widow’, it feels like ‘a punch in the guts’. She wants to scream, ‘I’m NOT his widow. I’m his wife.’

Keeping his clothes in the cupboard and his pyjamas under the pillow, she realises she’s far from reaching the ‘acceptance’ stage of grief.

Everything, for the first year, is a source of pain. Richell never over-writes, she just tells us what happens, with admirable clarity and honesty. She describes her final hour alone with Matt’s body in the morgue, which happens to be right next to the maternity unit where she gave birth to their children.

‘One hour to stroke his stubbled cheek and hold his hand and lay my head upon his chest and weep onto the hospital gown . . . Wake up, I implore him. Wake up, we need you.’

Her period starts on the day of his funeral, reminding her that they could have had another baby, instead of which ‘this is the end’.

She takes the last Bolognese made by Matt out of the freezer, and her children have it for supper: ‘The sight and smell of it eviscerate me.’

When they visit the beach where Matt died, her son asks: ‘Mummy, is Daddy ever coming home?’

Happy couple: Hannah and Matt on their wedding day

You’ll need a box of tissues to read this – a useful item Hannah found herself being offered wherever she went.

She never resorts to the cliché ‘grief is the price we pay for love’, but she does quote helpful words someone said to the writer Julian Barnes after his wife died. ‘Nature is so exact, it hurts exactly as much as it is worth.’

And in her evocation of how she and Matt fell in love, she expresses how much their love was worth.

Both British, they worked for the same London publishing house and bonded beside the canal in the days after the 7/7 bombings, in a state of shock.

The capital was the backdrop for their love story – ‘kissing in the rain, squeezing onto benches in pubs, walking the streets hand in hand . . .’ She describes Matt’s ‘quiet poise, the striking angles of his face, the thoughtfulness in his amber-green eyes’.

They emigrated to Australia for a new life. After a magical camping trip on the west coast, they moved to Sydney, got married and had their two children.

The first chink of light in Hannah’s grief comes when she tells a counsellor, Louise, that she feels ‘trapped by my children in a life I no longer want’. Louise suggests she repeat the mantra: ‘This is a moment of pain; pain is a part of life; I wish myself peace.’

Eight months after Matt’s death, she wakes up for the first time without having to re-remember that he’s died. ‘It just is. It is a part of me.’

Acceptance, she discovers, is ‘a letting go of the need for things to be different’. It feels as if her body is ‘developing the muscle to carry the grief’. At the start, Hannah was struggling to write her novel. One day, in the depths of grief, she wrote a piece called ‘Life and Death’ on her blog, and had a huge response. From that first step, this book emerged.

And there’s a lovely ending, which proves that you can be happily married again. Hannah doesn’t tell us when this happened, but she met a camera operator, in ‘an eyes-across-a-crowded-room’ moment. They fell in love, married, and now live as a blended family in Britain.