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

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. 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 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. Her voice is different, strained.

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. The door opens and I cross the threshold.

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.