By David Montero, Rocky Mountain NewsJanuary 22, 2005

VELANKANNI, India - The man is sitting alone atop a heap of rubble, the ocean breeze creating an occasional billow in his white cotton shirt. In his hand, he holds a family portrait, the paper cracked like spider-webbing. He looks at it, and then points to two of the children in the frame.

Their names are David and Absissek. They are his 11-year-old son and his 2-year-old daughter. They are dead. And for D. Edward, their 38-year-old father, that's where the conversation starts.
"We were about to go out of the house, and that's when the wave attacked," he says. "The wave took them."

Attacked. That's the word used by most everyone when they describe the sheer force of the tsunami that belted the Indian coastline on the morning of Dec. 26. Attacked - as if it were a personal strike by the sea against them.
Edward, a Catholic, doesn't believe the ocean is a vengeful entity, but still, the tsunami felt furious to him. It was traveling close to 500 mph. It was tall. It was black, blue water darkened by sediment and sand picked up along its almost 1,200-mile journey across the Indian Ocean. It arrived and ripped through his house, knocking the walls down and hurtling his wife and daughter into a coconut tree.
It sent Edward through what used to be his back wall. He didn't know where it sent David and Absissek.

The conversation stops. Edward points past a pile of pulverized bricks where a slender slab of chipped concrete stands upright. The top has a small rope tied around it. Around the bottom lies a cluster of leaves, debris and, not far off, a Catechism. The cement is a piece of his house he took and planted there next to a coconut tree that survived. Looking closer at the makeshift memorial, there is a small mound stretching toward the sea.

It took less than a day to turn Edward's house into a cemetery.
Nearly four weeks later, he looks at his handiwork and wonders what will become of his life. He said he would go on, taking the memories of his deceased children with him until it is time for his own burial. In the meantime, he has come to his own rationalization.

"God gave me two beautiful children and I was blessed," he says. "Now God has taken them. They are in a good place."