The worst moment of Hannah’s life happened at Tamarama beach. Ten years later, she went back

Hannah Richell opened the door of her Sydney home to find two police officers waiting for her. They had come to tell her that her husband was dead.

Matthew, 41, was at Tamarama beach when he died in a tragic surfing accident, leaving Hannah a widow and a solo mum of two young children.

“I was completely shattered,” Hannah told nine.com.au.

Set adrift on a seemingly endless sea of grief that threatened to pull her under, writing became Hannah’s safe harbour.

Already a published fiction author, she poured her heart out across countless notebook pages that were never supposed to see the light of day.

This week, nearly 12 years to the day since Matthew’s death, they hit shelves as Hannah’s first memoir, An Ocean and a Day.

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A raw and heart-wrenching examination of grief, motherhood, and what to do with the leftover love for someone who’s gone, it’s the most personal thing she’s ever written.

“I would be lying if I said I wasn’t a little afraid of how much I reveal of myself and my experience in this book,” Hannah said.

“[But] there is strength in vulnerability and sharing the dark, messy parts of ourselves.”

Writing about her grief had started as a therapeutic act of survival, and she was hesitant about sharing it with even her closest friends and family.

The idea of publishing it for the world to see felt impossible for a long time.

“Five years after Matt died, I did consider working my private writings into something that might offer solace to others, but it took another few years for me to find an end point to the book,” Hannah said.

“Life is not like fiction. There is no happy ending or convenient full stop.

“But the ten-year anniversary, which allowed me to go back to Tamarama and revisit the place of Matt’s death, felt like a pivotal moment for me.”

That’s why the book begins and ends right there on the sand in Sydney’s east.

Equal parts grief and joy

An Ocean and a Day follows two parallel timelines that start on the day Matthew died and the day he and Hannah met, respectively.

It was a very intentional choice.

“In grief, the present is painful and something you want to desperately escape,” Hannah said. 

“Contemplating the future is frightening and unknowable.

“So the past is where you want to be, which, of course, only exists in memory, which was where my mind often disappeared to in an attempt to conjure Matt back.”

Taking readers into the past let her introduce them to Matthew as the living, breathing man she fell in love with, not just the husband she lost.

“It was important to me that the book had as much love and joy in it as sadness, because this is how I see life now: as a duet of both,” she said.

Those first hollow days, weeks and years after Matthew’s death were incredibly painful for Hannah to relive.

But it was even more devastating to revisit the grief and confusion her children experienced after losing their father.

“One of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do as a mum is bear witness to my children’s pain, knowing that there is nothing I can do to fix it,” she said.

There were times while Hannah was writing and editing the book when she worried that in being honest about their grief, she was exposing too much of herself, Matthew, or their children.

It’s a fear she’s become accustom to over the last decade.

In one passage of An Ocean and A Day, she writes about a friend’s mother who suggested she was being too public with her grief and needed to ‘move on’.

“I think the idea of grieving ‘right’ or to an appropriate timeline is something that does still sadly exist, as much as I wish it didn’t,” Hannah said.

“I certainly came across people who seemed to feel I was grieving ‘wrong’ and offered their judgement.”

Publishing this book could be seen as an invitation for more criticism, but Hannah didn’t write An Ocean and A Day for the people who would judge it.

She wrote it because in her darkest moments after Matthew’s death, she found solace in stories and poems about love and loss.

Now she hopes to offer that same solace to other people.

Light in the darkness

Two years after Matthew died, Hannah packed up the kids and moved back to the UK, where she and their father had fallen in love.

In 2024, she returned to Australia and Tamarama beach.

Sitting on the sand exactly 10 years after Matthew’s death, she finally found the ending to An Ocean and A Day – and one chapter of her own grief journey.

Hannah’s glad she took the time to get there before writing the book.

“If I had published it two or three years after Matt’s death, it would have contained all the raw material of my grief, but perhaps less of the shifting weight of it.” Hannah said.

Grief is not linear and even now, Hannah still moves through the world with a “Matt-shaped hole” in her life.

But her grief is different now, and that’s a big part of the reason she finally felt ready to share it.

In the 12 years since she lost Matthew, Hannah has learned she finds her greatest purpose when she runs towards the things that scare her, and she makes the most authentic connections when she shares her vulnerability.

That’s what she’s done with An Ocean and A Day, and it’s her deepest hope that it will help other people drifting on the tides of grief find their way.

“Death is the one surety we all face in life. It is, you might say, our greatest common denominator,” Hannah said. 

“If my book can be a companion or a small light to someone else as they navigate their life holding grief or pain, then that would be my very great honour.”

An Ocean and A Day is available at book retailers now. Find a copy here.