For others, the pain of their loss was almost impossible to come to terms with.
"Where are my children?" asked 41-year-old Absah, as she searched for her 11 youngsters in Banda Aceh, the Indonesian city closest to Sunday's epicenter. "Where are they? Why did this happen to me? I've lost everything."
The disaster could be history's costliest, with "many billions of dollars" of damage, said UN Undersecretary Jan Egeland, who is in charge of relief coordination.
Hundreds of thousands have lost everything, and millions face a hazardous future because of polluted drinking water, a lack of sanitation and no health services, he said.
Scores of people were also killed in Malaysia, Myanmar, Bangladesh and the Maldives.
The powerful waves -- triggered by the 9.0 magnitude quake off Sumatra -- raced 4,500km across the Indian Ocean to Africa, wreaking death and destruction as far as Somalia, where hundreds died, and the Seychelles, where three were killed.
It was the deadliest known tsunami since the one caused by the 1883 volcanic eruption at Krakatoa -- located off Sumatra's southern tip -- which killed an estimated 36,000 people.
Children have emerged as the biggest victims of Sunday's quake-born tidal waves -- thousands and thousands drowned, battered and washed away by huge walls of water that have decimated an entire generation of Asians.
The UN organization estimates at least one third of the tens of thousands who died were children, said UNICEF spokesman Alfred Ironside in New York.
Officials in Thailand and Indonesia conceded that immediate warnings of gigantic waves could have saved lives. The only known warning issued by Thai authorities reached resort operators when it was too late. The waves hit Sri Lanka and India more than two hours after the quake.
For most people around the shores across the region, the only warning on Sunday of the disaster came when shallow coastal waters disappeared, sucked away by the approaching tsunami, before returning as a massive wall of water.
Also see stories:
Indonesia's Aceh province a graveyard
Quake's aftershocks rattle India's Andaman islands
Death toll of holiday makers mounts
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