Disaster Falls

by Stephane Gerson

  MORE PRAISE FOR DISASTER FALLS

  “Disaster Falls is prismatic, fractal—it proceeds like an existential detective novel, beginning with a big bang of grief, after which the author begins to assemble associations, resonances, and clues, each a point of light guiding him and his family from death to life. The book’s suspense emanates from watching the author piece meaning back together, creating amidst darkness constellations entirely new.” —THOMAS BELLER, author of J.D. Salinger: The Escape Artist

  “Keenly observed and deeply felt, this book is not only a powerful reflection on grief and loss, but also an intimately textured history of fathers and sons. An unflinchingly honest, moving memoir of loss and recovery.” —KIRKUS REVIEWS

  “Disaster Falls is a father’s grief-stricken book, a work of expiation, homage, and remembrance, and it moved me, as it will move many others, because it is authentic, resonant and true, deeply thoughtful, utterly real.” —EDWARD HIRSCH, author of Gabriel: A Poem

  “Stunning…Disaster Falls leaps beyond death, avoiding the maudlin by turning toward connection. Gerson meditates on how to raise children to be confident, life-living risk-takers in spite of danger, and shares a generous portrait of a marriage in which husband and wife give each other space in grief and love. An astonishing book.”

  —CHRISTA PARRAVANI, author of Her: A Memoir

  “This diamond-sharp book is both meticulous and breathtaking….While [Gerson] takes us to the precipice of the fatality, it’s as if the accident itself is secondary to the larger story. This creates a narrative tension….Though we know the outcome, we hold our breath as he and Owen approach the falls….A beautiful book, even as it deals with unthinkable anguish.”

  —LIBRARY JOURNAL (starred)

  Copyright © 2017 by Stéphane Gerson

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  crownpublishing.com

  CROWN is a registered trademark and the Crown colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following:

  Hal Leonard LLC: lyrics from “Under Pressure;” words and music by Freddie Mercury, John Deacon, Brian May, Roger Taylor, and David Bowie. Copyright © 1981 by EMI Music Publishing Ltd., Queen Music Ltd. and Tintoretto Music. All rights on behalf of EMI Music Publishing Ltd. and Queen Music Ltd. Administered by Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, 424 Church Street, Suite 1200, Nashville, TN 37219. All rights on behalf of Tintoretto Music administered by RZO Music. International copyright secured. Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard LLC. All rights reserved.

  RZO Music, Inc.: lyrics from “Under Pressure,” written by David Bowie, John Deacon, Brian May, Freddie Mercury, and Roger Taylor. Reprinted by permission of Tintoretto Music administered by RZO Music, Inc. All rights reserved.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the Estate of Diane Arbus for permission to reprint the photograph entitled “A Family on Their Lawn One Sunday in Westchester, N.Y.” Copyright © The Estate of Diane Arbus.

  Library of Congress cataloging-in-publication data is available upon request.

  ISBN 9781101906699

  Ebook ISBN 9781101906705

  Cover design by Michael Morris

  v4.1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Part I: The First Year

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Part II: The Place of the Dead

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Part III: End Stories

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Sources

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Under pressure that burns a building down

  Splits a family in two

  Puts people on streets

  It’s the terror of knowing

  What this world is about

  QUEEN AND DAVID BOWIE, “UNDER PRESSURE”

  What we came to call the accident occurred on the Green River, near the border between Utah and Colorado. Life was good—filled with its daily conflicts and anxieties and unmet expectations, but good. Afterward, Owen was gone and we remained. Such things happen every day. Accidents, losses, and separations are the texture of human existence. If the circumstances are dramatic enough to appall or fascinate, the story makes the paper. A few years ago, the New York Times devoted four columns to a family caught in a flash flood in New Hampshire. The parents and the oldest child escaped from the car, but the seven-year-old daughter drowned. The father could not get her out in time.

  Owen’s death did not make the Times. The following newspapers ran articles: the Greeley News, the Craig Daily News, the Denver Post, and the Salt Lake Tribune. Also, the Daily Freeman in upstate New York, where we spend a lot of time.

  These articles, which I read days after the accident, contained the same material, taken from the same wire report: eight-year-old boy…family vacation…turbulent waters…aggressive search…truly tragic. There is nothing to be drawn from these pieces, neither new information nor the comfort, however contrived, of obituaries and immortalization. My son’s name is shorn of its meaning, its flesh-and-blood content, its humanity. It has been plugged into a template that journalists put together in ten minutes and readers digest in two.

  In reality, it happens like this. You wake up one morning without knowing that a disaster will take place that day. You do everything right, you plan ahead, chart the course, ask the necessary questions, examine the situation from all sides. You do what parents are expected to do, and yet things still break down, they come undone, they slip away, an eight-year-old slips away and dies. There is no destiny at play. This death comes at the end of a string of decisions small and large, steps taken or not, resolutions made too long ago to leave visible traces, and behavioral patterns that, like canyons in forsaken lands, sediment so slowly that they seem eternal.

  Things could have turned out differently. But they do not. And when a child slips away people tell you that your loss resembles no other. They say that they cannot imagine what is happening to you, which also means that they cannot imagine it happening to them.

  A doctor pulls in close and explains that the hurt will last a long time—perhaps forever. A rabbi confides that he has never seen anything like it, not once in twenty years on the pulpit. Friends write that losing a child is a hole without end, beyond the map of human experience. You are living every parent’s worst nightmare, they say.

  This is what you become: a walking reminder of the nightmare that haunts all parents nowadays. In a world that promises children safety and happiness, such deaths become personal failures, crimes against civilization, an affront to our collective aspirations. What previous generations were simply unable to prevent now falls somewhere between aberration and delinquency. The loss of a child is intolerable and unthinkable.

  I had become my own worst nightmare, in
tolerable and unthinkable. But I also sensed the banality and cosmic magnitude of Owen’s death, at once a ripple in the flow of everyday life and a disruption of the universe. Apart from that, everything eluded me. I could not understand the events that had taken place the day he died. I could not grasp how the ordinary turned extraordinary. And I could not imagine what would now arise within our family, what might transpire between Alison and me. We had to find a way forward, with Owen and with our older son, Julian, mourning his only sibling and the parents he used to know.

  —

  Two weeks after the accident, I began writing about Owen and our life without him. There was no plan. I simply picked up my laptop one morning and started chronicling my infinite shifts in mood, what Alison and Julian and the people around us said and did not say, what we and others did and were unable to do. I wrote at all hours, seized by a graphomaniac impulse that left me confounded until someone told me that, while those who have lost a parent are called orphans, there is no word for those who have lost a child. I wrote because there were no words. This is what I told myself at the time, I write because there are no words. But it was not only that.

  I wrote to understand how, despite their best intentions, people end up in catastrophic situations.

  I wrote to dispel the notion that no one, not even us, could imagine what we were going through.

  I wrote because banal yet cosmic disasters require stories for the dead and the living. When Hester Thrale lost her nine-year-old son, in 1776, her friend Samuel Johnson wrote her, “I know that such a loss is a laceration of the mind. I know that a whole system of hopes, and designs, and expectations is swept away at once, and nothing left but bottomless vacuity.” When Alison and I lost our eight-year-old son, an acquaintance told us that “there is nothing worse than the death of a child, and this is truly, as you know of course, a horror story for anyone who hears it.”

  It is also against such words that I wrote. When our hopes and designs and expectations are swept away, something has to endure besides horror stories and bottomless vacuity.

  Drew: Just a quick question: What is it like at home?

  Owen’s former classmates—Drew and the others—sometimes asked us about the accident. They also recounted where they had been when they found out. This is how they told us his death had turned their lives upside down. Adults were not different, but most doubted that we wanted to know or else they feared saying the wrong thing so they tended to remain quiet. The few friends who took us back to that moment did so gingerly. They watched for our cues.

  With Alison, they saw a distant gaze and hard features. She did not want to know what others were doing or what they had felt when we called with the news because such stories were not about Owen. They were solely about these people and the pain they had felt when the accident entered their lives. This was excruciating for Alison, who felt responsible for their suffering.

  The signals I gave out were more conflicted. Throw it my way, they said. Give me another vantage point on this catastrophe so I can grasp its enormity. Owen’s death is too large to remain a private affair. I want this knowledge and I want this closeness. But do not tell me too much. Do not turn this death into a spectacle or a collective trial that taught us something and brought us closer together, even if that is true. Do not suggest that your grief resembles mine.

  These were unreasonable expectations, I knew that.

  One friend recalled that, during her first phone call, Alison had asked how she would go on living. Another told us she was in her car when her husband, who was standing outside, answered his cell phone. She watched him speak and then sob, though she did not know why. These are the kinds of recollections Alison sought to avoid. But I listened because our lives tipped over at that exact moment and I wanted to understand the world into which we had tumbled.

  One day, a friend began describing the nervous anticipation that had filled our home in Woodstock, New York, as we made our way back from Utah, but she stopped midsentence because of Alison’s obvious lack of interest. I was disappointed. Though I never asked, I would have liked to hear what happened when friends and relatives converged upon our home the day after the accident. They had to respond to a situation they barely fathomed and at the same time handle practical matters. Someone had to drive to the Albany airport and find the courage to face us and say those initial words. Something else: what should the house look like when we arrived? I imagine that this entailed many decisions: where people would position themselves, whether food would be laid out, how bright to set the lights. There was a scene to compose.

  I was only dimly attuned to all of this but did realize that people were stepping in and making decisions—they were making decisions for us. This was one of the mental notes I kept during the early days, tabulating as best I could the widening gulf between the old reality and the new.

  Two friends made the hour-long drive to Albany. It was dark, I think, when we left the airport. I sat in the backseat, feeling already like a passenger in my own life. I do not think that we discussed anything substantive during the ride, though I could be wrong. A haze surrounds these days, with random moments of clarity etched into my memory.

  Among these moments: the sight of my mother, the first person whom I saw as we pulled into our garage. She shuffled across the dusty concrete floor with tiny penguin-like steps, ashen-faced, arms half-open. Though she moved slowly, I knew that she would reach me, grip me, collapse upon me. Behind her stood my father, smaller than in the past, my in-laws, my brother-in-law, friends from the area and others who had already flown in, all part of a funereal receiving line that meandered from the garage to the entryway, the kitchen, and finally the living room, a line of still and silent beings who resembled embalmed corpses.

  What happened afterward? Did Alison and I sit with one person or one small group at a time? Did we talk about the Green River? Did we plead fatigue and retire to our room? And Julian—where did he go? All I know is that at some point that evening or the next day, lights went up, frozen bodies thawed, and waxlike faces regained elasticity. People began to move, first in slow motion and then faster until they were twirling from one room to another, up and down the stairs, onto the deck, into the garden. The house lit up with a circular energy that was manic and magical, an energy that surrounded us but could not touch me.

  —

  Alison and I began dating within months of moving to New York in the late 1980s, both of us fresh college graduates. We left for Chicago a few years later—I began doctoral studies in French history, Alison planned events for nonprofits—and returned in 2000, when New York University hired me. Having missed the early Giuliani era, we came back to a city that was cleaner and more affluent than the one we had known. We had two sons now, Julian and Owen, born three years apart in the late 1990s. Through their school and Little League games, we found ourselves in a universe of music producers, architects, account executives, film editors, academics, artists, venture capitalists, and foodies—all of us wearing black jeans and listening to the Red Hot Chili Peppers, or later Wilco. There was something intoxicating about downtown, a self-awareness of cool powered by a mix of prosperity and faux nonchalance.

  New York also felt safer than the city we had known in the 1980s—except of course on 9/11. We were living in a Battery Park City rental, a few blocks south of the World Trade Center and within the evacuation zone. When we returned to our apartment to collect our belongings a week later, the fire still smoldered, its odor pungent. Trees sported white leaves—pages from memos, official letters, and instruction manuals shredded into macabre confetti. A dozen crushed ambulances and police cars were stacked outside our building like metal pancakes in primary colors. We left the neighborhood for the Upper West Side but feared that this would not be enough distance, not enough protection against the next attack.

  This led us to purchase a home, for shelter and summers, in Woodstock, New York, two hours north of New York City. We met other urban refugees there, and also m
usicians and painters, onetime employees of a now-shuttered IBM plant, retired schoolteachers, svelte yogis, butchers who also coach Little League, bow-hunting carpenters, troubadour rabbis, and aging hippies who sometimes look the part and sometimes do not. Beyond the facile caricatures, it was an easy town to like. Our house was nestled in a dead end, surrounded by acres of forest. We had never lived among bears, snakes, and coyotes before, but this place felt oddly secure, as if, like giant cotton balls, the trees and bushes could muffle noise and vibrations.

  This is where we spent the first weeks after the accident—hidden away. Everything was filtered, freed from the weight of obligations, pity, and accidental encounters with well-meaning acquaintances. Alison and I did not have to leave the house, not even to buy groceries, because friends and relatives took care of everything, preparing breakfast, answering the phone, welcoming well-wishers, signing for deliveries, and making runs to the hardware store. One of them called the local tennis club, where Owen had been slated to begin day camp, and explained that he had died. Others brought Julian to batting cages, anything to maintain the semblance of normalcy. (Such outings left Julian exposed in ways we had not anticipated. He later told us that, when a camper asked if he had siblings, he gave a frank answer. Oh shit, the kid said.)

  Another one of our friends placed sleeping pills in our bathroom to help us get through the night. Alison took one every evening; I never did, but we both opened ourselves to this spellbinding human alignment, these tiny gestures inside our own home.

  We became the silent center of a micro-society that filled the space Owen had left vacant.