Disaster Falls

by Stephane Gerson

  —

  The day after our return from Utah, I retreated to the small studio that serves as my office. Bookshelves cover all of the walls except for a section devoted to the kids’ drawings and a large bay window that opens onto the forest and a bluestone quarry. This is where I had written historical books and articles over the years, but that morning I sat at my desk to draft a preliminary version of our eulogy. Alison and I had taken notes on the flight home and agreed that I would show her something by midday.

  Writing Owen’s eulogy was in some respects an impossible exercise, a confrontation with reality that proved so raw I had to turn my back to Owen’s art on the walls. But alone in this quiet space, surrounded by trees and traces of the path that quarrymen had followed decades earlier, I heard Owen for the first time since the accident. The eulogy flowed on the page, with ready-made sentences and echoes of his voice. All parents must carry within them biographies of their children, unwritten but available at a moment’s notice.

  Ours began with the joy of having two boys and the pain of living without one of them. Alison and I told anecdotes about a child who had memorized our credit card number, and recounted some of his small victories that spring. We touched upon the accident and Owen’s absence. All that remained, we said, were recollections—and something else:

  Owen looked into himself and into the outside world with penetration and feeling. He sought understanding while remaining aware of his own frailty and limitations. He embraced the beauty and efflorescence of life while grasping its darker, impenetrable side. If Owen has left us a legacy, then this is it.

  These words continue to ring true even if I now realize that legacy talk is what the two of us needed at that moment. Owen’s life had to harbor some deeper meaning.

  Alison and I also spoke against anger. We had both felt its pull within days of the accident, and so we pushed back. We would no doubt feel anger in the future, we said. “But not today.” An anger that was equal to the death of Owen would consume us; it would scorch the earth and the insides; it would preclude all other emotions, even sadness; it would make it impossible to truly see, to understand what had happened and who we were becoming. There was no religious belief or ethical framework behind our words, just the conviction that once we surrendered we would lose ourselves and lose Owen—we would lose him again. This, too, we needed to say and hear that day, as if to make a public commitment, to ourselves and to the rest of the world. A life without anger, a life with as little anger as possible: this became almost right away our mantra and our daily practice.

  —

  The morning after writing the eulogy, I woke up knowing we would bury Owen that day. Every morning, there are parents who wake up knowing this is what they will do before sunset.

  I dragged my legs to the side of the bed and raised my body, hoping to accrue enough momentum to overcome the inertia that kept me pinned under the sheets. As I stood up, I wondered how the day would unfold. I might sit prostrate on a chair, or sob uncontrollably, or fall on my knees in the cemetery. Or perhaps Alison would behave in ways I did not recognize. The images of bereaved parents that I carried with me suggested that all of this was possible. After losing her seven-year-old daughter, the friend of a friend screamed in bed every morning. This was terrifying, but her behavior seemed appropriate.

  Alison wore a navy sleeveless dress with pleats and a short gray sweater. The rabbi recommended that I pick an old tie since, following Jewish custom, we would cut it (and Alison’s sweater) before the services. I chose my favorite tie instead; Owen deserved it. Afterward, we met our relatives in the synagogue library. I felt numb and restless, remote yet hyper-present.

  In the great room, quiet but full of static when we took our seats next to Owen’s coffin, people barely moved as the rabbi chanted and then summoned Alison and me to deliver the eulogy. We read paragraphs in turn while holding the sheets of paper between us, her hand and mine touching the words. Like a passing of the baton, this responsive recitation kept us in motion. It gave us balance. Julian watched from the front row though I do not know what he heard. I do not recall what he wore either (there are no photographs). Alison and I paid attention to Julian, but not as closely as before. He later told us that, for weeks, we did not concern ourselves with what he ate.

  Alison stood tall, feet planted on the platform. At the cemetery afterward, she held my hand firmly. It was a bright day, with a big blue sky surrounding Overlook Mountain, a local peak we had recently hiked with Owen and Julian, climbing past the ruins of a Gilded Age resort that had burned down long ago. The rabbi asked the mourners to create space for the three of us to walk around the grave. Afterward, still within this human circle, we shoveled dirt onto the casket. Alison remarked that a gust of wind blew out of nowhere at that moment.

  Before picking up the shovel, she stepped toward the black hole, as if to peer in. I placed my hand on her arm.

  “You really thought I would jump in, didn’t you?” she asked during the car ride home. She smiled faintly, but I think that she felt slighted, as if I had doubted her strength. Perhaps I had: it was easier to focus on her potential breakdown than to face my own.

  —

  At the house, mourners overflowed into the garden. This was no longer an indeterminate mass, but familiar people who held our hands, squeezed our shoulders, looked us in the eye. One of them thanked me. Minutes later, someone else did the same. So it went as the afternoon blended into the evening and the sun lost its intensity somewhere beyond Overlook.

  Thank you for your words, friends told me. We came to offer you strength, but you have helped us. Alison heard the same words and found them as jarring as I did. It took me months to understand the relief that people felt when we stood before them in the synagogue, spoke of a present without anger, and imagined our future alongside Owen’s. This is not what they had expected. We might have screamed uncontrollably or jumped into the grave.

  Hardly anyone mentioned Owen in my presence that afternoon. I barely mentioned him myself; this made me feel ashamed, but it seemed easier that way. At one point, I ended up among fathers from the kids’ school who bantered about vacations and the like—anything to fill the silence. I listened, then wandered off. Circling the small groups in dark colors, my eyes fell upon the couch where Owen had sat reading, legs crossed, a few weeks earlier. The book he had picked up on our coffee table that day—New York Changing—coupled Berenice Abbott’s photographs of New York City in the mid-1930s with shots of the same locations sixty years later. While some spots had not changed, many are now unrecognizable. The Wanamaker’s department store on Broadway and Ninth Street—razed. The block-long gas tanks in Yorkville—vanished. The Jamaica Town Hall—replaced by a McDonald’s. Talman Street in Brooklyn—now gone, all of it.

  Later that evening, once everyone had left and we had put Julian to bed, I picked up the book and sat where Owen had sat to scrutinize the before and the after. As I pored over the photographs, I pictured him doing the same, feeling the force of catastrophic events that erase the past with coldhearted brutality. Who among us remembers Talman Street? And who will remember the boy who just the other day, just before he died, saw entire worlds vanish before his eyes?

  The metaphor seems so neat now. But this is what Owen had read on that couch, and this is what I came to feel the day I buried my son, when the fear of jumping in gave way to the prospect of total erasure.

  —

  That night, Alison and I lay side by side on the bed. We talked about the day that had elapsed—the day we buried Owen—and moved closer. We needed to touch, but neither one of us said so, as if some taboo forbade carnal intimacy on this day of all days. Our cheeks touched, our lips met, and then we held each other with an intensity I thought had vanished on the river, an intensity without desire but sharp enough to cut through the night’s crystalline stillness. For an instant I stepped outside myself and watched our bodies interlock, but only for a moment because stronger forces took over and overpowe
red all doubling of the self, all thoughts of sacrilege. Alison and I came together and at that instant she began sobbing, quietly but for what seemed like a very long time. It was devastating and yet felt so perfectly normal at the end of this day that I could not tell what it said about our future together.

  —

  Is it necessary to say that during the weeks that followed, pain scorched our bodies, leaving us hollowed out? In the morning, I often woke to find Alison on her back, eyes wide open, mind churning. That was how we now began our days, trying to make sense of who we were. Once, Alison said that the hole Owen had left was so huge that she would have to wrap her mind around it in little bits. Otherwise she would drown. Soon enough, we would purge our language of aquatic metaphors (keep your head above water, the current is dragging me down), but that day Alison did not notice and neither did I.

  For weeks, friends continued to fill our house. They made themselves available and tried to gauge our mood. All we had to do was receive their offerings. This proved easy for Alison, who accepted all invitations: get-togethers on the deck, hikes, walks around lakes, afternoons on the couch. Companionship was the only way to get through the day, she said. Though she did not want to hear how people found out about the accident, Alison quickly concluded that entombing her grief would bring her down. And so she opened our home to all comers, close and distant. Those who gave her what she needed confirmed what she already knew about the generosity of human nature. Those who did not were outliers.

  Unlike Alison, I had never expected people to act in altruistic ways. Trust was a leap of faith, more likely to yield pain or disappointment than solace. Nothing had occurred on the river to challenge this outlook, and yet I could not deny that people were now showing up for difficult conversations. This happened; it was real. During these early days, I followed Alison’s lead and grieved for Owen in the company of others.

  Julian, eleven at the time, did so as well. But one day he told us he did not like living in a house full of strange voices. There were too many little kids requiring supervision and too many adults intruding on his space. “The B——’s, where did they come from?” he asked. “They just showed up.”

  It feels unseemly and almost ungrateful to say so, but the constant presence of others soon overwhelmed me, too. Our home had become a kibbutz, a Soviet kolkhoz, a collective with sounds and rhythms and rituals that were no longer ours. It was less about trust than space, silence, and the possibility of listening to myself and perhaps hearing Owen as well. So I volunteered for chores outside the house and checked the recyclables bin several times a day, hoping that there would be enough bottles to warrant a run to the dump. I took refuge in my studio, looking out the window at the forest and the wild turkeys that crossed the quarry path. And one evening, seeking relief from the strange voices that spooked Julian, I asked Alison for a day without visitors. We did little that day, but it was just us, groping our way through the stillness and a house that was not yet ours, trying to sense what it would feel like to become a family of three.

  Michael: I would like to know in which ways Owen was a nice boy.

  For months, I jotted down everything I could recall about Owen’s life. I did so expecting that this would go on forever, that every day would bring another kernel of Owen, and that these kernels of memory could, when strung together, explain who Owen had been and hence what had happened on the river.

  There was his fascination with numbers. Owen related to the world by counting, quantifying, correlating—not like an idiot savant, but with an innate eye. Upon waking up, he picked up the newspaper and sat on the couch, eyes half-open, searching for series and recurrences in the box scores. His math teacher spoke about this at the funeral. “Owen was able to see patterns and the solutions to complex ideas; he was able to use the math he knew to figure out the math he had never seen before.” For Owen, she said, “seeing new patterns that occur naturally in numbers was like magic.”

  Other things came easily: spelling, grammar, where to throw the ball for the double play. Owen was endowed with the seemingly effortless ease Italians call sprezzatura. The mother of a schoolmate wrote us after his death that her son could never believe he had as cool a friend as Owen. Cool, yes—aloofness mixed with pinpoint certainty about the workings of the world. He strutted in his crocs and baseball cap. Cool charisma.

  As I write this, I want to be self-indulgent and fill reams of paper with such recollections, an unending stream of anecdotes about my son. But Owen was neither self-indulgent nor prone to self-pity. I now recall the time his friend Jordan failed to show up for a sleepover. His mother had found reasons to decline previous invitations, perhaps because she worked full-time and lived in another borough, but one day she agreed to drop Jordan off. Owen and I waited at home. When they did not arrive, I called the mother. They were stuck in traffic, she said. Ten minutes later, Owen asked me to call again, which I did. The mother said she was on her way. We waited more, called a last time, received the same answer. I told Owen that this had nothing to do with him, that things can be complicated. But there was no need. Owen was already walking to his room with a book.

  I am convinced that Owen understood this woman’s limitations because, cool as he appeared, he was beginning to grasp his own. Days before the accident, he lost his temper during a family game and stormed away. An hour later, he acknowledged that his reaction had been out of proportion. But there was no way he could have admitted it during the game, he said. “I seem tough on the outside, but I’m fragile inside.” I now wonder where Owen picked up these words.

  He understood other things, including the depth of his attachment to Alison, and when she was not around, to me, and when I was away, to the grandparent or adult he had decided to trust. Owen also grew attached to ordinary objects, such as the ragged couch that we replaced one day. He was distraught when he returned from school and discovered the change. It was as if a close friend had moved to a distant continent without a good-bye.

  One winter, when my parents took Owen and Julian on a vacation, he asked me whether I felt lonely without them. If I did, he said, he would draw me a person to whom I could talk. I think that he would have liked to have such a person on call; he would have relished such powers. Owen would often retreat into his own universe, return to check in with us, and then depart once again. We sometimes found him in nearby but enclosed spaces: closets, dressing rooms, and bathrooms. He seldom ventured far, steering clear of cellars and outdoor hiding spots. The spaces he chose seemed to provide security and an opportunity to grapple with his conflicted feelings about solitude.

  At night, Owen never found an easy way of falling asleep. He would lie on his side, eyes open, staring into emptiness until he grew too exhausted to hold out any longer. He liked being alone, but taking leave of the world was a challenge.

  —

  At the age of seven, Owen asked to return early from sleepovers. Soon, he found it impossible to accept invitations to friends’ homes. He told us he had a “problem” he could not overcome on his own. We found a therapist, an elderly, Austrian-born child psychologist who specialized in attachment issues. Every Monday afternoon during the spring that preceded the accident, one of us brought Owen to her old house in Chelsea. He rang all the doorbells since we never figured out which was the correct one, dropped his schoolbag in the vestibule, and climbed the three flights of stairs to the top floor. The office was divided into two sections: on the left, a couch and chairs around a low table; on the right, a play area.

  During the first sessions, Owen remained on the couch, but after a while he explored the room, touching the innumerable books, bibelots, and toys that gave it the feel of a bourgeois salon in fin-de-siècle Vienna.

  “You guys talk and I’ll chime in,” Owen would say as he examined a glass fish or a small car. The therapist and the parent who had come that week conversed until he joined us, not for long but always attentive to what was said. Then Owen was gone again, often into the bathroom, which was clo
se enough to the main room for our voices to carry. In and out, in and out.

  After a few months, the therapist determined that Owen’s separation anxiety had originated on 9/11. It had never occurred to us that what happened that day could have had a lasting impact on a child who was barely two at the time. But it is true that his life began with a collective catastrophe.

  —

  When the first plane hit the towers, Julian and I had already traveled north to begin our days at school and at work. Owen and Alison were still home in Battery Park City, eating breakfast. While Alison did not hear the crash, she noticed the fire trucks driving up the West Side Highway and turned on the TV. After a few minutes, she lifted Owen from his high chair, grabbed her phone and keys, and stepped outside. She wore shorts and a T-shirt; Owen went barefoot.

  They were standing before our apartment building when they heard the roar of the second aircraft. Looking up, Alison saw the underside of a jet coming in from the south. She covered Owen’s eyes and shut hers before the airliner entered the tower, but the collision was so loud that she asked a man nearby if the plane had come out the other side. Throughout the day, Owen repeated this man’s answer. “Plane no come out,” he said again and again.

  Alison ran toward Wagner Park—into the crowd that was forming at the southern tip of Manhattan. People were receiving BlackBerry messages about eight terrorist planes. Someone recited the Lord’s Prayer; someone screamed, “My brother is in the building!” Alison bumped into an acquaintance who had seen people jump from the upper floors. When the first tower collapsed, a white cloud rolled over the park. Everyone retreated toward the river. Some people kneeled. A man stepped over the railing, ready to dive into the water. Another bystander ripped off his shirt and gave Alison strips of cloth to cover her toddler’s face.

  Owen fell asleep in Alison’s arms, which meant that he did not see firefighters arrive and distribute paper masks. He did not watch the armada of boats come in from New Jersey to evacuate New Yorkers. Nor did he hear firefighters order people to climb over the railing and step aboard. Because Owen slept through this, we assumed that he had missed it, even though he awoke on the ferry and was alert when a woman invited Alison and other evacuees to shower and make phone calls from her Jersey City home. Alison and Owen were still covered with white dust when they walked into her brownstone.