Disaster Falls

by Stephane Gerson

  A few friends—smart, sophisticated, sensitive—were too bereft to say anything. Some did not call or write because they feared catching us unprepared or felt that they had nothing hopeful to offer. I recalled my own ill-chosen words after the death of a family friend two decades earlier. I had told his sister that their mother must have been devastated, to which she had slowly replied: “We—all—are.” So I could understand why people said as little as possible, and nodded when a friend told me that if he and others did not bring Owen up, it was because they feared saying the wrong thing. “You’ve thought of this, right?” my friend said.

  On some days, I told people they could simply ask how I was doing that day. That was a question I could answer. On others, I cast myself as the magnanimous party who, from his daily encounters with suffering, had learned to understand and even forgive the silence of others.

  But there were also moments when my empathy for those who lacked the words or resolve to go deep ran short. Aristotle advised against inviting friends into one’s grief. “Unless he be exceptionally insensible to pain, such a man cannot stand the pain that ensues for his friends.” Nowadays, friends share the pain of others, and when they do not, when opportunities remain unseized, the relationship is no longer the same.

  Encounters with unsuspecting strangers did not carry the same charge, but they could also veer off course. There was the restaurant waiter who told us his special talent was to uncover at least one moment of grace every day. When I got home that evening, I wrote him a letter explaining why his disclosure had touched me at this moment in my life. There was the dermatologist whom I asked if there was anything he could say about my grief. As a doctor, he surely knew something. And there was the long-lost classmate who found me on Facebook and explained that she had moved to Paris after the death of her parents. Sensing an opening, I told her about Owen. My classmate never replied; the waiter did not write back; and the dermatologist looked at me confounded before saying without conviction that it was hard, time helped, but it was hard. I still think of these exchanges with discomfort, the memory of my disappointment entangled with the burning awareness that I had asked for too much.

  After four or five months, I resented this constant expectation of intimacy, a tyranny imposed from within and without. I sometimes passed on conversations that might pull me to dark places. I knew I had to return the call from a friend who had moved to another state, but I kept postponing it, unwilling to shoulder whatever sorrow she would disclose, unsure that she could understand mine, and too depleted to rebuild or even sustain our relationship. When a graduate school friend informed me after years of silence that he and his wife now had an infant named Owen, I stared at his email and wished that it would vanish without a trace.

  —

  Our interactions with the world changed in another way. Friends now refrained from mentioning certain things in our presence: the layoffs, professional setbacks, marital strife, and separations that make up the daily fare of middle age. The expectation seemed to be that burdening Alison and me with mundane troubles was insensitive at best, heartless at worst.

  The irony, however, is that I would eagerly have made these people my companions. Give me your forlorn spouses and divorcées, your damaged and ailing folk. Together, we will create our own ring of misery. I remember the stunned, embarrassed expression on the face of an old friend when I told her that the two of us had gone through so much in the past months. Her husband had left her, and she was taking it hard. The way she looked at me as I spoke sliced open the illusion that bereaved parents could find equals. Alison and I had won the gold medal in suffering. We did not even need to sign up for the competition. All we had to do was show up, and victory would follow—guaranteed.

  So it was with this old friend. Standing outside a restaurant after lunch, I told her once more how sorry I was about her separation. She thanked me, but added that it was nothing compared to what I was going through. As we went our separate ways, I heard her call out my name. “Nothing in common, nothing at all!” she shouted from her side of the parking lot.

  She may have been right, but I shuddered because if there are no comparisons then there is no shared experience, and if there is no shared experience then Alison and I could not give and receive, and if we could not give and receive then nothing would remain but an asymmetrical relationship and permanent isolation. I wanted my friend to know this. I also wanted her to understand that, despite what I sometimes told myself, there was no hierarchy of desperate news. Her pain had its own contours, whether it involved a dead boy or not.

  But my friend was far and I was spent.

  Natalie: Was it afternoon or morning?

  Memories pour out of Julian one morning before school. He tells us that he thinks about the accident every day: the morning bus ride from the Best Western Dinosaur Inn to the Green River, Owen trailing him while the guides discussed safety on the water, the afternoon confusion. Sitting next to him on the living room couch, I realize that when Julian speaks of the accident, he means the entire day.

  The scariest moment, Julian says, occurred when Alison realized that Owen was missing. It happened ten minutes after the accident, on a bank of the Green below the rapids, as the rafts and duckies pulled in one by one. Julian and I had both made it to land. Standing side by side, we hoped that one of the rafts had picked Owen up.

  Julian tells us that he heard me yell out as Alison’s raft moved within earshot, asking if she had seen Owen. Until that moment, Alison still believed that he might be with us. Julian saw his mother’s face change complexion and then watched as she jumped over the side, stumbled onto the narrow beach, and ran back toward the site of the accident.

  Julian witnessed all of this, but it is the scream that Alison let out before leaping into the water that continues to resound.

  I can fill in what happened afterward, at least parts of it. I told Julian to stay put and then ran in the same direction as Alison—up the hilltop, down the other side, across brush, between short trees, along the flat terrain that abutted the river. Branches tore into my T-shirt and cut a gash on my forearm. I screamed Owen’s name, my voice drowned out by the water. Nothing, no reply. I did not know what to do so I returned to the beach in case he had been found but he had not so I ran back toward the hill. I did this several times, up and down that hilltop.

  The accident had split us apart. Owen was somewhere unknown; Alison ran along the bank and so did I, but with her; Julian stayed on the beach. He was not exactly on his own—guides and vacationers surrounded him—but he remained alone by a river that was growing louder and meaner.

  —

  Julian nestles into the couch and continues talking. As Alison and I searched for Owen, he sat on a raft in the cold rain. It had been a gorgeous day, but the vast Western sky now unleashed a violent thunderstorm. Some vacationers huddled under a tree. One of them handed Julian a light jacket. As he looked at the river, he began to think that Owen was probably not all right.

  I move close and touch his arm, his leg. He now discloses something that, he says, he has been keeping to himself. He tells us he did not sit on the raft the whole time. After a while, he joined the search and looked for Owen near the river. But he lost his balance, fell into the water, and was submerged before managing to pull himself out. I ask Julian if anyone saw him fall. Probably not, he says. Was he still wearing his life vest? He cannot recall.

  I feel a pit in my stomach. The river could have swallowed him, Julian could have vanished, and we would never have known what had happened to him. I accept that things occurred as he says they did, but this is too much. I cannot process it, and so I don’t. I offer no guidance, no fatherly reassurance, no way of making sense of these events. Julian is alone with this one.

  —

  Alison, too, yelled Owen’s name as she ran up and down the bank. She also begged the guides to do something to find Owen. Delma said that someone had seen him on the other shore; she said that this is where he had to be.
Some of the articles I later found online stated that “the boy was last seen near the shoreline before going out of sight.” Owen did go out of sight, but the notion that he reached the other bank and then gave no sign of life made little sense.

  Eventually, a guide hiked up the river, got into a kayak, and found Owen’s body in the water. As soon as she was told, as soon as she realized that the next exit point was a four-hour raft trip away, Alison asked the guides to get us out. Delma had already called in a helicopter to assist with the search and rescue, but it contained too much equipment to bear the weight of an entire family. There could be no airlift from this rainswept terrain so late in the day.

  I watched the helicopter take off without us. As the sound of the rotors faded over the horizon, my thoughts turned to the night we would now spend deep within a canyon.

  —

  Everyone kept busy around us. There was a campsite to set up, dinner to cook, a death to process. The guides and the other vacationers stayed away as we retrieved our gear and finished assembling our tent. Their gazes dared not cross ours. Delma alone communicated with us. She kept it simple: quick questions about logistics. Though her voice was hushed and controlled, she held the phone close to her ear. She would speak with us for a few minutes and then disappear.

  —

  The subject of Owen’s body must have come up, I suppose it did, but I cannot recall and neither can Alison. What is certain is that we did not ask to see Owen. We did not want the image of his lifeless face to sear our minds, which is why, the next day at the morgue, we declined to view it. I watched this strange ballet from afar, a reordering of social and emotional space in which people turned to menial activities and looked away from the bereaved family. There is no reason why ordinary people plunged into extraordinary circumstances should behave in extraordinary ways. Still, I yearned for some form of human contact.

  Had the guides set a different tone, the other vacationers might have approached us. In the midst of a canyon, strangers might have come together around the death of a child. But Alison and I also played our part in this ballet. We drew lines of our own and remained within their confines. Once our tent was up, we retreated inside.

  The tent was small, with little space to move without bumping into the flashlight that hung from a rod. It was too soon to cry or talk, so we sat side by side on the sleeping bags we had laid out on the hard ground. We sat in silence, listening to raindrops burst on the canvas and, just a few steps away, the growl of the river. This felt like a cruel punishment.

  It is difficult to tell how long the silence lasted or who spoke first. At some point I suggested that we recite the Shema, the Jewish declaration of faith. Though not devout, I yearned for some ritual. The Mourner’s Kaddish, the prayer for the dead, would have been more appropriate, but I had never memorized it and Alison did not mention it. We both knew the Shema. As we uttered its opening line in Hebrew—Shema Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai echad—I neither pondered its meaning nor expressed devotion nor implored God to look after Owen. I did not hope or pray for anything. Instead, I felt the enormity of the moment and the presence of untold generations who had recited such words while facing their own tragedies.

  Alison took us elsewhere. “It is just the three of us now,” she said. “We cannot do it alone. We have to stick together, we have to care for one another.” I did not know where these sentences originated, nor did I fully grasp what Alison was saying about the hazards that threatened our family. But she spoke with such quiet certainty that I registered everything she said.

  “We cannot revisit the past,” Alison added, as if she had already understood that Owen’s death was not only an end, but also a beginning.

  —

  Julian said little in the tent: no questions or complaints. Huddled in his corner, he watched and listened for a while and then fell asleep.

  Alison and I remained awake for a long time. She made a fist and hit her hand, her arms, her legs without knowing why, though she did say she had no idea what this would feel like for the rest of her life. Unable to put pressure on my bruised thigh, I lay down, sat up, lay down again and stared at the minute stitches in the canvas. Every half hour, I walked out to pee in the bucket Delma had left outside the tent.

  The first time, I noticed the other members of the party seated around a campfire a hundred feet away. They were deciding whether to continue the trip, but all I could see was flickering light and a closed circle. The next time I left the tent, the campsite was dark. Nothing but water—rain and the river and the stream of urine into the bucket.

  We barely slept. Minutes stretched into hours, time lost in an infinite expanse that brought neither relief nor clarity. Still, within days of our return, Alison and I began crafting a story—our own origin myth—about a family that came together in a tent, made a pact, and reached into its past while embracing a shared vision of its future. The tent joined the accident and the river in our new personal dictionary. Alison and I repeated this story to console the people who filled our house after the funeral. We told them that Jewish tradition should revise the practice of shivah, the seven days of mourning during which the bereaved mourn at home under the care of friends and kin. Mourners, we said, should spend the first twenty-four hours cut off from the world. The family that had grieved in a tent, or at least alone, would surely hold together afterward.

  When I talked to Julian about the tent a few years later, he recalled neither the prayer nor Alison’s words. His most salient memories were of the flashlight, the hard ground, and the cactus needle lodged in his toe. I was so surprised that I asked Alison what she remembered. It all came back to her: the Shema, the bucket, her fist hitting her legs. There was another thing.

  “You blamed yourself, you asked me if I blamed you,” Alison said. “I don’t remember exactly what I answered, something like ‘You didn’t do it on purpose, you didn’t mean to put Owen in harm’s way.’ ”

  This, too, I now realized, began in the tent.

  —

  The next morning, we packed our belongings while the guides served breakfast and loaded the rafts in preparation for the last leg of our trip. We were eight miles from the nearest exit, at Echo Park. When Alison found out that Owen’s body had spent the night wrapped in a sleeping bag, she asked Delma to keep it cool. Use whatever you brought for the food, she said. Delma took Owen on her raft—just the two of them at the end of the line. Our trip ended with an aquatic funeral procession, as in Venice but without flowers.

  It was a surreal voyage, a slow glide on a fatal river, through the same awe-inspiring scenery, the same layers of sand and red rock that had mesmerized Owen the previous day. At one point, the blue water of the dam-controlled Green and the brown water of the sediment-rich Yampa came together in a striking confluence. We looked at these wonders in silence, unable to grasp what the death of an eight-year-old meant in a timescape of such insufferable beauty.

  When we happened upon a rock wall that served as an echo chamber, Alison wanted to scream Owen’s name, but she merely gripped Julian’s hand a little tighter. When we hit other rapids, with names like Triplet Falls and Hell’s Half Mile, all of the rafts ran them except for ours. A guide walked us along the river’s edge, hiked back to collect the raft, ran the rapids on his own, and then picked us up. This was not necessarily the safer course since we ended up on perilous ledges, but it kept us out of fast water. Alison found it unsettling that, after what had happened, the other members of our group would run these rapids. Had they felt a thrill?

  At midday, we approached our destination. A row of official-looking people waited by the water, lined up in some protocolar fashion. There was the Moffat County sheriff—tall and burly, with a thick mustache—who stayed by our side. I took his card and meant to thank him for his soft touch, but never did. There was a police investigator, who sat Alison and me in the backseat of his SUV and listened to our accounts without taking notes. There was a victim’s advocate, who walked Julian to the sherif
f’s car while Alison and I spoke to the investigator. This separation, the first one since the search, felt like a surrender to foreign institutions. There was also a coroner whose name, the sheriff told us apologetically, was Owen. Standing outside the SUV, he asked us through the open window if we wanted to autopsy our son’s body.

  Before leaving, Julian and I returned to the beach to fetch our bags. All of the guides huddled by the water, arms and shoulders interlocked. This circle was such an incongruous sight—a display of support and affection unlike anything we had witnessed since the accident—that the two of us stood and stared. The moment they disbanded, one of the guides, the one who had piloted our raft out of the canyon that morning, walked over. He was crying, I think, and may have said a few words, but mostly I remember that he opened his arms and that I did, too. No one else on his team acknowledged that something massive had taken place on the river.

  During the months that followed, I wondered how Owen’s death had altered the lives of these young men and women, all of them caught in a whirlwind that seemed so much bigger than they were. I wondered how often they thought about Owen (and about us) and also what stories they had devised, about the river and their behavior and ours as well, in order to go on with their lives.

  Today, the only guide I still think about is the twentysomething who pulled Owen from the water and gave him mouth-to-mouth. Does he talk about what happened that day? Does he tell new friends and girlfriends? What will he say to his children? I do not know this guide, but he continues to haunt me.

  —

  In the afternoon, the sheriff and the victim’s advocate drove us to the Dinosaur Inn in Vernal, a quick stop to shower and change before heading for the Salt Lake City airport. The three of us sat in the backseat of the police car. Once we entered cell-phone range, Alison and I began making calls to relatives and friends. I opened each conversation by saying we had lost Owen, which meant that the person on the other end had to figure out whether Owen was simply lost or in fact dead. Once they understood, we cried together, we could not stop crying. My sobs and Alison’s melded into a wailing that filled the car.