Disaster Falls
Page 6
Sitting on our couch, Julian remembers this as well. He tells us that listening to our calls was so horrible that he covered his ears. As he says this, I remember reading that children who watched repeated footage of 9/11 imagined that each news clip depicted another plane hitting the World Trade Center, another tower collapsing. On the morning of September 12, 2001, the babysitter who looked after Julian while I ran errands left the TV on. I do not know if Julian covered his eyes that day; I do not know if he, too, believed that different towers kept coming down. But it has crossed my mind that, as he heard us make call after call in the back of that police car, Julian lost his brother more times than either of us can recall.
Tessa: I remember at the farm, a chicken pooped on Owen!
A year before the accident, I walked into Owen’s room and sat on the edge of his bed, my feet on the blue carpet with elephants and tigers. The house was quiet that summer afternoon, the kids at day camp. I do not know what brought me into the room—something to fetch perhaps—only that I sat and looked around. To my left: the purple Jimi Hendrix poster Owen had chosen in a music store. To the right: an alcove with a window and a desk covered with pencils, drawings, comic books, and a plastic turtle. Across from me: an open closet with pants and long-sleeved T-shirts suspended on multicolored hangers.
As I took it all in, I imagined that Owen was dead.
This was not an intellectual exercise in which I pictured life without Owen. Rather, his absence surged through my body like an electrical current. I felt Owen’s death in my shoulders, I felt it in my hands, I felt it in my bowels. I lived his death for what seemed like a long time though it could not have been more than a minute. When I could no longer withstand it, I got up and left.
I told Alison about this later that day. She listened and then disclosed that she had recently woken up in the middle of the night with an ominous feeling about Owen, a feeling so piercing she ran to his room to check on him. Since then, she could not shake the belief that Owen would not be with us forever.
Alison and I never talked about this afterward. I think we both feared the power of words that, once released, might act upon the world. Better to leave them unspoken. But the two of us carried these two memories in distant corners of our minds, quietly and sheepishly.
After the accident, they blended into what Alison and I labeled a premonition, at once uncanny and meaningful. This happened so quickly—on the river, that very day—that we mentioned it in our eulogy: Both of us have always been aware of the fragility of Owen’s presence among us. We just felt it, independently, in ways that escape rational explanation. When he was alive, we treasured every moment with him because we sensed, somewhere, that they might not be eternal.
I could quibble with some words. It was not true that we had always been aware of Owen’s fragile presence or that we treasured every moment with him. But it is true that I had never sat on Julian’s bed and felt his death. It is true that Alison had only had such a dream regarding Owen. And it is true that on the Green River, only hours after the accident, Alison and I confessed to each other that while Owen’s death was intolerable, it did not come as a surprise. This was not a long conversation: just a few words, a movement of the head, sustained eye contact. We kept it short because there was something disturbing in the idea that we had sensed Owen’s early death, as if it had been preordained.
Perhaps it was only disturbing to me. Alison added to the premonition during the weeks that followed our return to Woodstock. She talked about the fortune-teller who had once told her that a life-changing event would occur in her forty-second year. She had turned forty-two the year of the accident and decided to wait before scheduling a minor surgical procedure. Three months later, we left for Utah. On the eve of our departure, Owen had gone into a funk. He had told us he was sad, and insisted upon spending time on his own. His dark moods concerned us, but only now, after the accident, did Alison suggest that Owen had intuited that he would never return to Woodstock. “It’s like those people who know they are going to die,” she said.
I did not like it when people told us that Owen had gone through his full cycle of growth and accomplished everything he was meant to accomplish, or that he had died because a terrible fate awaited him on earth. But the premonition loomed so large after the accident that I shared it with a few friends. One of them kept returning to the fact that Alison and I had felt something so similar. The two of you knew him so intimately, he said. Another friend told me that it is common for parents to entertain such thoughts, especially with their youngest child. She, too, had gone into her daughter’s room and imagined life without her.
This friend may have been right, but her words made me grimace. If my premonition and Alison’s were humdrum, if they were not linked to the particulars of Owen’s life and death, then we were left with an eight-year-old dying a senseless, solitary death in the depths of a canyon. No parent can live with that.
—
One of the first places we visited in Utah, days before the rafting trip, was the small town of Helper (population 2,189). Located between Salt Lake City and Grand Junction, surrounded by canyons and ridges, Helper was founded in the 1880s to house railroad workers. The Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad made it a freight terminal, with a depot for helper engines that aided trains on the steep climb up Price Canyon. This is how the town got its name.
We got off U.S. Route 6 in search of lunch and ended up in a place that was not quite a ghost town but looked like one, with abandoned single-family homes, a rickety bridge, and shuttered storefronts on Main Street. Next to the rundown movie theater, a deli had been transformed into a temporary thrift store, its floor covered with boxes of used clothes and toys, mismatched china, and old magazines. The day we walked in, an eight-year-old girl and her younger brother were manning the store, which belonged to their grandparents. We browsed for a while then had lunch a few doors down, in the only restaurant still open in the early afternoon. The room was crowded, with groups of beefy men at some tables and families at others.
The first anniversary of the nearby Crandall Canyon Mine disaster had come and gone earlier that month. This collapse had registered as a 3.9-magnitude earthquake: six miners trapped, their bodies never recovered, two rescuers and an inspector buried while trying to reach them. The mining company had been fined more than three million dollars for inadequate design, miscalculations, overly aggressive mining, withholding of information, and other safety violations that directly led to these deaths. “Had I known that this evil mountain, this alive mountain, would do what it did, I would never have sent the miners in there,” the mine owner later said. Our waitress told us that everyone in Helper knew at least one victim. She said this in a straightforward tone, with resignation in her voice.
Death was everywhere in Helper. This may have been why Owen and Julian disliked the town, why they saw no poetry in the decrepitude of Main Street or the old railroad cars turned into outdoor relics in the local park. They could not wait to leave. But they quarreled that afternoon, and Owen took refuge on a stoop and then asked us to get the car and pick him up there. For a few minutes, as Alison and I walked a few blocks with Julian, it was just three of us—and Owen alone in a town that no longer lived up to its name.
—
A few months after the funeral, I suddenly thought of Helper and wrote down every detail I could recall. I wrote with urgency, consumed by the need to consign these events to memory. As I did so, I felt again the presence of those two moments: the day I entered Owen’s room and sensed his absence and the night Alison awoke with a terrifying presentiment. Nearly forgotten incidents and recent disasters came together within a natural order that had remained invisible until then. This was not about fate—so I told myself once again. There was nothing predestined, just a story of death and foreboding whose force I could not deny.
Matthew: What was Owen’s favorite thing to do?
FROM: ALISON GERSON, “REGRET.O.GRAM”
DATE: SEPTEMBER 24, 2009 11:57:19 AM EDT
TO: COSMICAPOLOGY@GMAIL.COM
SUBJECT: I AM SO SORRY
Dear Owen,
I am so sorry. There is nothing more to say to you at this point. I am sorry you are gone. I’m sorry we couldn’t save you, find you, protect you.
I’m sorry you have missed out on life and its many wonders. I am sorry for ourselves, for missing you as a child, adolescent, adult. I am sorry you will never marry, have sex, kiss a girl. I am sorry for Julian. Sorry you can’t see your brother growing up, with braces, at his Bar Mitzvah. I am sorry your front teeth didn’t come in before you died. I’m sorry we signed up for that trip. Sorry we trusted them. Sorry we allowed you to push the limits. I hope you are happy and thriving and surrounded by love. I feel your love around me all the time. Especially when you send me hearts and bunnies. I love my dreams with you. Loved your eyes in my dream last night. I really think you control these dreams. I wish you could reply to this email. I have often thought of sending you an email—would you get it? I am so sorry you are not with me physically—you are with me all the time, every second, but physically where are you?
I’m sorry I will not be able to mother you into adulthood. Kiss you goodnight every night and good morning every morning. I’m sorry your soft skin and beautiful eyes have been taken from me. I’m sorry you aren’t getting older, changing, growing. I’m sorry my life is what it is—without you. I’m sorry I no longer adore life. Life without you is empty and I’m sorry to say that. Hopefully it won’t always be like that. I’m sorry I may forget things about you.
I’m not sorry you were in my life for 8½ years or that I loved you as much as I did. I am sorry you are gone.
Love,
Mommy
—
Alison felt Owen’s presence from the moment we returned to Woodstock. She felt it when she found a heart-shaped stone and when a rabbit crossed the road (Alison used to call Owen “bunny”). She felt it when she accidentally typed live instead of love on her phone. This was Owen telling her to go on with her life. She also felt his presence when Utah’s Wall Arch, located along the Devils Garden Trail in Arches National Park, collapsed two weeks after the accident. This was Owen’s energy at work, Owen testing his strength.
Sitting on our deck in Woodstock one evening, I asked Alison whether Owen was with us right then. If my question surprised her, she did not say so. “Yes, he’s here.” Where? “Probably on that log over there.” I thought she had made this up on the spot, but no, she had felt Owen’s presence before I asked, without having to articulate it. While Alison has never been spiritual, she now talked about spirits and forces. She could acknowledge her need to believe in all this, but self-awareness did not make her experiences any less vivid.
More than a belief, this presence was a certainty that had sprouted fully formed—the natural prolongation of Alison’s relationship with Owen before the accident. She once drew a line with her finger from her throat to her abdomen. “Owen lives inside me,” she said. “He is in my heart, in my body. He grounds me, he keeps me stable.” The two of them had shared a profound connection—deepened by what they had lived through together on 9/11. Alison loved Julian just as much, but Owen’s personality was closer to hers than to mine. Alison recognized herself in Owen, and he probably recognized himself in her: the street smarts, the self-sufficiency and natural leadership, the blustering confidence masking a need for reassurance. Both yearned to be understood and sometimes felt misunderstood—but never by each other. Alison once told me she sensed Owen’s needs before he voiced them. Even if Owen had pulled away during his teenage years, she knew he would have come back to her.
Alison said that living without the person most like her was the hardest thing. Owen’s death made her feel as if she had lost a visceral part of herself. But she had no regrets about anything she had done or failed to do as a mother; she felt no need to revisit any facet of their relationship, or assess Owen’s feelings toward her, or examine her own behavior before his death. There was nothing to revisit because Alison never doubted that Owen loved her and never wondered if he had known how much she loved him. Her bond with him was as secure and intimate in death as it had been when he was alive.
—
My relationship with Owen had always been steeped in difference. His sense of privacy ran deeper, his locus of satisfaction seemed to stem from within in a way that mine did not. Whereas he improvised and trusted his instincts, I prepared and planned ahead. All of this crystallized a month before the accident, as the two of us drove to Cooperstown for a father-son weekend (Julian was at sleep-away camp). From the backseat, Owen told me he would soon have to resolve a lingering issue with a friend. I suggested that he rehearse what he might say, but this held no interest. “I’ll wing it,” Owen replied with nonchalance and conviction.
Owen’s outward confidence matched his fine farm-boy looks and athletic talent—all of which had eluded me as a child. Growing up, I had harbored the notion that some people lived in a realm in which things came easily and life proved fuller and richer. Adulthood had punctured this illusion, but there was something bewildering about Owen, something that sometimes made it difficult to believe that he was my son.
Owen and I devised games and created characters whom we impersonated. He had begun calling me Pops, which I liked. But I worried that I would never understand him, and that he did not understand me. I had long taken on the burden of protection in our family, insisting that the kids hold my hand in subway stations or bike near the curb on country roads. Owen pushed back. Skiing in the Catskills one afternoon, he missed a midslope jump-off on a lift and rose into the white ether, the safety bar high above his head. I grabbed his waist and pulled him down. As we recovered our bearings, Owen told me with some vehemence that he would have done fine on his own.
Owen once called me a wuss, a term that, as he used it, went beyond its dictionary definitions: feeble, ineffectual, cowardly. For Owen, wuss denoted a fearful relationship to the world. His third-grade journal includes a sunlike diagram: a large circle containing my name and, all around it, lines leading to a dozen bubbles, each one of them filled with a character trait. One mentions my sense of humor, but there is also “scared of heights” and “scared a lot.”
It is possible that Owen once again acted tough at the precise moment that he sensed his own fear. It is possible that he berated me because his fears stemmed not only from 9/11, but also from the trepidation I expressed in his presence. Owen may have felt this without being able to put it into words.
All this is conceivable, but I did not consider any of these possibilities at the time. Though his words hit hard, I wondered instead whether eight-year-olds can understand the dangers of the world. Can they grasp a parent’s burden of responsibility? Someone had to look after Owen despite his need for autonomy. Someone, I told myself, had to be scared a lot.
Alison sometimes mocked my protective nature, too. She did so in a gentler fashion. Instead of calling me a wuss, she laughed with the boys when I made them hold my hand as the subway approached. After the accident, however, she listened as I reexamined past incidents from our family life. On 9/11, I had dropped Julian off at school and then spent the morning a mile from Ground Zero, secluded in a small library office whose thick concrete walls bunkered me off from the world. Without cell access, I did not learn about the attacks until one p.m. Although NYU had set up a TV in the library lobby, no one had knocked on the office doors to alert patrons. This made me one of the last able New Yorkers to find out what had happened. By that time, a friend had taken Julian to her apartment, and Alison and Owen had been evacuated to New Jersey.
This became part of our family lore, a story repeated again and again to people who had not known us in 2001. I winced each time I had to recount it, and even more so while listening to Alison’s rendering, because I could not tell where the story about my work ethic ended and where the tale about parental absenc
e began. Early that afternoon, I had picked up Julian at a friend’s home, sat him on a bench across from St. Mark’s Church in the East Village, and tried to explain why towers had burned outside his classroom window. But I did not mention my absence that morning, and did not see Owen until he and Alison returned to Manhattan two days later.
The day’s events made me even more protective. Though I now understood how easily outside forces can split parents and children apart, I could not help but wonder whether Owen knew that he could trust me, that I would look after him. Did he know how much I loved him? Alison assured me he did, but that summer in Utah, I was still waiting to hear it from him.
—
I struggled to uncover Owen’s presence after his death. When a friend asked if I felt it around the Woodstock house, in the buds sprouting in the woods, among the butterflies that flew in close, or through openings in the clouds, I had to shake my head and say no. When Wall Arch collapsed, the only thing I thought about was ephemerality and fragility behind strength. I could not fathom what the Buddhist monk Thích Nhát Hanh meant when he declared that “to say that he no longer exists is just an imaginary construction of our discriminative mind. If we know how to look deeply, we will be able to perceive his presence.” Somebody sent me this quotation. All I understood was that there was a way and that it escaped me.
It was not for want of trying. Within two weeks of the funeral, I had devised a morning ritual, an incantation that I recited in order to somehow exist without but also with Owen. It included the Kaddish, which I read in Hebrew for the cadence of the words; a list of Owen’s qualities; bromides such as “Take the risk that people are good”; and summons to both love Julian unconditionally and listen to Alison’s pain. There was also a quotation from Carlos Fuentes, who lost two children, about coping by bringing the person one loves inside oneself. I read this quotation every morning and hoped to one day understand it.