Disaster Falls

by Stephane Gerson

  Once or twice, I repeated Owen’s name like a mantra—a trance-like litany with the soft n slipping into the open o: Owen Owen Owen Owen Owenowenowenowen. I recalled the different ways in which we had pronounced the name. The two-syllable Ow–en when we played hide-and-seek…The accent on the o when we went looking for him: O-wen?…The low-pitched, extended n—which became almost its own syllable—when he pushed the limits…The doubling of the final syllable when he impressed us: Owen-en.

  One morning, I filled a sheet of paper with his name, over and over again, line after line, until no space remained.

  The mantra was not only meditation, but also penitence and punishment, as if incessant writing could express contrition.

  I made lists of things Owen had liked and disliked. I collected memories—sentimental, humdrum, tactile. I sometimes leaned toward memories of strife because I found it easier to mourn a difficult or tortured child rather than one who enjoyed all facets of life. Grief can be ruthless that way. I went about this task feverishly, convinced that, unless I transcribed these memories as soon as they surfaced, they would melt, they would vanish, Owen would melt and vanish.

  By the fourth month, I could no longer come up with a new memory every day, and soon not every other day either. I thought I had exhausted the reserve, but there was still a trickle, a last spurt. And then that was it: no more memories. “All of these things have passed like shadow and wind!” Victor Hugo wrote. This was the total of Owen. I hoped it was not the end of Owen.

  Around that time, I visited his grave on my own for the first time. It was a gray, wispy November day with a wet sky. Having parked near his plot, I looked around the car for a piece of candy to bring to Owen, but there was none so I placed a pebble by his engraved name (following Jewish custom) and told myself that he deserved better than this. Dead leaves had accumulated on the gravestone. I thought about removing them, but it began to drizzle so I drove away.

  Owen had to be elsewhere. Back in New York City, I left our apartment one morning with a camera to photograph places that had mattered to him, places that might retain a trace of his presence. I wanted to do so before our neighborhood no longer resembled the one he had known. Our building’s lobby, with the granite bench on which he sometimes rested after playing outside. The concrete ball field at Houston and Sixth Avenue where, standing behind the fence, Alison and I once watched him take the quarterback position as if it belonged to him. The stoop of his school on Bleecker Street, where he waited to be picked up in the afternoon. The Italian barbershop on Thompson, where he sat among Village locals and college students. The J. J. Walker Park on Hudson, where he watched Julian belt hits during Little League season.

  I also took a picture of the child therapist’s office on the day Alison and I walked up the three flights of stairs and told her Owen had died.

  I planned to resume this project another day—my list contained locations in other neighborhoods—but I never did. In fact, I only looked at these photographs on one occasion, and never showed them to anyone, not even to Alison. All I could see was Owen’s absence, empty space, and ghostly shadows.

  —

  Could there be another way? I kept coming up short during the first months. Then, in the spring, another bereaved father told me he sometimes took walks with his late daughter. He simply left the house in her company, hand in hand, and walked around the city. It seemed like a curious thing to do, but I invited Owen to come along one afternoon.

  The two of us ambled across crowded sidewalks in the West Village, holding hands while talking about his field trip to the Bronx Zoo. After a few blocks, we played a game in which the first person to spot a shop we knew earned a point. When we stepped into one of them to make a purchase, Owen sat on a chair and read a book. The next day, we took another walk, this time to Chelsea. In the gift shop of a museum, Owen bought Alison a Mother’s Day gift: a watch with a picture of Dali on its face. On the way home, we tried to figure out why people tend to live in neighborhoods filled with others just like them.

  There were moments of plenitude on these walks, moments during which Owen’s voice rose up. When we came upon a human billboard advertising a hot-dog joint, I told Owen about education and low-paying jobs, but he had a different take. “Maybe this guy likes it,” he said. “Maybe he chose to do this.” If I listened attentively, I could hear echoes of Owen’s voice and fill in some of the holes that perforated my memory. I could also recover sides of myself that I had forgotten. Perhaps this was the way to bring him inside.

  But these were mere moments. On some walks the conversation did not flow, either because I was distracted or else because Owen had nothing to say. There were even times when the two of us left the apartment together and I came home alone. Once, I answered my phone in the midst of a stroll and never went back to Owen. Another time, I asked him to sit on a bench while I made a stop at the dry cleaner’s. A half hour later, far from that spot, I recalled with dismay that I had left him there. I had left Owen and never said good-bye.

  Our walks became scarce by the end of the first year, but whenever I asked Owen to come along, he always put down his toys, looked up with a smile, and joined me at the door. He never complained about the time that had elapsed since our last outing. In fact, he never complained about anything, not even the life he lost at the age of eight.

  —

  Regardless, I returned to the cemetery before the first anniversary of his death and apologized to Owen. I did so twice: once for leaving him behind on the river and once for forgetting him on a bench somewhere in the big city.

  Meghan: I am sorry that Owen died and you are probably very sad that that happened.

  After 9/11, we spent six weeks with Owen and Julian in a two-room hotel suite in midtown Manhattan. Battery Park City did not feel safe, and we had not yet decided where to go next. Though we found ourselves in close quarters, Alison and I inhabited different realms. She remained in shock; I felt confusion but no posttraumatic anxiety. I had not lived through the attacks, not even by watching them on TV, and this changed everything. Alison wanted me to understand what she had experienced, and continued to experience, but I had a difficult time opening myself day after day to her sorrow and uncertainty. Frightened as we both were about the future, Alison needed knowledge about potential threats whereas I sought distance. Alison also pined for reassurance, and I had none to provide, not when I stopped taking the kids on the subway because of the anthrax and the dirty bombs. Alison felt abandoned.

  This is why, I later told myself, she made us vow in the tent to endure not only as a family, but also as a couple. Alison may have sensed that our responses to disaster would once again take different forms. She may have intuited that parents do not grieve in identical ways for a child who seems familiar and for a child who stands apart. And she knew that I had ended up in the water with Owen, whereas she had not. The two of us might, once again, inhabit different realms. To withstand what the future had in store, we would have to reconfigure our marriage from within.

  —

  Alison plowed through grief as if it were fresh snow. Her pain was incommensurable: she sometimes finished the day folded over on the kitchen floor, saying things like “I am cracked open” or “I am but a shell.” But she also ventured into Owen’s room and made regular visits to the cemetery. Several times a week, she walked along the Hudson River, all the way down to the spot in Battery Park City where she and Owen had been engulfed in white dust. I found this out three years later, when I joined her on this route for the first time. This was not her destination, she said. She simply ended up there, on a walk with Owen that had not required an invitation.

  Alison ended up in other places too. One day, when taking Julian to the dentist, she found herself in the office where Owen had had his front teeth pulled weeks before the accident. She broke down in the waiting room, but this did not stop Alison. She continued to seize any opportunity to feel Owen, regardless of the potential consequences.

  Alis
on wore Owen’s watch and sometimes went to bed the way he did, staring at the wall, keeping her eyes open as long as she could, fighting slumber until, like death, it fell over her. “It’s a hard way to go to sleep, but I feel like Owen,” she explained.

  A primal energy propelled Alison forward and thrust her into the future. She followed Owen as he grew up, imagining what he would look like at the age of nine or ten and then picturing him in his teens, his twenties, even in middle age. Every day, Alison contemplated not only what we and Owen had lost but also what we had yet to lose: an entire lineage of unborn children and grandchildren.

  —

  Unlike Alison, I kept Owen frozen in the past, with front teeth that would never come in, and reconsidered memories of an eight-year existence I had canvassed and made safe. Every intimation of Owen’s life progressing, even as a figment of my imagination, was another reminder of implacable death, the end of everything.

  His past did not necessarily prove more comforting. I seldom entered Owen’s room, which remained as it had been before he died. In the early days, his comic books were still current, the sheets carried traces of his perspiration, the air that wafted through the window was as warm as it had been the last night he had slept there. No blown lightbulbs, no discolored posters.

  Within weeks, the room became something else: a sepulcher but also a time capsule. Whenever I looked in, I thought of our apartment the day after 9/11. That morning, I had talked my way through police checkpoints and somehow made it down to Battery Park City to recover our dog, who had spent the night at home, alone. Upon walking into the apartment, I realized that the windows had been left open. A smooth blanket of dust covered every surface, creating a chillingly gorgeous fantasy of post-Vesuvius Pompeii. The entire apartment was white except for a brown circle on the bed: the dog, alive but immobile until I shook him from his torpor. Owen’s room now reminded me of this scene, but without the sublime beauty or the live animal on top of the covers.

  I stayed out.

  I also avoided the parking lot where we had taught Owen how to ride a bike the previous summer. When friends presented us with photographs of him or poems they had written in his honor, I hid them because if I stopped to look, I would feel the promise of childhood and, again, the enormity of death—Owen’s and my own. I refused to open our photo albums for similar reasons. Sometimes I told myself to plunge into the loss and touch what remained of Owen’s presence. But the pain was so piercing—pain and the possibility of irreversible descent—that I mostly glanced from afar.

  Outside the house, my eyes scanned the sidewalk a block ahead for parents and young children. I learned to spot them without paying attention, like a radar in default mode, and then to adjust my path or my pace to avoid overhearing fathers teach their eight-year-olds about Alexander the Great. I mention this specific example because one day I miscalculated and ended up too close.

  This was a rare occurrence. In general, the mechanisms I had devised protected me from unexpected encounters. The only place in which I did not hold back was my writing. Two Word files were always open on my laptop, the day’s task and my journal. Sometimes, I left the work document in the middle of a paragraph and returned after five minutes, or twenty, or perhaps not until the next day. If far from my desk, I jotted down thoughts on scraps of paper that I stuffed in my pockets.

  This writing sometimes made me feel like a voyeur of our distressed lives. Private pain can all too easily become public spectacle, even if it is not shared. I could not imagine that Owen, who was secretive and did not yield to authority, would have allowed someone else to draw his portrait, even his father. Besides, how could I capture the depths of a person whom I brought into the world but did not fully know? We raise children with the hope or conviction that we will know them, but so much escapes us. Writing about Owen felt like an affront. Not a second death—these words are too strong, although I heard them—but a confiscation, a flattening. It was inadequate and unjust.

  But it was less inadequate, less unjust than silence. So I kept writing.

  I wrote in expiation, in homage, in remembrance. Perhaps someone will one day collect the scattered remains of this child’s life. Maybe it will be Julian once he grows up, or one of Owen’s friends, or a stranger who, after hearing about a boy from New York who drowned in the Green River, will wonder what this was all about, why did he die, what does it mean that he died, and also who was this boy, what life did he live. This may happen, but I could not be sure, so it was up to me to gather the vestiges of this life and death.

  I wrote so that Owen would know that I had tried to understand. I wrote so that Owen would not be alone. Alison thought it might be the other way around. Perhaps I wrote to feel less alone, she said.

  I wrote to find out if I still existed, to make sure I had not vanished on the river. I wrote to stop roaming the streets. I wrote because otherwise I would have had to live all of the time.

  I wrote for Alison and Julian—to leave traces of Alison and Julian, to leave traces for Alison and Julian. But, as I did so, I also felt myself retreating from the world and the ones I loved. Writing and everyday life became distinct realms between which I circulated without fully existing in either one. The psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross urged parents who have lost a child to steer clear of Valium. She did not issue the same warning about writing. I do not think that many mental health professionals do: writing is deemed therapeutic. Stéphane Mallarmé could never complete his poetic tomb (as he called it) for his eight-year-old son, a vault that would encase “the immense void produced by what would be his life—because he does not know it—that he is dead.” Still, the fragments Mallarmé wrote must have provided something, if only deeper immersion within that void. But I wondered toward the end of the first year. Writing tempers the hurt, but might it not also deaden nerve endings? Writing can prove less painful than life, but might this mediated existence not keep experience at a remove?

  —

  Alison’s walks and my writing helped us both function. We got up and showered every morning. We went out with friends. We attended weekly meetings with a therapist who specialized in grief and trauma. Though Alison had to sit still and I could not write, we both looked forward to sessions that, unlike the usual couples therapy, were meant to anticipate and prevent marital discord, to detect shifts in our dynamic in real time.

  The two of us had low days during which we could not be sure we still belonged among the living, but oddly enough we did not have these days at the same time. It is as if each one of us carried a thermometer that measured the other’s emotional temperature. Whoever had the lowest reading instinctively understood his or her obligation toward the other. There were things that could not be said on those days. Here we were in sync.

  We also entertained equally conflicted relationships to work, which we resumed a month or so after the accident. I plugged away at my research because I had to plug away at something, but without any sense of necessity or a grasp of the larger stakes or even the pleasure I used to feel while combing through archives. I became a historian pro forma, absent from professional meetings, unable to comprehend common phrases in my field, such as “the crisis of late modernism.” What could this mean? Why would people write such things?

  Alison told me not to give up, perhaps because she feared that, if I did, she might give up herself. But even in the classroom, which I used to approach like a seasoned performer, capable of owning the stage or improvising with my students, I now rarely ventured beyond the lectern, rarely made any point with conviction. Grief such as ours may have cognitive consequences: for several years, I struggled to remember the names of students. But it went beyond this: I suffered from a crisis of audacity and authority, rooted in my inability to know anything for certain.

  Alison’s difficulties were of a different order. As a family mediator, she helped people resolve conflicts, improve relationships, and work through separations, divorces, or custody battles with as little acrimony as possib
le. The tenets of the profession forbid mediators from proposing solutions: it is all about listening to the two parties and helping them hear each other. Alison could still do this. At home, she instinctively listened to what Julian or I had to say, focusing not on the words themselves but on what lay behind them. Julian had experienced something that we struggled to understand: he had watched his only sibling, his rival for parental attention, simply vanish. When he belittled his brother, which still sometimes happened after the accident, Alison did not defend Owen. Instead, she listened. This is how we learned about Julian’s competitive relationship with Owen, even in death, and his desire to maintain a truthful memory of his brother. In his eyes, the problem was not that Alison and I were talking too much about Owen. Rather, it was that we (or others) might turn him into an infallible hero. Julian cut Owen down to size to preserve his authentic self.

  At work, too, Alison could still listen. She sometimes lost her train of thought but remained capable of immersing herself in the lives of others, even when the matter at hand seemed insignificant compared to the death of a child.

  Alison was nonetheless reluctant to resume her career. It was due neither to apathy nor diminished abilities. If she resisted work, it was because she was afraid of leaving Owen behind. Making mediation a larger part of her daily life would curtail the space available for Owen. It would also suggest that his death had made room for other pursuits, that it had set her on a new and perhaps fulfilling course. This she could not accept.

  —

  Still, Alison and I returned to work. An out-of-town friend who was passing through New York whispered over lunch that she’d heard that we were—she searched for words here—living in a kind of wondrous state. She could not spell it out when I asked her what she meant. “Heroism, strength of some kind,” she said. Her words echoed those we had read in condolence cards: