I admire your courage and your ability to forge ahead.
Just wanted to tell you (and I know it seems stupid) how much I admire your strength and your courage.
You are so brave. I wish there was no need to be but you are so very courageous.
A college friend told us we were his heroes. Another, we heard, was describing Alison as a saint. “That is how most people see us,” Alison remarked. She said this with sadness because, while she could understand why people needed to portray us this way, such labels made her feel misunderstood, turned into an empty exemplar. The people who said this were close friends, too. If they no longer knew her, then who did?
—
Once or twice I told Alison that I should remain in bed for a week or more—as long as it took. I was beginning to think that showing up every day as if things were normal precluded true recognition of how much we had lost. To feel Owen’s absence and presence, shouldn’t I lie in a dark room, cut off from work and noises and the demands of the world? Alison never considered doing this; she did not like these conversations. But she did not ask me not to stay in bed. The only thing she said was that I was protecting myself a lot.
While I did not perceive this comment as a judgment, I could not help but compare my grief to hers. From where I stood, everything had fallen into place for her: acceptance of life’s hazards, our path forward, Owen’s presence, opening herself to what Julian had to say. It was as if she had been preparing for this moment her entire life. She did not need self-protection because she had nothing to fear, not even pain, since it deepened her connection to Owen.
When Alison talked about this connection, she never suggested that hers was the only path. She just wanted me to know. But she embraced it with such conviction and derived such strength from it that connection became a buzzword around the house. For me, it loomed as a mirage, an ideal that I should have attained but could not. Writing down memories was not enough, especially when I could not recover Owen’s vulnerability, or Owen needing me. Like everything else, this came easily to Alison.
Before going to the cemetery, she would pick up one of the heart-shaped rocks she had spotted on her walks and collected at home for this purpose. I scrounged for candy in the car or pebbles on a path. Next to her pure connections and deliberate offerings, mine seemed paltry and haphazard.
During the first months, I watched Alison with awe, unable to understand how she could be so certain during these most uncertain of times. I once asked her to explain what it meant to connect. She was reluctant to give advice, but did suggest that I open myself and let it come. I could not follow. My life was growing ever more bifurcated, between life with Owen and life without Owen, between the outside world and the written world, between opening up to our new reality and withdrawing within myself. Alison’s, in contrast, struck me as incomprehensibly and sometimes unbearably whole. It was not envy I felt but sadness and shame before my inability to withstand the pain and recover Owen’s presence.
—
One evening, Alison showed me a selfie that Owen had taken on her phone. I did not want to look, I did not think I could, but she insisted. Owen seemed surprisingly young in that picture.
“He feels so far,” I said.
“He feels so close,” Alison replied. I heard disappointment in her voice.
Alison was returning to the kids’ school the next day with copies of the books Owen had been reading that last summer. In each one she had inserted a bookplate bearing his name. She did not expect me to accompany her, and I did not intend to. But as she packed her bag in the morning, I asked to come along. In the classroom, I listened as she told the kids that we had wanted to give them keepsakes. Some children remembered seeing Owen read these books. I was glad to witness this and grateful to Alison.
But some of the kids’ facial features were maturing, and for this, for bringing me into this future, I was less thankful. At the end of the school year, I did not join Alison at the fourth grade’s moving-up ceremony. That night, she told me she regretted my absence. She regretted it for me, she said, though I think she also regretted it for herself.
It was typically at night that Alison’s grief spilled over. Lying in bed, she would read an entry from Owen’s poetry book or ask about his piggy bank: What should we do with his money? Then she was gone, she collapsed in exhaustion, and I remained with the questions and images and silence. During the early months, I would listen to her during those late hours. But after a while I asked Alison why she had to wait until the end of the day to unload such things. She said it was easier in the dark and also that nighttime alone brought stillness.
Eventually, I told Alison that this was more than I could handle. I said this with desperation because I wanted us to grieve together and could not bear abandoning her as I had after 9/11. I told Alison that I was empty inside, but felt something deeper, as if I were leaving her at the river’s edge. For this, too, I felt ashamed.
—
An acquaintance stopped me in the street in the early months, pursed her lips, and asked if Alison and I were still together. “So many couples split up after losing a child,” she said. Someone else emailed that up to 85 percent of such couples end up divorcing. Whether such numbers were accurate or not, I was all too ready to believe them. In novels, movies, and TV shows, bereaved spouses struggle to mourn in unison. They spin off into different states and stop discussing their child.
But this is not because they no longer understand each other. On the contrary, these spouses know each other’s pain all too well. They are simply too diminished to provide what the other needs at any given moment. The bereaved parent’s inner life is so tumultuous—such density of thought, so many overlapping emotions, so much to feel and observe within—that it saps energy and makes it difficult to look beyond oneself. Alison once told me she could not take care of me, that she would not know where to begin. I once sat next to her as she sobbed and only caressed her arm. It was not clear to me whether I was unable or unwilling to do more, but the thought did cross my mind that Alison might drag me down.
She must have felt the same at some point. I certainly assumed that she did. I remember reading about a bereaved mother who watched her husband break down in the cereal section of the grocery store—she was standing at the end of the aisle. She watched him cry and left him there. It was not a question of love. She stayed away because she had nothing to give him at that moment and perhaps because she was frightened. This seemed horrible when I read it, but within a few months it made perfect sense.
The novelist Philippe Forest, whose daughter died of cancer at the age of four, concluded that the bereaved parent must accept the impossibility of consoling his or her spouse. For Forest, this was where true love reached its limits, but also where it attained its purest and most paradoxical form. “To abandon the person one loves to despair—because this despair has become the essence of that person’s life—can be a sign of love,” he wrote. It can be, but neither Alison nor I were prepared to live or grieve apart, without Owen’s other parent, without the only other person who knew Owen’s life and death in such intimate detail.
I could not tell where this refusal originated. It is possible that tragedy on the edges of civilization, the profound isolation we had felt on the river, and the estrangement, the strangeness of what happened during the first twenty-four hours, drew us together. The pact we sealed in the tent was also a commitment to who we had been until the accident.
—
Alison and I kept trying. More couples therapy, more walks. We signed up for joint yoga lessons, hoping for communion through the body. But we stopped after three or four months because Alison was more limber than I was and also because yoga is ultimately about one’s private world. Alison then took up crocheting—with the same compulsion that I invested in my writing. This made her sit still but also brought her deeper into herself.
A few months after the accident, a mother whom Alison had met at school told her she had communicat
ed with Owen. This woman, who had been channeling for twenty years, said that Owen had been crying, that she consoled him, and also that an older man was watching over him. This conversation further convinced Alison that Owen’s spirit was alive around her. He had more to say. She hired a medium, who reported that Owen did not want any more trees in his memory. We had planted a Japanese maple in Woodstock, and friends had dedicated a cherry tree to him in a Manhattan park. That’s enough, Owen said.
This is all I knew about Alison’s conversation with the medium. She would have told me more, but I did not ask and she refrained from broaching the topic. The book I was writing at that time (begun before the accident) revolved around the afterlife of Nostradamus’s predictions over the centuries, but from a cultural historian’s perspective. The idea had come to me after 9/11, when this astrologer’s Prophecies climbed the bestseller lists. While I had never consulted these prophecies, I had read articles about them as a teenager and felt the power of interpretations that threatened a Soviet missile attack upon Western Europe in the early 1980s. After 9/11, I watched in awe as so many people turned to cryptic verses that had somehow survived for five centuries. Rather than redeem or debunk this phenomenon, my book would explain what such predictions had meant to men and women in the past and why they continued to resonate in our era.
But something strange happened a few months after the accident. One afternoon, the silver frame around a picture of Owen went dark for half a second. I saw no shadows in the room, no refraction of light. An odd thought crossed my mind: Could it be that, after sending signs to Alison, Owen was communicating with me as well? But what did I know about signs, and when have I ever believed in them? I could neither embrace nor shake this belief. When I began experiencing physical ailments, a voice inside my head intoned that Nostradamus was venting anger at me. This voice was not mine, and yet I could not stifle it. I told myself that these were mind games and that I did not have to play along. But on some days I ended up arguing it out against myself.
My internal battles with magical thinking made me resent Alison’s certainty when it came to Owen’s presence and dread her peregrinations with people who claimed to communicate with him. When she called to tell me about the channeler, I was furious about this woman’s intrusion into our life. More frightening still was the possibility that she had indeed contacted him, whereas I still sought a comparable connection. My skepticism about what could not have taken place overlapped with fear regarding what might have.
Mostly, I feared losing Alison. She was already spending all of her days with Owen. In this psychic universe, she might now move closer to him and further away from me. It was impossible to stop Alison, and equally impossible to join her. When she suggested that we speak to the medium together, I told her I would not hear a thing.
—
By the end of the first year, Alison and I had stopped discussing signs and mediums, and other things, too. When I found her staring at the ceiling in bed in the morning, I did not always ask about her thoughts. When she heard me sigh, she did not always make sure I was okay. Alison said that we needed to talk more and display more affection and be sad together. What she did not explain was how to talk and give affection and feel sadness at the same time.
Neither one of us could find the words. Grief had led us to fashion a common vocabulary (the river and the accident, the tent, connection), but it also robbed our language of its potency. We had run out of adjectives, comparisons, and metaphors. Why tell each other once again that our entire bodies ached? That Owen did not deserve this? That our grief was like a rock thrown into a lake, disturbing all the particles? When one of us uttered such words, the other replied with something like I know, this is impossible or It makes no sense in order to shorten the exchange. Soon, neither one of us began such conversations.
The woman in the grocery store abandoned her husband because she did not have the strength to console him. She said so later. It dawned on me one day that she might have lacked the words as well.
—
A few years after the accident, I came across articles on bereaved parents and divorce that paint a less alarming picture than the one I had been told about early on. According to one, this rate falls between 9 and 16 percent. According to another, only half of these divorced couples deem their child’s death an important factor. The truth is, there are few reliable numbers, few long-term studies resting on broad sample sizes. One of the authors I read said as much. But even if I had found reassuring statistics that first year, I doubt they would have done any good.
When I looked at Alison, I no longer saw the woman who used to love life and find joy in everyday activities. When Alison looked at me, she no longer found spontaneity or humor. We continued to live together, but we were losing parts of ourselves and discovering others that we had never known, so it was no longer clear to whom exactly we were married.
How can spouses who are turning into other versions of themselves, spouses who have lost desire for all things, continue to make a life together? A friend of mine, a psychologist, told me there is a surge of extramarital affairs among those who have lost a loved one or survived a serious illness. After encountering mortality, she said, we want to feel alive and shed our identity as mourners or patients. It is easier to do so with a person who has not shared or witnessed our ordeal. My friend called this an act of rebellion, the revenge of deserted possibilities.
Several years after the death of their daughter, Philippe Forest and his wife agreed to have affairs in order to recover love and desire, return to life, and uncover other sides of themselves. They stayed together while opening their marriage in this way, but I thought of them the day Alison asked me whether I had considered leaving her for someone else. Though she denied it, her question seemed to suggest that she had given the matter some thought. I answered that I had not contemplated leaving her, which was true, although I had dreamed of other women and the thrill of a life governed by pleasure. In one of these dreams, I cheated on Alison with Alison herself—Alison as she had been before the accident.
—
One afternoon that first winter, the two of us ventured into the snow-covered woods of Woodstock. We walked among the oak trees and hemlocks, our feet cracking the brittle ice crust. When we stopped moving, all was perfectly still and white. Alison and I took this as an invitation to lie on our backs and stare at the sky. The powder encased our bodies: two open-air tombs in the middle of a forest that was pure and desolate.
I cannot recall this scene without also thinking of the no-suicide pledge Alison and I made within weeks of the accident. We promised one another that, as dire as things might become, neither one of us would abandon the other and Julian. Everything was allowed except for this, even if ending one’s life meant encountering Owen on the other side. I do not remember where this conversation took place, or who started it. Did we look into one another’s eyes? Shake hands? End with an embrace? All I recall are the words themselves, the mutual promise that gave me such comfort when Alison seemed to be moving so much faster than me.
Strangely, Alison cannot recollect any pledge. In her mind, there is no such thing. It might be amnesia on her part, or involuntary fabrication on mine. Regardless, the two of us have carried our own memories, not only of Owen, but also of the grief that drew us together and apart at the same time.
Blake: Overall, was Owen the best at the PlayStation game?
When evenings came, the three of us hovered around the dining room table, eyeing the empty chairs. We had not always sat in the same places, so it was not that we feared filling Owen’s spot. But four has a symmetry that three does not. We could huddle together at the end of the table. We could also sit across from one another. But who, then, would sit alone? Unable to settle or even discuss the matter, we kept changing places, from one hard-edged triangle to another. Family snapshots from that time likewise display permutations of two rather than portraits of three, as if we refused to immortalize Owen’s absence.
> Most of these photographs include Julian, with Alison or me by his side. He was the constant presence, the boy who had lost his sibling and continued to require parenting. Julian became the center of our family life—not the sole focus, but the most urgent one. He was in seventh grade, about to morph into a teen. The years ahead would be complicated; Alison and I would have to remain attentive. I thought of it as a six-year project that would end with his departure for college. Afterward Alison and I would hover around the dining room table on our own, imagining what it meant to become a household of two.
—
So many people asked us how Julian was faring. “Thank God for him,” some of them said. “For his sake, you’ll hold it together.” Once the school year began, Alison and I made sure he arrived on time in the morning. Conferring with his teachers, we devised contingency plans in case he broke down in the middle of the day. We found a therapist in the neighborhood and bought Julian chocolate pastries after his sessions. We urged him to write down his thoughts, but did not insist when he abandoned his journal. A few months after the accident, we began planning his bar mitzvah.
We did all of this but still could not tell Julian where to sit at the dinner table. It was not the only thing that lay beyond us. We wondered what Julian understood about his own loss, how much he wanted and needed to know, and even whether part of him resented a brother who, in death as in life, took up so much of his parents’ emotional lives. Though much of our grief was grounded in the micro-present—one hour, one day—we projected ourselves into the future when it came to Julian. We pondered how Owen’s death would continue to take on new shapes as he moved toward his twenties, graduated from college, carved out his place in the world. How would it reroute his life and shape the things he would and would not do, his relationships, the way he raised his children?
I thought of Julian while reading a memoir whose author had stopped making friends after losing his twin brother at age six. He feared that his late brother would grow jealous of new friends. Would Julian do the same? Would he recover, at age thirty or fifty, memories of Owen and their times together? Would he feel that he had had a true childhood? Would he deem it his duty to live for two, fulfilling the aspirations Alison and I had entertained for both of our children?
Disaster Falls Page 8
