Disaster Falls

by Stephane Gerson

  Gauging Julian’s current emotional state proved as difficult as imagining his future. Now and then, Julian spoke about the changes in our lives. We would never again appreciate the beauty of canyons, he remarked at one point. For Alison’s birthday, he wrote a poem about missing Owen on this “awful sad” day and yet somehow celebrating his mother, who belonged to the three of us alone—Owen, myself, and Julian. In his eyes, we remained a family of four.

  Julian also told us he sometimes felt he should be missing Owen more than he did. Alison thought about Owen every minute of every day (he once heard her say this), so why did he only do so three times a week?

  Such revelations were rare. For the most part, Julian refrained from putting words to what he felt. He remained quiet when, in futile attempts to determine where he stood or ease what we took to be his pain, Alison and I engaged him by saying things like I’m sorry you lost your best friend. We were both convinced that opening up to us would make him feel less alone while helping us parent. But we could not force it. The only thing to do was to observe Julian intently. The anecdotes I transcribed in my journal also represented a desperate attempt to elucidate my child’s grief, intertwined with mine and yet subject to its own unseen laws.

  —

  Some of the things we observed suggested that Julian was finding his way. He eagerly went to school in the morning, completed all of his homework assignments, and did well in the middle school geography bee. But he resented the boy who had joined Owen’s class in September. Owen’s replacement, he called him. We also found out that he commonly left class before the end; took long breaks in the school library; and was thrown off by bee questions about Utah and a town in Indiana called Owensburg.

  His Little League career provided yet starker signs. Julian and Owen had shared a passion for baseball. Owen was a Yankees fan whereas Julian had for some reason chosen the Phillies. The two of them would exchange baseball cards and spend weekend mornings at Greenwich Village Little League. The first spring after the accident, Julian and I joined hundreds of kids and parents at Pier 40, where Houston meets the Hudson, for the opening day ceremony. I hung around Julian’s team for a while and then walked over to Owen’s just as the league director declared over the loudspeaker that the entire season would be dedicated to him. The kids did not know what to say when I showed up, but all wore jerseys with the words “Owen’s Stars.” The coaches had also handed out patches bearing Owen’s name. Julian took one, but later confessed that he had not heard the director’s remarks. He just wanted to play.

  The season proved brutal. The previous spring, Julian had won a team award for his .433 batting average. Now, he found himself unable to make contact. Having lost his abilities at the plate, he would routinely slump back to the dugout after four or five pitches. On more than one occasion, he sat down after his second or third strikeout of the game and buried his face in his hands. Every at-bat became an ordeal, something that he dreaded, a failure waiting to happen.

  These at-bats seemed to condense our current lives on a stage that was at once smaller and larger. Hitting a fast-moving ball with a bat that is not much wider while players and spectators stare in silence requires concentration, the ability to tune out the outside world. Julian was struggling with both—focus and the gaze of others—on a field where he probably felt Owen’s absence more intensely than elsewhere. It was painful for Alison and me to watch from the stands as Julian stood at the plate, so much more exposed than we ever had to be at that time. My mother-in-law said this was the one place where she saw the emotional toll of everything Julian was living through.

  Julian later wrote a high school paper about his Little League falloff. “My elaborate pre-swing routine no longer intimidated the pitcher,” he wrote. “It just made him impatient.” As it was happening, though, Julian never connected baseball to his life beyond the field. This left me wondering what he made of his sudden drop in performance. The answer came after the final game, when he received the dreaded sportsmanship award and then quit baseball for good. When he most needed what baseball had to offer, Julian wrote in his paper, he “felt more alone than ever.”

  —

  Julian did not talk much about solitude that first year. Before the accident, he had often acted as an older brother and commanded Owen when they played together. But Owen was a natural leader, a forceful presence with deep reserves of social energy. Sometimes he would play with Julian’s friends after Julian had retired to his room with a book. Around the dinner table, Owen often drew most of the attention, allowing Julian to recede into the background. Now, Julian had to finish his own playdates and fill this silence on his own.

  Alison and I struggled to determine what this took out of him though we did see him search, like an archaeologist, for traces of Owen’s presence. Three months after the accident, Julian called me into his bedroom and held Owen’s Little League cap to my nose. “If you breathe in hard enough,” he said, “you can still smell him.” He then took me to Owen’s room, pointed to his erasable board, and explained that he had made out a few words in Owen’s handwriting. Here was Owen in one corner, suck or something like it in another.

  These connections proved fleeting, which is why when Julian wanted to hear Owen’s voice, he loaded old videos on his computer, and when he wanted to bring him into the present, he played video games with his brother, filling him in on news events, such as the death of Michael Jackson nearly a year after Owen’s own. When Julian wanted to see two brothers fight mercilessly until a hard-won reconciliation, he watched Step Brothers. He told us this was the last movie he had seen with Owen—in Utah, just days before the accident—and also the last movie Owen ever saw.

  And when Julian wanted to visit Owen, he went, of all places, to the virtual farm on which he planted crops, plowed fields, and raised livestock. One evening, he sat me behind his laptop for an impromptu tour of his Farmville property. He pointed to the barn and stables, the cows and horses, the pastures and carrot beds. The visit ended with a pond and, next to it, a white tombstone. “This is Owen’s grave, a quiet place,” Julian said. Because Julian would not enter the Woodstock cemetery, I had believed that he never visited Owen’s grave. In fact, he had built his own.

  —

  These glimpses into Julian’s interior life suggested that he grieved with an intensity that was his alone. He was following a route that lay within his reach—and also beyond mine. Unlike him, I did not tap my senses or watch videos to feel Owen’s presence. I also stayed away from the Catskills slopes on which I had taught the boys to ski. I did not think I could withstand their mix of natural beauty, physical risk, and familial intimacy. But Julian insisted that we return together. It would be hard at any time, he said, so we might as well go now.

  Julian and I also entertained different relationships to the scene of the accident. Though he sometimes claimed to block it out, he announced one evening that he had located the rapids on Google Maps. There they were on his laptop, a crisp photograph that he blew up until he and I stood so close to the water that my body trembled. Julian saw me turn away from the screen. In my mind, this meant that he grasped what I had been sensing for months but struggled to acknowledge: how much I now fell short as his father.

  An acquaintance had emailed me that, ever since the death of her teenage sister two decades earlier, she had felt that her parents “were somehow hating me for what happened (rather than loving me even more).” I do not think that this applied to us; I do not think that we blamed or repudiated or neglected Julian, whether out of anger or despair. But Alison once told me she was not parenting Julian well, and I felt equally diminished. Even as friends wrote us that Owen’s death inspired them to become more attentive parents, I grew increasingly aware of what I could not provide.

  When one of my nephews, four at the time, sang to Julian that his brother was dead, I did not know what to say, and thus said nothing. When Julian broke down at the sight of a dead toad by the road—the kind of toad he and Owen used to
seek out in Woodstock—I looked on in a stupor, unable to understand that when Julian said, It was alive just a moment ago, I was holding it yesterday, and now it is dead, he was grappling with Owen’s death. Several months had passed since the accident, and yet this still escaped me.

  I declined Julian’s invitation to watch the Major League Home Run Derby because it was something I had done with Owen two weeks before his death and the memory remained too raw, and also because of the many other things I could not do, the most grueling was to take Owen’s place.

  —

  Sometimes Julian wanted me closer and sometimes, like all teenagers, he pushed me away. After our pact in the tent, I could not imagine how any one of us could venture alone into the world. I kissed Julian repeatedly, touched him as he walked by, and held him tight in embraces he had to break. One morning, I asked him if we could hold hands on the way to school. He refused at first before relenting, but only for a block. Though Julian rarely saw me cry after the first weeks, he heard me sigh throughout the day and also report on my state of mind, dark though it may have been.

  With Owen gone, Julian had to combine his own temperament with Owen’s to serve as confidant and accomplice, partner in jokes and political conversations. I could not stop teaching him: advice, admonitions, warnings, life lessons. The chain of transmission now ended with Julian: everything I had to impart, anything I might hope to bequeath, would now pass through him alone. I knew that it was too much, that no child can meet all these parental expectations, but I could not stop.

  I also knew how much Julian needed space to fall and fail and hurt himself, to grapple with his own fears, but here too, I found it impossible to step back. Julian balked the day I forbade him to climb a rooftop water tower pylon. For a while, I believed that I was responding to what I had learned about the hazards of the world. I enforced rules and boundaries to prepare him for what might await. Only later did I realize that this was less about Julian than about me as a father. I could not lapse, I could not let him go.

  Julian also told me I was too strict, too serious. “You don’t laugh anymore,” he said. “I am the only one who laughs in this family.” This was true. Julian’s raucous laughter had returned, whereas I no longer made practical jokes or teased people whom I loved. So much of my relationship with Owen and Julian had revolved around play, but now the sense of play, the possibility of play and everything it suggested about innocence and lightness of being, had become incomprehensible. Laughter and play felt like a tacit betrayal of Owen, as if play and pain could not coexist.

  —

  At the end of Julian’s school year, I invited him to call in sick one morning and play hooky with me. We took the subway to Astoria, Queens, where we ate breakfast in a Greek deli, got haircuts from an Uzbek barber, and walked around a neighborhood that neither one of us knew. This discovery, this break from routine, this contempt for rules felt sweet and forbidden. It also felt poignant, at least to me, since Owen and I had often talked about one day skipping school and work and eating pizza all day in front of the TV. Much as I relished the time with Julian, I am not certain I laughed that day in Queens.

  Soon after the accident, an old friend invited me to “find the courage to teach Julian to become a happy man.” Her words stayed with me: a worthy, necessary endeavor. But they required a belief in the possibility of happiness as well as an almost childlike trust in the world and humankind and the future. This called for more strength than I could muster on most days. Regardless, when another friend asked at the end of the first year for the deepest insight I had gained since the accident, I quoted this line. This friend replied that it might also work the other way. “Maybe,” he said, “Julian heard somewhere that he needs the courage to teach his father to become a happy man.”

  I cannot imagine that Julian deemed his efforts successful. In time, he complained about my unwelcome hugs, my emotional needs, and my inability to let him act his age. If the two of us were movies, he said, he would be Step Brothers and I would be Shoah (he had somehow heard about the classic Holocaust documentary). There were times when Julian berated me mercilessly, pushing the limits of acceptable language in public put-downs. This began soon after the accident, a reflection of his anger and loneliness, which pushed him to seek out immediate responses. Beyond the usual teen behavior, he was probably also testing me, making sure I could still stand tall. I sometimes wondered why Julian did not treat his shrunken father with more compassion, but could not let such thoughts distract from the task at hand: respond to Julian in a measured way, neither too meek nor too rough.

  He must have felt my confusion, my sense that nothing was assured anymore—certainly not my authority as a parent. After the accident, what degree of confidence could I retain in this domain or any other? My sense of self was so compromised that, while I continued to advise and admonish Julian, I did so without being convinced that I was correct. There were times when I backed off in his presence, and times when I stood my ground with an obstinacy that belied my doubts. I hoped Julian would tell me many years hence that, after the accident, I had done the best I could under the circumstances. I could not be sure this would happen, which is why, I suspect, I left a written record of myself as a father—diminished, uncertain, but present.

  Alison, too, buzzed around Julian. We both did, seeking the same attention and affection as parents, and sometimes we collided. Alison had long been the primary caregiver, but now one of her sons was gone, the other thinking about high school, and her husband spent more time at home. I wish that I had asked her how this felt, but I was too busy staking out a new position. When Julian tested me, Alison told me to just go with it. She also said I was too demanding of him. More than boundaries, he needed love and levity and the right to remain a child. This is what she sought to provide.

  She did not doubt her ability to do so because her sense of self and her authority as a parent remained intact. I made sense of this by returning to the fact that Alison had not been in the ducky with Owen. It is also possible, however, that our culture still conditions men more than women to experience a violent loss such as ours as a lack of competence, a failure on the job. Our couples therapist threw out this idea, and I found it compelling. When my eldest son seemed to turn against me and my wife urged me to do better, I liked to think that deeper social forces were also at play. In the same situation, other fathers might have responded in ways not unlike mine.

  —

  A year after the accident, Alison’s mother invited Julian to pick a photograph from her collection as a bar mitzvah gift. She is a photographer and collector whose fine eye enabled her to make smart acquisitions in the 1970s, before prices began to soar. Julian chose Diane Arbus’s A Family on Their Lawn One Sunday in Westchester, N.Y. and hung it above his bed.

  A few years later, a friend noticed the photograph. “What an incredibly depressing picture,” she said, and asked me for the backstory. Her instinctive response was that it must have expressed what Julian felt at the time. Until that moment, I had never considered this photograph as a scan of Julian’s psyche. Nor had Alison. We had looked the other way or else missed what now seemed so obvious besides suburban anomie or inattentive parenting: a family of three, together and yet separate within an empty expanse.

  The thing is, I still do not know what Julian found so alluring. At first, I was convinced that it was the photograph’s bleakness. No one laughs in this family. Lying side by side, the parents are secluded in their respective universes. The father, unable to look up, purses his lips in what may well be a sigh, similar to my own sighs, which Julian monitored with unremitting vigilance. Julian would comment during that first year about the gray that bled across my beard and the wrinkles at the corners of Alison’s eyes, all of these signs of depletion and aging that made him anxious. If we died, Julian would be left alone, like the boy in the background, out of his parents’ sight, eager to play but on his own.

  This may be what Julian saw in the photograph. But it is also
true that, while the parents remain immobile—whether checked out or exhausted or overwhelmed, they are clearly stuck in place—the boy is caught in motion. I initially thought he was struggling to set up his miniature pool, but then I pictured a scene in which he prepared to fill it with water so that his parents could refresh themselves on that summer day. Looking at the photograph, Julian may have seen a boy who, though he wanted to play, also nurtured his parents.

  That is after all what he had done following Owen’s death. He glanced at Alison during movie scenes that involved mothers and sons. Once, after Alison told him that having him nearby made her less sad, he replied that, for her sake, he had better not die anytime soon. She needed him too much. Without Julian, I would not have returned to the ski slopes, or smelled Owen’s baseball cap, or, after doing so and waiting for Julian to fall asleep that night, entered Owen’s room for the first time in months, sat on his bed, stared at undiscernible words on his erasable board, and felt a sliver of his presence.

  Arbus may not have depicted a harmonious or functional family, but she did place a family at the center of her composition. Our own familial disorder unsettled Julian so much that he objected whenever one of us declared that we had become a different family. We are the same, he insisted. To make certain, he kept telling us that he remained a kid. The desperation in his voice telegraphed his need for clear boundaries as well as his inability to serve as a makeshift parent all of the time. If I resumed my role as a father, then he could return to his as a child.

  I sometimes wondered for whom things are in the end more difficult: the parents of a bereaved child or the child whose parents mourn his lost brother. Both losses are of course painful in their own ways, but I kept returning to the question, perhaps because I still knew so little about Julian’s inner life. Family tragedies can sharpen the senses and open the heart, but they do not necessarily allow parents to better understand their children. The novelist Annie Ernaux, whose sister died at the age of six, may have said it best: “The parents of a deceased child do not know what their pain does to the child who remains.” All they can do is imagine what it might feel like to suffer losses so different from their own: the sibling who has died and the parents who now seem adrift.