Disaster Falls

by Stephane Gerson

  All of this was touching, but disorienting as well. While I cautiously let Berl in during those months, I resented his inability to provide a home in which I could have learned to trust my instincts, assert myself, and say no when necessary. The thought now went through my head that, had he done so, I might have made different decisions on the river.

  Berl soon avoided all talk about Owen and life without Owen—as if he once again preferred not to know. He asked my mother not to kiss Owen’s photograph in his presence and, shortly afterward, forbade her from uttering his name when he was in the room. While he never made such demands of me, he remained quiet whenever I mentioned Owen. He never shared memories or expressed regret or voiced wistfulness. On the first anniversary of the accident, he neither called nor emailed.

  I told myself that his pain remained so intense and frightening that he had to lock Owen away in order to contain it, that his behavior was not so different from my own inability to look at photo albums. Still, all I now encountered in his presence was silence—a silence that seemed to erase my child’s existence.

  There were times when this silence was my own, when I kept quiet or stayed away from my father. Owen was not only my son, but also his grandson. I felt responsible for his sorrow (and my mother’s as well), ashamed even. I had invested so much emotional energy in becoming a good father—a father who was present and self-critical and spurned physical violence. The shame I now felt as both a son and a father made it difficult to spend long stretches with Berl. It drove us further apart.

  A few years before the accident, my parents offered to keep Owen and Julian at their Brussels home while Alison and I spent a weekend in the country. After loading up the car, I took my father aside in the kitchen and asked him to control his temper in the children’s presence. It was not an easy thing to say and, as quickly became apparent, not an easy one for him to hear. It all came back: the anger taking hold of him, his body encroaching upon mine, the booming voice that filled the room, the spittle and narrowed eyes. This time, however, I leaned against a cabinet for support and told my father as steadily as I could that this was the way it had to be with my children. He stared at me and then slowly walked away, wiping his mouth with his handkerchief. My heart was pounding, but at that moment I felt like the better father.

  After Owen died, the benchmark for a good father was revealed to be stark: keep your children physically safe, carry them into adulthood. This is how I now saw it—a simple matter. Berl had succeeded and I had not, which is why I could no longer imagine surpassing him as a father. Regardless of what he might say, regardless of what he might shout, the very sight of my father now reminded me of what else I had lost on the river.

  Claire: How long can you go without thinking about him?

  Grief is surrounded by expectations. When people whispered my name or gently touched my shoulder, I made eye contact, bit my lower lip, and nodded once or twice. We did not have to speak to play our respective roles: the empathetic acquaintance and the bereaved father. When people inquired whether Alison and I talked about Owen every single day, I listened to my answer in the hope of learning something. But when they asked how we were carrying on, I squirmed. If I told them that I still felt hollow, they might recoil in fear. If I said I was all right, they might conclude that I was papering over my innermost feelings or, worse still, expressing what I really felt.

  There were other impossible moments. On my first visit to the High Line, the public park that had recently opened atop an old elevated train track on the West side of Manhattan, a relative told me I must have thought of Owen upon encountering such a beautiful sight. I shook my head and said that, no, I had not thought of him at that moment. As I uttered the words, I wondered whether my sorrow was equal to the loss.

  What parent will admit to one day grieving for their child until their body could no longer stand the pain, and then going out to shop? What parent will confess to resenting an eight-year-old boy who drowned in a river? What parent will declare that, while he misses raising his son, life is smoother without his stubborn defiance?

  Grief is surrounded by shame as well.

  —

  Alison and I sometimes asked each other whether people were judging us. After all, we had taken a child on a rafting trip and returned without him. Ignorance breeds speculation, and few people knew exactly what had happened. We had recounted the day’s events to a handful of friends and relatives, but only bits and pieces and only during the first months. When I spoke about it, my body shivered, not in a way that anyone would notice, but enough that I had to wrap my arms around my chest. So I stopped.

  Now and then the faint echoes of other people’s judgments reached us. Julian divulged that one of his friends had overheard a neighbor ask his mother why Owen’s father had not done anything (the neighbor had heard that we ran the river on our own). One of my nieces said that she should probably not repeat what a relative had said about the accident. Her mother changed the subject, but later that day, as the girl and I took a walk in the woods around Woodstock, she told me the relative’s remarks had to do with kayaking. No doubt it was something about rapids and reckless parents. I did not ask my niece for details, but noticed what she said next: “When I was scared some time ago, my parents told me they’d always be there to keep me safe.”

  What people told others at two or three degrees of separation could not take me to depths I had not already explored on my own. It did, however, remind me once again that I was living in a world apart. As months elapsed, friends stopped telling us about their own tragedies. The time for shared suffering had passed. In its place, there was distance, incomprehension, perhaps stigma.

  When confronted with the death of a child, we need to believe that we would have behaved differently, that we would never expose our kids to such dangers. Such thoughts maintain the order of the world; they make it possible to go forward. After a fire killed three sisters and their grandparents in Connecticut, a local TV station cut to a man on the street, out with his toddler: “If I had done something like this, if I had caused the death of my son, I couldn’t go on living,” he said.

  Perhaps the poet Lamartine was right when he wrote that only a father who, like him, had lost his only daughter could understand what he was going through. And Victor Hugo, whose verses I continued to read: “You parents who have suffered like me / Have you felt what I felt?”

  —

  Alison and I both spent time with other parents who had suffered like us and felt what we felt. We did so separately most of the time. Within a few months, I had fashioned a small circle of bereaved parents whom I saw with regularity, though never together.

  The first one was an old friend and also the only one who had ever met Owen. Her toddler had died of a genetic disease a decade earlier. Sadness keeps resurfacing without warning, she said, but the sorrow evolves, the pain morphs, the body adapts. You have the right to curl up and cry, she told me, but do not allow grief to consume you. She shared her experiences while acknowledging that living through her personal horror (as she called it) still made her helpless before the death of other children, afraid of saying the wrong thing. I cherished the intimate physicality of her presence, the tender moments we now spent with her son and mine. Whenever I think of my loss, she said, I think of yours.

  The second member of this circle, a man I met after the accident, is the father who told me about taking his late daughter on walks. He approached grief with startling precision, devising tangible, quantifiable markers that he shared with me. For instance: years after his daughter’s death, he could give only 60 percent of himself at work. In his company, I could believe that order might persist after all. I could also confront the same intractable questions. His daughter had succumbed to a sudden illness rather than an accident, but he still spent countless hours reviewing the circumstances and the decisions he and his wife had made before her death. Had they chosen the right hospital? Had they taken their daughter there soon enough? He once told me th
at, regardless of the situation, guilt is unavoidable because the chain always ends with the parents. This was a summons to let go.

  The last of these bereaved parents, another new friend, struck me as equally lucid and self-aware, but less linear in his thinking. Our conversations resembled Robert Altman movies, with piercing but fleeting insights, and strands crossing, interrupted, and resumed. Memories of our respective accidents surfaced, then receded, then returned. This father felt as if he were repeating himself when it came to his son’s death. He also wished that people would ask direct questions instead of referring to him as the guy who lost his child. He spoke at length about the day his son died. “It just happened, that’s all there is,” he said. There were no lessons to be learned about the catastrophic nature of life. The notion that some things elude understanding escaped me at that time, but not the way he kept circling his own accident or the fact that, somewhere in his apartment, there was an envelope full of unseen photographs of his son. Someone had handed them to him a few days after his accident. Perhaps he would look one day, he said. His uncertainty echoed my own.

  I do not expect these parents to recognize themselves—their full selves—in the descriptions I have given. I leave out so much about their grief and their layered lives and our time together. These portraits are facets of my imagined self: I project upon them my yearnings for affection, order, and raw honesty. But it is true that together we were neither culprits nor saints nor heroes—just unkempt sufferants who did not worry about unasked questions, excessive expectations, or matters best left unsaid. If my bereaved friends could talk about fading images of their child’s face, then I could open up about complicated feelings toward Owen and the accident.

  And yet, there were times when I felt I had unloaded too much during our conversations. While we all needed to derive something from these encounters, it was not necessarily the same thing. We could not always be ready to traverse barren lands together. Sometimes, one of us dragged the other into a place that, for whatever reason, proved inhospitable that day. At other times, I realized that I was not truly listening, not fully present. Part of me, 40 percent perhaps, remained elsewhere. And there was only so much I could say, even to them, about the river.

  —

  Is this why, toward the end of the first year, I found myself in the basement of a church, seated in a circle with other men and women who had lost children? Underground, there are rooms full of anonymous people who rarely encounter others like them in their everyday lives. All of these people are their own worst nightmares.

  I would probably have attended this support group earlier if not for the bereaved couple, both in their fifties, who visited us in New York soon after the accident. A drunk driver had slammed into their daughter’s car two years earlier. Afterward they had turned away from the world; anger had led to isolation. They still went to work, but there was no cooking, no music or art, no hobbies save for workouts, no laughing, no conversations that did not revolve around their loss. The wife sat erect and spoke about all this with resolve; the husband slumped and said little. Both concurred that life was bleak and would remain so, without solace besides the company of other bereaved parents. They had no friends outside the support group because no one else could understand.

  This couple had come to warn us about what lay in store and welcome us into the universe they inhabited. Alison and I heard their consoling words, but not as loudly as their rancor. Neither one of us imagined it possible to live the rest of our lives closed off from a world that bore the stain of collective guilt. We did not say this; instead, we strung together platitudes about walks and friends and remaining open to different experiences. As I watched this couple drive away, I pictured them telling one another that, once the shock wore off, Alison and I would come to accept our new reality.

  This visit proved so chilling that, for many months, I stayed away from the support group. And then one evening, I ended up in a church basement with fifty other bereaved parents. We went around the room and introduced ourselves and our dead children. It was a litany of tragedy: the elderly father whose son had overdosed; the middle-aged Serbian mother whose daughter had died of cancer; the white-haired woman who presented her only son as her best friend; the composed father with a long face whose two boys had drowned on the same day (his wife sat quietly by his side, hands clasped on her lap); the elegant gentleman whose son had collapsed while playing basketball; the young Hispanic woman who could not utter her daughter’s name; and me, the father whose son had slipped away on a river. This collective recitation defies comprehension, but in this circle it seemed almost normal.

  After the introductions, we broke up into subgroups: mothers, fathers, recent deaths, parents of suicides, and other categories that could vary from one meeting to the next. The qualities that govern the world outside this basement—age, income, race—had little purchase here, except for gender. I went with the fathers.

  A fast-speaking man told us that his wife had refused to mention their seven-year-old son for two decades after his death. There were no pictures, no stories, no memories in their home. But one day his wife’s sister lost her son, and then the pictures came out.

  A young man with dreadlocks said that grief is like carrying a heavy bag that people stop noticing. Others proposed different metaphors. I am an amputee who still walks, but no longer in the same way. A nuclear bomb has gone off in my home. Grief is like a brick in my pocket, which I can touch at any time. It is a chronic disease, with flare-ups and periods of remission. These were clichés once again, but full of pathos—desperate attempts to make life fit within some kind of symbolic scheme.

  A war veteran was so angry that he would explode, he said, if he did not attend meetings. The father to my right wanted to know if anyone else had been told to get on with his life. It had only been three months, he said.

  Some faces became recognizable after a few meetings, but there were always new ones, or else silent folk who suddenly unveiled some new torment. One evening, it was a big guy in his thirties, with alert but tired eyes. He asked the group if anyone knew about layovers. No one did—not in this context—so he explained. It is when a parent sleeps with a baby and accidentally suffocates it by rolling onto its body. The man spoke at a measured clip, his emotions in check. He had been napping with his infant son, woke up, let his wife take his place, and left for work. His wife fell asleep and rolled over. Some of their relatives could not forgive, he said.

  I talked to the fathers about my guilt and asked them about theirs. They all seemed to sit up in their chairs, even those who said they never felt guilty. A man in a gray suit, his nails chewed to the skin, told us about his daughter, who had died of a rare disease at the age of three. He continued to feel the guilt—“the father’s philosophical guilt,” he called it.

  We only skimmed the surface, and yet it was for such words and stories that I came back—for jolts of reality that pushed against the boundaries of human existence. This made me feel alive in the realm of the dead.

  —

  Still, after half a dozen meetings, I stepped away from this room. I did so because, beneath the diversity of voices and experiences, I kept encountering the all-too-seductive notion that our lot was without equal. At each meeting, someone spoke about the slights and perplexed gazes bereaved parents face every day. A few of the people I met had been attending meetings for a decade and only socialized with bereaved parents because those whom they called civilians could never get it. “Your entire address book changes,” a coordinator told me.

  This community could have become mine. In fact, I sometimes felt the urge to take up permanent residence there. But if I acted upon it, could I exist as anything but a bereaved father? Could I escape anger and the melancholy that, as the Roman philosopher Seneca put it, feeds upon its very bitterness while turning grief into a morbid pleasure?

  And could I imagine a life without Alison? She accompanied me to one meeting and never returned. Seneca once counseled a bere
aved mother against “that most perverse distinction, that of being considered the most unhappy of women.” Alison arrived at this conclusion on her own. Living in seclusion and rejecting people for what they could not understand would destroy her, she said.

  Ella: Where were you when it happened?

  The people for whom I longed—available whenever I needed them, still open to the world, ready to share their experiences without expecting me to reciprocate—did not exist, at least not anywhere I could see. To find such bereaved parents, I had to canvass other centuries. An important part of my mourning that first year took place in eras other than my own.

  I had begun with Victor Hugo but found others. In the Renaissance, the astrologer Nostradamus lost his wife and two children to the plague epidemic that devastated Provence in the 1530s. While he mourned them privately, this ordeal allowed him to touch and capture in poetic prophecies the suffering and disquiet that so many of his contemporaries felt during those tumultuous times. Across the English Channel, Ben Jonson and Shakespeare expressed their sorrow for their departed sons in harrowing verses. “My sin was too much hope of thee, loved boy,” Jonson wrote. “Seven years thou wert lent to me.” Shakespeare included a bereaved mother in King John, the first play he wrote after his son’s death in 1596. “Grief fills the room of my absent child, / Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me.”

  While some of these bereaved parents had attained fame, most were ordinary folk who had left a record of their suffering. Around 1800, a Burgundian notary by the name of Jean-Baptiste Boniard lost two of his children, including his five-year-old daughter Adèle, who succumbed to scarlet fever. He kept a detailed account of his last conversation with the girl, the “rosebud” who liked to kiss and comfort her father and died while reciting a fable to him. I found this out by chance, while reading the reminiscences of his grandson. Boniard was a fascinating character (local politician, journalist, amateur archaeologist and astronomer), but his relationship with his late daughter told me everything I wanted to know about him.