Disaster Falls

by Stephane Gerson

  This is the point of no return, filled with thoughts that, like a serrated knife, scrape the inner lining of the skin. When we visited Owen’s school, some of his classmates asked how long he had spent underwater and what he looked like. I could not answer because I had not wanted to know. I did read in a dentist’s waiting room that drowning occurs when water destroys a thin membrane in the lungs. It is remarkably easy for this membrane to stop functioning; a gulp or two can suffice. Julian blurted out as much one day. Drowning is not that bad, he told me: some pain at the outset and then a rapid feeling of euphoria. He had read this online.

  Regardless, Owen had been pulled under. Perhaps I simply needed the image of his serene face to counter my own fear of death.

  —

  Alison did not carry such images. She also said that her view of death changed after the accident. She did not look forward to dying, but she did not dread it either. What had been everlasting nothingness became a respite from emptiness and a reunion with Owen. I could not help but think once again of our different experiences on the river. Alison had not veered off course in a ducky, she had not seen Owen’s face in the water, she had not been sucked under. Our loss was the same but not its circumstances. This must have explained other things as well:

  Alison never wished that, on the bus ride to the boat launch, she had read River Rescue rather than a collection of short stories about New York City.

  Alison never checked the National Water Information System for the Green River’s real-time water flow on the day of the accident.

  Alison never had dreams in which she caught Owen as he slipped from a ladder.

  Alison never walked along the Hudson and imagined that, should a child fall into the river, she would dive in before anyone else. She never wished for this to happen, and never vowed to keep this unspeakable thought to herself.

  Alison never stopped swimming. Soon after the accident, I watched her jump back into pools. Undulating like a seal, she glided along the walls and delved into corners before coming up for air. Alison said that she had learned this from Owen. Sometimes she swam underwater until her lungs emptied out and began to burn. She did it to feel Owen’s presence, to reach that place that neither one of us could avoid.

  —

  There is one other thing Alison never did: ask me how I could have allowed this to happen. She could have inquired openly or discreetly, through an inflection in her voice, a glance, a gesture. Without uttering a word, she could have told me I had lost her child.

  I remained on the lookout for subtle assignations of blame but detected nothing. When I thanked her for forgiving me, she replied that she had nothing to forgive because I had not done anything wrong. There was something ethereal about the grace Alison displayed and the grace she bestowed. Our therapist said that she had never before counseled a couple in which the spouse less directly involved did not blame the other. Alison had given me a gift I could never repay.

  We both agreed that if our roles had been reversed that afternoon, things would probably have proven more complicated afterward. I believed in causes and effects and responsibility and hence blame. Alison did not, at least not within the family, which means that she did not blame herself either. Though she asked me if we had screwed up, she never revisited our decisions to book the trip or allow Owen on the rapids. She never reexamined what she had said or refrained from saying during the scouting. “It is not about us, only about Owen,” Alison explained.

  Perhaps there was nothing to revisit. But while Alison’s attitude felt liberating, it also struck me as inexplicable. Surely blame had lodged itself somewhere within her psyche. Maybe this is why she had apologized after bringing us back to the river that morning in the bedroom. She may have sensed that something could slip out.

  Alison’s unwillingness to blame did not mean that our world was without blame. Surely someone bore responsibility. The blame thus fell upon me and, more often than not, it ended with me—the scouting, the ducky, the rapids. There was a churned-up demon inside my body, something I felt with sharpened intensity during each physical breakdown. Had Alison assigned blame and perhaps taken some blame—even a little—our marriage might have collapsed. But if we named and shared the blame, then I might not have reexamined the circumstances of the accident as often as I did, questioning our decisions, the events that played out on the river, and the story I preferred to ignore, the one about people who make bad calls because they only hear what they want to hear.

  Had Alison assigned blame, I might not have told her, as I did one day, that I wished that, on the lookout point, she had urged me to run Disaster Falls in a raft instead of a ducky. And she might not have told me that same day and only that one time what I needed to hear in someone else’s voice: namely, that she wished that I had been stronger and faster, more decisive and assertive that day on the Green.

  Sarah: I know how it feels to lose someone because I lost my grandmother.

  Four months after Belarus, on a Sunday afternoon, my mother called from Brussels with a shaky voice. Berl had ferocious stomach pain. They were awaiting test results, but she was not hopeful.

  “It’s very bad,” she said.

  My mother could not tell what my father felt or sensed at that point but when they drove to the doctor’s office three days later, he warned her not to expect good news, and when they walked out, he put his head on her shoulder and kissed her cheek, something he did only rarely.

  One of my great-aunts had died of pancreatic cancer when I was a child: we knew what the words meant. My thoughts went first to my father’s death rather than the ordeal to come or the tumor that had been growing inside his body, even in Belarus. Owen had died in a blur, leaving no time to say anything. Afterward, time seemed to freeze: Owen always eight, always entering fourth grade, always looking into my eyes in the middle of a river. Within weeks, the machinery of time began to creak, slowly at first and then faster with each revolution. The acceleration proved nearly indiscernible—something you feel before you see—but it sucked up memories while leaving Owen behind.

  This would be different. Berl’s death would stretch out until he reached the faint light we could already make out on the horizon. There would be time to track the smallest shifts and anticipate new stages in the disease, time for Berl to die and for us to watch him die.

  I did not expect to cry with Berl, whose silence in Belarus still weighed heavily on me. But perhaps I could sit with him and talk about things that had happened long before the accident and afterward as well. Or perhaps things would go differently now that he had entered a phase of life that did not fit on his CD. Perhaps my father would sit by my side and say things that had not been said before.

  I knew too little about cancer to manage my expectations. After my mother’s phone call, I went to the Hudson to be with Berl. Since the accident, I had wondered whether any loss would ever compare to Owen’s, whether I would even be able to properly mourn my parents when the time came. Now I wondered how to continue grieving for my son while remaining present for my father. But along the river, all I could find were traces of Owen. There did not seem to be room for anyone else.

  —

  A few days later, my mother met Alison and me at the Brussels airport and drove us to the hospital, where Berl was being treated for an infection. He was sitting up in bed, waiting for us. My mother pulled up a chair near him; Alison and I sat across from them, on the other bed in the room.

  Though my father spoke in a firm voice, his face was pale, and he asked my mother to rub his sore shoulder. As her fingers massaged his parched skin, digging into muscles that I remembered as so much firmer, Alison lay back and fell asleep. She had insisted upon making the trip even though she had found it difficult to leave Julian alone. Back in New York, she had winced while hearing me speak to my sister, who lived in Seattle, about care options for my father. This conjured up a future in which Julian was left to confront our end-of-life travails on his own. Owen’s death and my father’s
were entwined around the prospect of our own passing and Julian’s solitude in the world.

  We remained in that hospital room for much of the afternoon. Berl talked about his symptoms and what lay ahead. He said things like “Let’s take it one day at a time.” This pragmatic approach, which broke time down into manageable parcels, had served him well over the years. It told me that things do not always change irrevocably the moment one enters the realm of the ill, the wounded, the dying. Even as his body broke down, Berl might remain steady, he might remain himself.

  But his body would break down, and this expectation brought me back to the first months after the accident, when people looked to Alison and me for guidance. Though Berl did not ask for advice, I told him that people would not come to him if he appeared closed in or helpless; they would not know how to do so. You have to guide them, I said. You have to provide a way in.

  —

  My father was discharged in the evening. The four of us spent the weekend in my parents’ apartment, which felt as low and gray as the Belgian sky. We ate, and talked a little, and looked out the windows as rain fell on the small garden that Berl had tended for years. Before dinner on Saturday, he invited me into his office to go over his assets and talk about estate taxes. Our conversation ended with burial plans. Cremation had long been his preference, but he now told me that a cemetery funeral might be best for the family. When I looked into his eyes, I saw resolve and lucidity. I muttered that he seemed to be holding up. “I don’t express all that’s going on inside,” he said.

  My mother had no difficulty expressing what was going on inside her. As I walked out of my bedroom early Sunday morning, she stopped me in the dark hallway. I expected her to say something about my father, but she apologized instead for her inability to help after Owen’s death. She had not found a way of making herself available, she said, and this continued to fill her with guilt. “Do you feel guilty?” she asked before adding that I should not. We never spoke about this again—her guilt and mine—although at some point that weekend I mentioned Disaster Falls and my mother gasped. Until that moment I had never told my parents the name of the rapids.

  Alison and I packed our bags after breakfast. My father had always been the one to drive us to the airport, but this time he bade us good-bye at the front door. He hugged us both, first Alison and then me. As he relaxed his embrace, I thought I saw tears in his eyes. I could not be certain, but during the ride to the airport I wished that I had held him tighter and longer.

  —

  While Berl lost muscle strength and felt discomfort during the early months, he could still manage daily activities. He said it had taken him two weeks to get past the shock. Once you accept the reality, he added, you just get on with life without thinking too much about the disease. I felt relieved yet mystified. He now acted as if he would live a long time. When the new year approached, he asked my mother to buy him a calendar, and when the chemo’s side effects let up for a day or two, he hailed it as progress. My father held on to the framework around which he had built his entire existence. Until the last month of his life, he told my mother that he was not as sick as she claimed. It was as if the conversation he and I had had about his will and cremation had never taken place.

  My mother never heard him ask his oncologist a single question, let alone request a prognosis. But the day after he died, I noticed a book on his bedside table: a memoir by a journalist who had survived two bouts of cancer. Berl’s bookmark remained where he had left it. Leafing through the early chapters, I realized that he must have read the passage on page 33 in which a doctor found a tumor near the author’s pancreas. The author wrote that if this turned out to be cancer rather than a tumor resting on the organ, “the chances of my survival…would have been even slimmer than they were.”

  “Your father knew,” my mother said when I told her about this. “He was a smart man. My aunt died of pancreatic cancer. He knew.”

  One could see the disease gnawing at him. Each month brought new symptoms: decreased appetite, weight loss, an inflated belly. There were habits and pastimes he abandoned because he no longer cared or forgot: glucosamine supplements, flossing, Sudoku, Curb Your Enthusiasm. Fastidious in the past, he now left half-eaten bowls of yogurt throughout the apartment. Berl continued to ask me about my life, but less often. When I walked into his room four months after the diagnosis and found him sleeping with his hands clenched on his stomach, his face the color of chalk, I moved close to make sure he was breathing. This, I told myself, was the face he saw in the mirror—if he still looked.

  Berl had always been a bit of a hypochondriac. Every fever might prove fatal; blood pressure had to be measured daily. He said he loved life so much that he did not want to die. Alison now remarked that Berl feared dying alone whereas my mother feared living alone.

  Each time I flew to Brussels during those months, I expected a far-reaching, transformative conversation. On one occasion, Berl alluded to a bad day—something that seemed to involve peering into the abyss, imagining the world without him. The rest of the time he sat without speaking in the living room. We both did, side by side. We read, we watched TV, we hid behind laptop screens.

  “The silence is the worst,” my mother said. In return for her care, she wanted to talk about their marriage and what he was now going through and what would happen to her once he was gone. She was angry, but I felt disappointed and sad, not only for him, but also for this lost opportunity to bridge the distance between us.

  If Berl was grieving his own death, he did so within a silence so deep that no one dared breach it. And yet death permeated the apartment—the imminence of death, the energy expended to battle the idea of death, to refute the very possibility. I found it impossible to spend any amount of time with Berl without confronting my own mortality alongside his.

  I wondered how I would handle illness when it struck, how I would face my last days. I had hoped that Owen’s death might alter my outlook on death, but my bodily breakdowns after the accident had only sharpened my fear. For me, death remained a void, nothingness, the end of it all, pure absence. I felt guilty about this, too—guilty for not changing enough and for expecting too much of my father. I had led the way after Owen’s death but now looked to him for direction.

  Around this time, Julian voiced trepidation of his own about death. After the accident, he had found comfort in listening to people talk about Owen. This told him that, although his brother had died, he was not entirely gone. Two years later, people had grown quiet and Owen seemed so far away. The stillness of the night allowed dark thoughts (as Julian called them) to colonize his mind. He postponed going to sleep and sometimes asked us to sit with him in bed. I wanted to tell him what I had said to Owen when he had asked about death at the age of six or seven, namely that he was so young and had a long life to live. But I could neither utter such words nor tell Julian that I did not dread death. There was nothing to do, really, except to concede that his dark thoughts were mine as well.

  Though Berl had not brought up his own death since the day we planned his funeral, I expected him to say something about Owen’s, or at least mention his name, which is why I dropped references in the hope that he would seize upon one of them. All I heard was his new mantra: “I’ve had eighty good years and one bad one.”

  I nodded when he uttered these words, which seemed to soothe him, but if he had had eighty good years, where did that leave the two years that separated the accident from his diagnosis? Where did that leave Owen?

  —

  On my third visit to Brussels, eight months after the first one, Berl asked me to water the flowers with him. As a child, I had been expected to serve as his helper in the yard, a chore I despised, and we had not gardened together since. But he could no longer do it on his own. His bloated legs provided little support; he had already fallen several times.

  I uncoiled the hose and fed it to him as he walked gingerly across the narrow lawn, from one bed to another. I kept my eye on him excep
t for a few seconds, when I kneeled down to untangle the hose. Almost immediately, I heard my father call my name—a plaintive, urgent summons. He had lost his balance on the steps that led from the lawn to the patio. Looking up, I saw him falling backward, hanging in midair, arms spread out, time suspended once again. I lunged and caught him before he hit the ground. His frail body, a sack of bones, nestled against my chest.

  Berl had called for help; he had asked me to catch him. While I never did save a drowning child in the Hudson, I averted a disastrous fall that afternoon. The thought was powerful. But I also understood how fortuitous it had been, a matter of inches. Had I lunged a fraction of a second later, things would have unfolded differently. There are times when, instead of coming undone, worlds endure in infinitesimal increments.

  —

  Had my father not fallen, I might never have broken his silence about Owen. But I did: I brought up Owen’s death an hour later, while the two of us ate lunch on the patio. Leaning over the bowl I had placed in front of him, he dipped his spoon into the soup and slowly brought it to his mouth. This sequence required his full attention. I watched my father as he ate. I scrutinized his face, the skin sagging, the eyes tired, the mouth half-open to the food he could no longer taste. As usual, neither one of us spoke, but that afternoon the silence proved suffocating.

  “In a month, it will have been three years,” I said. “Three years since Owen died.”

  I could have spit out these words, a quick, nervous stride across the line my father had drawn. Instead, I spoke them slowly to make sure he heard me.

  His head jerked back a little. He looked at me, his spoon suspended at chin level, making sustained eye contact for the first time in months. Then my father let out a groan unlike any I had ever heard, a soft, guttural cry that seemed to originate in a place deep inside him, the place that must have held the shock and consternation, the commiseration, the helplessness I now saw on his face. He could say no more. Though I understood this, I also wished that, just this one time, he had found words.