He was there when, winging it, I told Berl what I needed to say and what he could hear about himself as a father. He was also there when Berl showed me that there are good deaths as well as tragic ones. The good deaths take place without fear or violence, without injustice or guilt or shame. The skies do not darken, the thunder does not roar.
Since the accident, I have anticipated my own death as a grisly encounter with Owen, the two of us gasping together just as he may have on the rapids. Now I know that, when my time comes, Berl will be there as well, and this makes all the difference.
—
Berl and I remain within that silence for a long stretch. When he does talk, it is to ask me when everyone else will arrive. Julian and Alison soon show up, and each speaks with him alone for several minutes. Though Julian does not know about the euthanasia, he understands that his grandfather’s life is nearing its end. My mother and my sister then join us, along with Berl’s brother and sister-in-law, who flew in from Chicago. It is 10:30; the doctor will arrive at noon.
We set up chairs in a circle around the bed. More banter, more reminiscing—a semblance of normalcy. When Berl trots out the line about eighty good years and one bad one, Julian says that for a baseball team this would be a sweet season. Every few minutes, Berl clicks his tongue on his palate, a tic he inherited from his father. Though he tells stories, he listens more than he speaks. He turns his head to follow the conversation, but a fraction of a second late. He is both with us and already elsewhere.
11:20. Berl takes a sip of water. We talk about the Belgian retail chain for which he worked after leaving the Big Five accounting firm—a chain long sold to a competitor and then liquidated. Its headquarters are being converted into high-end condos. We wonder whether the office with the imposing desk behind which my sister and I sat on Saturday mornings still exists.
11:45. Berl asks for the time. Though no one mentions it, we are all acutely aware of the minutes ticking by. I watch my father, unable to make small talk even though he clearly sees what lies ahead as a liberation.
11:50. I take Julian to the hospital cafeteria and leave him there with lunch money. Alison and I are still trying to protect him. Minutes after I return to the room, the doctor arrives. My father is ready; we all know that he wants quick farewells, a kiss and a swift exit. When my mother leans over the bed, he kisses her then shoos her away, as if to make it easier on the two of them. By chance or design, I am the last one by his side. As I reach toward him, Berl says, “Good-bye, sonny boy.” He has not used the nickname since I was a child.
12:05. In the hallway, I watch the doctor roll an IV drip into my father’s room and close the door behind him. Alison wishes that one of us were sitting with Berl, but the doctor advised against it and Berl asked to be alone. My mother says that the doctor asked him several times whether he remained committed to his decision.
12:15. The doctor walks out and informs us that my father has gone peacefully. I hug Alison and then my mother, my sister, my aunt and uncle. We all cry, softly, but no one seems devastated. This is, I am certain, because his death was not an act of despair or abandonment. Even in his silence, even when he seemed adrift, he was making choices—especially during his last days, which opened up expanses of feeling that allowed him to trust us, which made space for me to say things I had long wanted to say.
One of the passages I underlined in the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying says that for the person who has prepared and practiced, “death comes not as a defeat but as a triumph, the crowning and most glorious moment of life.” These are lofty words, and I cannot be certain that my father had prepared or practiced. But I could be wrong.
—
Friday. Sitting at my father’s computer, I compose a group email about his passing that I send my friends. Replies flow in within minutes, extolling a remarkable man, so kind and generous, a man who lived well and died with dignity. How could they not? Though it said nothing about assisted dying, my message retraced his journey from Akron to Brussels to Belarus. There were no family homes to tour in Bobruisk, no tombstones left standing in Parichi, I wrote, but as my father smelled the air and walked on dirt roads that had barely changed over the past century, he appeared to gain a deeper understanding of himself. He seemed as serene in Belarus as he did during his last days in the hospital. I can now write a story about my father that leaves out violence and anger and still remains truthful.
As I prepare to leave his office, something jumps out at me from his computer screen. It is a folder full of photographs of Owen and Julian. My first impulse is to look away; I still avoid such mementos, I still fear the pain. But Berl sat in this chair and looked at these pictures. I click on the icon.
The first photograph is of Owen at the plate during a Little League game. My stomach tightens. I am not only recovering Owen’s presence—and absence—but poking around in Berl’s private album, and this feels like a transgression. Still, I go on. There are close-ups and group shots, photographs of Owen as an infant and as a third grader growing into his body. The pain abates. It is not only Owen who is resurfacing in these photographs, but Berl as well, reaching out to his grandson and now to me, as if for the first time.
The window by the desk looks over the garden. Outside, my father’s roses sway by the steps on which he lost his balance just a few weeks ago. This is what I see when, distracted by a summer breeze, I take my eyes off the screen. But I do not do so for long because inside the house there are no falls—just Owen, Berl, and me, standing together beyond the confines of death and life.
Thomas: My story is in my head
Owen went so fast and violently, Berl so slowly and deliberately—in slow motion almost—that, in both cases, it was impossible to register what was happening until it was over. Back in New York, I revisited those four days with my father. I had seen him contemplate death; I had listened as he discussed matters we had avoided until then. As I relived all of this, I kept picturing the two of us with Owen—together during his last moments.
And yet, what had really happened in Brussels? I wondered because I knew how much I longed for a transformative story about the accident and our life without Owen and now without Berl. That story would bring some coherence to the chaos of our lives and maybe offset Owen’s absence in some minute way. Only weeks after the accident, I had written in my journal: “Nothingness will not stand.”
As a historian, I resisted nothingness by becoming a chronicler of our own lives, documenting the aftermath of this catastrophe with precision. I had to create a comprehensive record of what happens on a river, inside a family, and within the broader world when a child dies at the start of the third millennium.
Yet I also sought to shape our experiences into a meaningful narrative, and part of me worried that such impulses would distort our family’s experience—not just Owen’s and mine, but Alison’s and Julian’s and my father’s as well. If our lives became nothing but a story, or rather nothing but my story, governed by what I had observed and overlooked, what I had registered and forgotten, would this chronicle deserve any credence? Could I trust my own words?
Perhaps I had only seen what I needed to see in Brussels: Berl and I accepting the idea of change and changing and precipitating change together, with our sons by our sides. This was after all what I had awaited: a story of posttraumatic growth and redemption in which sons and fathers came together without anger or shame. I told myself that I had not invented or exaggerated or omitted anything essential, but I also knew that things might have gone missing.
Still, I could not dismiss the story that had begun in Belarus and ended in Belgium. Without it, there was nothing but a world in which children vanish, parents live with random abductions, and all deaths prove equally tragic. After his daughter succumbed to pneumonia, Paul Gauguin wrote that “on the news of my poor Aline’s death I doubted everything, I gave a defiant laugh. What use are virtue, work, courage, intelligence?” I, too, had doubted all this, along with expert knowledge and our
ability to safeguard what we hold dearest. I even doubted facets of the stories I had been composing since Owen died. But I could not deny their force or their necessity.
After my return from Brussels, I did things that had become impossible after the accident. I followed the route that Owen, Julian, and I used to take to school in the morning and allowed myself to feel the city’s energy uncoil. I walked by a father holding his eight-year-old son by the hand and, instead of flinching, let the scene seep through my body. While every mishap continued to carry the possibility of devastation, I also talked to Julian about his new high school and peered into his future. Whether all this became possible because of what had happened in Belarus and Brussels, or because of how I had chosen to frame these events, I felt something akin to a release.
—
More than three years had now elapsed since the accident, and Alison continued to mourn fearlessly. One day, I watched her approach two of Owen’s classmates with the certainty that, however much her presence might unsettle them, they would happily recall sleepovers and morning waffles with their dead friend. Alison needed to make sure that a decade hence these boys would still find a place for Owen within their lives. In other situations, though, she protected herself in ways I had never noticed before. She sometimes walked toward Owen’s room and turned around at the last minute, or took a detour to avoid passing by his school at pickup time.
I could not anticipate how Alison would react, therefore, when I asked her to listen as I read something I had written about the accident. I had been working on this book for a few months, writing in Owen’s room, which I had avoided for so long, and occasionally I read her a paragraph or two to test the voice, the tone, the way she came across. These paragraphs revolved around grief rather than the accident, however. Now I wanted to read her a passage about the river.
Alison lay down on Owen’s bed while I pulled up a chair and placed my computer on my lap. For a few minutes, my voice filled the room, uninterrupted. Then Alison sat up and asked me to stop. She could not listen anymore—not right then, she said. My words did not merely summon images of the river; they transported her back to Disaster Falls, causing her to relive everything that had happened that day. She found this unbearable.
Alison eventually read the entire manuscript. She did so at a time, a place, and a pace of her choosing. The chapters on the river were the most difficult, but she read them too. In fact, Alison read the manuscript three times, allowing herself to do what she still refrained from doing on her own: to return to the rapids.
Around the same time, Alison offered to share other things the medium had told her about Owen. My instinct was to say no. I still did not want to lose myself in that magical universe. And yet, on a bike ride through Columbia County, New York, I told Alison to go ahead. Perhaps I wanted to see what would happen if I opened myself to her version of the accident. Or perhaps I wanted to thank Alison for allowing me to write a story that was not mine alone.
“I won’t tell you everything,” Alison said, “but the medium saw rocks. She said Owen hit his head and fell unconscious.”
Alison related this as we approached a hill. We both stood on our bikes and pedaled harder—too hard to talk but not to carry the medium’s image of Owen. At the top, Alison said that she found it comforting to hear that Owen had been unconscious. It meant that he had suffered less.
“Owen was happy that day,” Alison said. “There was no pain.”
We rode in silence among peach orchards and faded red barns, within earshot of streams that we still elected not to hear. Had I encouraged Alison to say more, she would have told me Owen did not want us to blame ourselves. He had said this to the medium, and also that Alison could not have protected him, and that the accident had not been my fault. Owen told the medium he loved me.
Alison relayed all this some time later. That afternoon I did not ask her for more detail but neither did I object (at least, not for long or with conviction) that the medium could have learned about us online and made up the rest. Nor did I tell Alison that all bereaved parents want to hear about love rather than pain when it comes to their children—no wonder the medium had framed it that way. This thought did not cross my mind.
Instead, I found comfort in the story, forceful and necessary, that Alison had been holding for a long time on her own. Whether events on the river had taken place that way or not hardly mattered at that moment. Alison and I could choose to make this story our own; we could compose it together.
Nicky: How did he hurt himself?
The story of the accident could have ended where I left it. But, after reading an early version, a friend asked about our lawsuit. Why had I not mentioned it?
Alison and I had filed a civil suit soon after the Moffat County Sheriff’s Office deemed Owen’s death an accident. The legal process lasted close to two years and yet I had said nothing about litigation. Even after my friend asked, I left it out of the manuscript I sent to my publisher. My editor knew nothing, and so she asked why Alison and I had chosen not to sue.
I could not tell her that my omission had been inadvertent because it had not been. But neither was it a considered decision. I had simply allowed myself to believe that legal constraints forbade me from discussing the suit, its resolution, or even the grounds of our complaint. It would have been a simple matter to verify—a quick call to our lawyer—but what if he told me I could not discuss some facets of the accident? I would have to leave out elements of my story.
And what if, on the contrary, he replied that I could disclose everything? Then there would be no external justification for my omission. I would have to return to the rapids according to a timetable and from vantage points that were not mine; I would have to revisit the accident through an adversarial legal process; and I would have to confront the failings of others in ways I had not done until now. This would be another story altogether.
I did not make that phone call until my friend and my editor asked. Then I found out that, with the exception of the final terms, I could indeed disclose it all.
—
How do I write, then, about a legal process that seemed vain and yet necessary?
Alison and I sued because Owen’s death had been unfair, to obtain some form of justice—we owed it to Owen—and to make it safer to run the Green. This led us to target the rafting company rather than Delma or Kris. We had expected more from the two of them on the lookout, in the rapids, throughout the search effort, and during the twenty-fours we then spent in the canyon. We wished they had not disappeared the moment Owen vanished from view. We would have liked to hear them say they were sorry about his death. But taking them to court seemed pointless. Responsibility ultimately lay with the corporation that devised procedures and trained its staff.
Still, our expectations for reparation were low. We knew the odds were against structural change in a region and an industry that have long resisted regulation. When I called Dinosaur National Monument after the accident to find out what kinds of canoes and duckies were allowed on rapids, the river manager told me that outfitters make such decisions on their own. “We can’t tell people what to do or not do,” she said.
After deaths such as this one, parents sometimes set up nonprofits, launch petitions, lobby officials, and raise money to enact change. Personal catastrophe can breed activism. But the accident depleted my inner resources and made me turn inward rather than outward. I did not have it in me to fight an industry and a culture that prizes the free, unregulated life—human beings and nature in unfettered communion.
Alison and I remained passive throughout the process. The two of us barely discussed it, and shared little with Julian, who, we later learned, felt excluded. The few relatives and friends whom we told heard tidbits such as “we are talking to our lawyer today.” No one asked about a matter that raised uncomfortable questions about fault and responsibility. Even my journal contains few entries about the matter, as if I had excised it from my life.
We hired an
attorney from Los Angeles. Beyond the practical rationale—the rafting company was incorporated in California—this physical distance enabled us to remain detached from the process. His name was Moses, and I imagined him tapping divine powers to part waters and lead us to the other side. During occasional phone calls, the grave, warm, disembodied voice of Moses remained as remote as I needed it to be.
Early on, Moses asked us to write down everything that we remembered of the accident. Both of us stalled. Alison left her narrative on her hard drive for weeks. When she finally emailed it to Moses, she wrote that the more she thought about the accident, the less she understood what case the opposing attorneys could build. “Do you feel the same way, or am I deluded?” she asked.
—
How do I write about a process that will flatten Owen?
The case revolved around the death of a child on a trip that had been advertised as a family vacation. At issue was the risk we assumed by signing the company’s release, and the risk the outfitters had to make public and curtail. Experts would have to determine whether a novice boater and an eight-year-old should have risked riding Class III rapids in a ducky.
Litigation would force us to reexamine Disaster Falls in clinical detail. A trial would force upon us the autopsy we had declined: a legal, expertise-driven autopsy, carried out through maps and photographs and testimony. Owen was bound to vanish: a boy reduced to a corpse, an exhibit, a victim whose financial value actuaries would appraise. How could he remain visible once future earnings, accumulations, and loss of services became the order of the day?
—
Do I write that I was terrified?
The opposing lawyers would come after me—for signing the release, for allowing Owen to board the ducky after scouting the falls, and, I imagined, for letting the current take us to the right instead of the left of No-Name Island. I expected a barrage of hostile questions from attorneys, a company, that entire industry and culture.
Disaster Falls Page 19
