Disaster Falls: A Family Story

What we came to call the accident occurred on the Green River, near the border between Utah and Colorado. Life was good—filled with its daily conflicts and anxieties and unmet expectations, but good. Afterward, Owen was gone and we remained. Such things happen every day. Accidents, losses, and separations are the texture of human existence. If the circumstances are dramatic enough to appall or fascinate, the story makes the paper. A few years ago, the New York Times devoted four columns to a family caught in a flash flood in New Hampshire. The parents and the oldest child escaped from the car, but the seven-year-old daughter drowned. The father could not get her out in time.

Owen’s death did not make the Times. The following newspapers ran articles: the Greeley News, the Craig Daily News, the Denver Post, and the Salt Lake Tribune. Also, the Daily Freeman in upstate New York, where we spend a lot of time.

These articles, which I read days after the accident, contained the same material, taken from the same wire report: eight-year-old boy…family vacation…turbulent waters…aggressive search…truly tragic. There is nothing to be drawn from these pieces, neither new information nor the comfort, however contrived, of obituaries and immortalization. My son’s name is shorn of its meaning, its flesh-and-blood content, its humanity. It has been plugged into a template that journalists put together in ten minutes and readers digest in two.

In reality, it happens like this. You wake up one morning without knowing that a disaster will take place that day. You do everything right, you plan ahead, chart the course, ask the necessary questions, examine the situation from all sides. You do what parents are expected to do, and yet things still break down, they come undone, they slip away, an eight-year-old slips away and dies. There is no destiny at play. This death comes at the end of a string of decisions small and large, steps taken or not, resolutions made too long ago to leave visible traces, and behavioral patterns that, like canyons in forsaken lands, sediment so slowly that they seem eternal.

Things could have turned out differently. But they do not. And when a child slips away people tell you that your loss resembles no other. They say that they cannot imagine what is happening to you, which also means that they cannot imagine it happening to them.

A doctor pulls in close and explains that the hurt will last a long time—perhaps forever. A rabbi confides that he has never seen anything like it, not once in twenty years on the pulpit. Friends write that losing a child is a hole without end, beyond the map of human experience. You are living every parent’s worst nightmare, they say.

This is what you become: a walking reminder of the nightmare that haunts all parents nowadays. In a world that promises children safety and happiness, such deaths become personal failures, crimes against civilization, an affront to our collective aspirations. What previous generations were simply unable to prevent now falls somewhere between aberration and delinquency. The loss of a child is intolerable and unthinkable.

I had become my own worst nightmare, intolerable and unthinkable. But I also sensed the banality and cosmic magnitude of Owen’s death, at once a ripple in the flow of everyday life and a disruption of the universe. Apart from that, everything eluded me. I could not understand the events that had taken place the day he died. I could not grasp how the ordinary turned extraordinary. And I could not imagine what would now arise within our family, what might transpire between Alison and me. We had to find a way forward, with Owen and with our older son, Julian, mourning his only sibling and the parents he used to know.

—

Two weeks after the accident, I began writing about Owen and our life without him. There was no plan. I simply picked up my laptop one morning and started chronicling my infinite shifts in mood, what Alison and Julian and the people around us said and did not say, what we and others did and were unable to do. I wrote at all hours, seized by a graphomaniac impulse that left me confounded until someone told me that, while those who have lost a parent are called orphans, there is no word for those who have lost a child. I wrote because there were no words. This is what I told myself at the time, I write because there are no words. But it was not only that.

I wrote to understand how, despite their best intentions, people end up in catastrophic situations.

I wrote to dispel the notion that no one, not even us, could imagine what we were going through.

I wrote because banal yet cosmic disasters require stories for the dead and the living. When Hester Thrale lost her nine-year-old son, in 1776, her friend Samuel Johnson wrote her, I know that such a loss is a laceration of the mind. I know that a whole system of hopes, and designs, and expectations is swept away at once, and nothing left but bottomless vacuity. When Alison and I lost our eight-year-old son, an acquaintance told us that there is nothing worse than the death of a child, and this is truly, as you know of course, a horror story for anyone who hears it.

It is also against such words that I wrote. When our hopes and designs and expectations are swept away, something has to endure besides horror stories and bottomless vacuity.

Drew: Just a quick question: What is it like at home?

Owen’s former classmates—Drew and the others—sometimes asked us about the accident. They also recounted where they had been when they found out. This is how they told us his death had turned their lives upside down. Adults were not different, but most doubted that we wanted to know or else they feared saying the wrong thing so they tended to remain quiet. The few friends who took us back to that moment did so gingerly. They watched for our cues.

With Alison, they saw a distant gaze and hard features. She did not want to know what others were doing or what they had felt when we called with the news because such stories were not about Owen. They were solely about these people and the pain they had felt when the accident entered their lives. This was excruciating for Alison, who felt responsible for their suffering.

The signals I gave out were more conflicted. Throw it my way, they said. Give me another vantage point on this catastrophe so I can grasp its enormity. Owen’s death is too large to remain a private affair. I want this knowledge and I want this closeness. But do not tell me too much. Do not turn this death into a spectacle or a collective trial that taught us something and brought us closer together, even if that is true. Do not suggest that your grief resembles mine.

These were unreasonable expectations, I knew that.

One friend recalled that, during her first phone call, Alison had asked how she would go on living. Another told us she was in her car when her husband, who was standing outside, answered his cell phone. She watched him speak and then sob, though she did not know why. These are the kinds of recollections Alison sought to avoid. But I listened because our lives tipped over at that exact moment and I wanted to understand the world into which we had tumbled.

One day, a friend began describing the nervous anticipation that had filled our home in Woodstock, New York, as we made our way back from Utah, but she stopped midsentence because of Alison’s obvious lack of interest. I was disappointed. Though I never asked, I would have liked to hear what happened when friends and relatives converged upon our home the day after the accident. They had to respond to a situation they barely fathomed and at the same time handle practical matters. Someone had to drive to the Albany airport and find the courage to face us and say those initial words. Something else: what should the house look like when we arrived? I imagine that this entailed many decisions: where people would position themselves, whether food would be laid out, how bright to set the lights. There was a scene to compose.

I was only dimly attuned to all of this but did realize that people were stepping in and making decisions—they were making decisions for us. This was one of the mental notes I kept during the early days, tabulating as best I could the widening gulf between the old reality and the new.

Two friends made the hour-long drive to Albany. It was dark, I think, when we left the airport. I sat in the backseat, feeling already like a passenger in my own life. I do not think that we discussed anything substantive during the ride, though I could be wrong. A haze surrounds these days, with random moments of clarity etched into my memory.

Among these moments: the sight of my mother, the first person whom I saw as we pulled into our garage. She shuffled across the dusty concrete floor with tiny penguin-like steps, ashen-faced, arms half-open. Though she moved slowly, I knew that she would reach me, grip me, collapse upon me. Behind her stood my father, smaller than in the past, my in-laws, my brother-in-law, friends from the area and others who had already flown in, all part of a funereal receiving line that meandered from the garage to the entryway, the kitchen, and finally the living room, a line of still and silent beings who resembled embalmed corpses.

What happened afterward? Did Alison and I sit with one person or one small group at a time? Did we talk about the Green River? Did we plead fatigue and retire to our room? And Julian—where did he go? All I know is that at some point that evening or the next day, lights went up, frozen bodies thawed, and waxlike faces regained elasticity. People began to move, first in slow motion and then faster until they were twirling from one room to another, up and down the stairs, onto the deck, into the garden. The house lit up with a circular energy that was manic and magical, an energy that surrounded us but could not touch me.

—

Alison and I began dating within months of moving to New York in the late 1980s, both of us fresh college graduates. We left for Chicago a few years later—I began doctoral studies in French history, Alison planned events for nonprofits—and returned in 2000, when New York University hired me. Having missed the early Giuliani era, we came back to a city that was cleaner and more affluent than the one we had known. We had two sons now, Julian and Owen, born three years apart in the late 1990s. Through their school and Little League games, we found ourselves in a universe of music producers, architects, account executives, film editors, academics, artists, venture capitalists, and foodies—all of us wearing black jeans and listening to the Red Hot Chili Peppers, or later Wilco. There was something intoxicating about downtown, a self-awareness of cool powered by a mix of prosperity and faux nonchalance.

New York also felt safer than the city we had known in the 1980s—except of course on 9/11. We were living in a Battery Park City rental, a few blocks south of the World Trade Center and within the evacuation zone. When we returned to our apartment to collect our belongings a week later, the fire still smoldered, its odor pungent. Trees sported white leaves—pages from memos, official letters, and instruction manuals shredded into macabre confetti. A dozen crushed ambulances and police cars were stacked outside our building like metal pancakes in primary colors. We left the neighborhood for the Upper West Side but feared that this would not be enough distance, not enough protection against the next attack.

This led us to purchase a home, for shelter and summers, in Woodstock, New York, two hours north of New York City. We met other urban refugees there, and also musicians and painters, onetime employees of a now-shuttered IBM plant, retired schoolteachers, svelte yogis, butchers who also coach Little League, bow-hunting carpenters, troubadour rabbis, and aging hippies who sometimes look the part and sometimes do not. Beyond the facile caricatures, it was an easy town to like. Our house was nestled in a dead end, surrounded by acres of forest. We had never lived among bears, snakes, and coyotes before, but this place felt oddly secure, as if, like giant cotton balls, the trees and bushes could muffle noise and vibrations.

This is where we spent the first weeks after the accident—hidden away. Everything was filtered, freed from the weight of obligations, pity, and accidental encounters with well-meaning acquaintances. Alison and I did not have to leave the house, not even to buy groceries, because friends and relatives took care of everything, preparing breakfast, answering the phone, welcoming well-wishers, signing for deliveries, and making runs to the hardware store. One of them called the local tennis club, where Owen had been slated to begin day camp, and explained that he had died. Others brought Julian to batting cages, anything to maintain the semblance of normalcy. (Such outings left Julian exposed in ways we had not anticipated. He later told us that, when a camper asked if he had siblings, he gave a frank answer. Oh shit, the kid said.)

Another one of our friends placed sleeping pills in our bathroom to help us get through the night. Alison took one every evening; I never did, but we both opened ourselves to this spellbinding human alignment, these tiny gestures inside our own home.

We became the silent center of a micro-society that filled the space Owen had left vacant.

—

The day after our return from Utah, I retreated to the small studio that serves as my office. Bookshelves cover all of the walls except for a section devoted to the kids’ drawings and a large bay window that opens onto the forest and a bluestone quarry. This is where I had written historical books and articles over the years, but that morning I sat at my desk to draft a preliminary version of our eulogy. Alison and I had taken notes on the flight home and agreed that I would show her something by midday.

Writing Owen’s eulogy was in some respects an impossible exercise, a confrontation with reality that proved so raw I had to turn my back to Owen’s art on the walls. But alone in this quiet space, surrounded by trees and traces of the path that quarrymen had followed decades earlier, I heard Owen for the first time since the accident. The eulogy flowed on the page, with ready-made sentences and echoes of his voice. All parents must carry within them biographies of their children, unwritten but available at a moment’s notice.

Ours began with the joy of having two boys and the pain of living without one of them. Alison and I told anecdotes about a child who had memorized our credit card number, and recounted some of his small victories that spring. We touched upon the accident and Owen’s absence. All that remained, we said, were recollections—and something else:

Owen looked into himself and into the outside world with penetration and feeling. He sought understanding while remaining aware of his own frailty and limitations. He embraced the beauty and efflorescence of life while grasping its darker, impenetrable side. If Owen has left us a legacy, then this is it.

These words continue to ring true even if I now realize that legacy talk is what the two of us needed at that moment. Owen’s life had to harbor some deeper meaning.

Alison and I also spoke against anger. We had both felt its pull within days of the accident, and so we pushed back. We would no doubt feel anger in the future, we said. But not today. An anger that was equal to the death of Owen would consume us; it would scorch the earth and the insides; it would preclude all other emotions, even sadness; it would make it impossible to truly see, to understand what had happened and who we were becoming. There was no religious belief or ethical framework behind our words, just the conviction that once we surrendered we would lose ourselves and lose Owen—we would lose him again. This, too, we needed to say and hear that day, as if to make a public commitment, to ourselves and to the rest of the world. A life without anger, a life with as little anger as possible: this became almost right away our mantra and our daily practice.

—

The morning after writing the eulogy, I woke up knowing we would bury Owen that day. Every morning, there are parents who wake up knowing this is what they will do before sunset.

I dragged my legs to the side of the bed and raised my body, hoping to accrue enough momentum to overcome the inertia that kept me pinned under the sheets. As I stood up, I wondered how the day would unfold. I might sit prostrate on a chair, or sob uncontrollably, or fall on my knees in the cemetery. Or perhaps Alison would behave in ways I did not recognize. The images of bereaved parents that I carried with me suggested that all of this was possible. After losing her seven-year-old daughter, the friend of a friend screamed in bed every morning. This was terrifying, but her behavior seemed appropriate.

Alison wore a navy sleeveless dress with pleats and a short gray sweater. The rabbi recommended that I pick an old tie since, following Jewish custom, we would cut it (and Alison’s sweater) before the services. I chose my favorite tie instead; Owen deserved it. Afterward, we met our relatives in the synagogue library. I felt numb and restless, remote yet hyper-present.

In the great room, quiet but full of static when we took our seats next to Owen’s coffin, people barely moved as the rabbi chanted and then summoned Alison and me to deliver the eulogy. We read paragraphs in turn while holding the sheets of paper between us, her hand and mine touching the words. Like a passing of the baton, this responsive recitation kept us in motion. It gave us balance. Julian watched from the front row though I do not know what he heard. I do not recall what he wore either (there are no photographs). Alison and I paid attention to Julian, but not as closely as before. He later told us that, for weeks, we did not concern ourselves with what he ate.

Alison stood tall, feet planted on the platform. At the cemetery afterward, she held my hand firmly. It was a bright day, with a big blue sky surrounding Overlook Mountain, a local peak we had recently hiked with Owen and Julian, climbing past the ruins of a Gilded Age resort that had burned down long ago. The rabbi asked the mourners to create space for the three of us to walk around the grave. Afterward, still within this human circle, we shoveled dirt onto the casket. Alison remarked that a gust of wind blew out of nowhere at that moment.

Before picking up the shovel, she stepped toward the black hole, as if to peer in. I placed my hand on her arm.

You really thought I would jump in, didn’t you? she asked during the car ride home. She smiled faintly, but I think that she felt slighted, as if I had doubted her strength. Perhaps I had: it was easier to focus on her potential breakdown than to face my own.

—

At the house, mourners overflowed into the garden. This was no longer an indeterminate mass, but familiar people who held our hands, squeezed our shoulders, looked us in the eye. One of them thanked me. Minutes later, someone else did the same. So it went as the afternoon blended into the evening and the sun lost its intensity somewhere beyond Overlook.

Thank you for your words, friends told me. We came to offer you strength, but you have helped us. Alison heard the same words and found them as jarring as I did. It took me months to understand the relief that people felt when we stood before them in the synagogue, spoke of a present without anger, and imagined our future alongside Owen’s. This is not what they had expected. We might have screamed uncontrollably or jumped into the grave.

Hardly anyone mentioned Owen in my presence that afternoon. I barely mentioned him myself; this made me feel ashamed, but it seemed easier that way. At one point, I ended up among fathers from the kids’ school who bantered about vacations and the like—anything to fill the silence. I listened, then wandered off. Circling the small groups in dark colors, my eyes fell upon the couch where Owen had sat reading, legs crossed, a few weeks earlier. The book he had picked up on our coffee table that day—New York Changing—coupled Berenice Abbott’s photographs of New York City in the mid-1930s with shots of the same locations sixty years later. While some spots had not changed, many are now unrecognizable. The Wanamaker’s department store on Broadway and Ninth Street—razed. The block-long