But there was something else, I think. When Julian visited Owen’s grave in our company, all he could see was a putrefying corpse underground. This disturbed him so much that he refused to return to the cemetery except on the anniversary of Owen’s death. Julian’s body may have been changing shape, but at least it remained alive.
Alison went through a cycle of her own. During the first week, she did not open the fridge. Within a month, she had shed fifteen pounds. Her features grew tight and her cheeks hollowed out, with bones protruding and hard edges that I could feel without touching. Creases appeared between her eyebrows. Her eyes froze, lost in immensities that only she could see. I had stopped looking at myself in the mirror, but I saw Alison’s face all day long, and sometimes I flinched. She once told me she had cried after seeing a reflection of herself. It was not that she hated her appearance (though she did ask me one day if she looked gaunt). She cried, she said, because the face in the mirror was no longer the face Owen had known.
But Alison needed to feel thin or, as she put it, empty inside. The pounds she lost would have weighed her down. So Alison jogged, she worked out, she took long, brisk walks. On cold mornings, she slipped into black tights, a black compression shirt, and her black jacket. She wore black gloves and a tight black hat. “You look like a burglar,” I said, but that was not it at all. She was a modern incarnation of the Victorian widow, signaling her altered state by engaging in her own visible rituals of mourning.
Alison said she was tapping the energy she would have expended on Owen; and also that she was tapping Owen’s own energy, his perpetual movement and chatter. She conceded that she could not stop moving, but this awareness did not alter anything. If she remained immobile, she would plunge to the depths of the river.
And so her body changed. Her abs tightened, her stomach flattened, her shoulders grew more defined. Alison’s taut muscles seemed to limn the shape of her bones. She stepped outside her body and at the same time relied on it as one does on an engine. No need to turn on the ignition: it was always humming. Anything but a standstill.
—
One day that fall, I sank into a couch and watched Alison circle around the living room. She moved, she could not stop, and I sat still, I could not get going. Like the grieving husband who, in Georges Rodenbach’s haunting novel Bruges-la-Morte, slowly wanders the canals of Bruges but always returns to the same place, I needed infinite silence and a life of such monotony that I barely felt alive anymore. “Noise offends moral suffering as well,” Rodenbach wrote. Alison, too, sought tedium and avoided certain sounds. She no longer listened to music because the clatter in her head was already too loud, she said. We had that in common. But as Alison whizzed by, I could not always be sure that she noticed my presence.
I wished that Alison would slow down and sit with me on the couch. I wanted us to sit for a very long time, until time itself ceased to be and everything dissolved into a landscape in which clocks melt on red rocks—as in Dali paintings and Utah canyons. I cannot remember what I said to Alison that day, but she agreed to sit and listen as I recited poems by Victor Hugo.
I had read Hugo before—historians of France can hardly escape him—but until now I had not paid attention to the verses he wrote as a bereaved father. Hugo lost four children. One of his boys died in infancy; his nineteen-year-old daughter Léopoldine drowned along with her husband in 1843; and two adult sons perished decades later, in Hugo’s old age.
His first poems about Léopoldine, three years after her death, are full of retreat, full of defiant though perhaps vain remonstrances against the bromides of grief. “You wish that I would still aspire To soft and golden triumphs! That I tell those who sleep that dawn awaits! / That I scream out, ‘Come on! Hope!’ ” The sorrow that Hugo felt was incomparable and specific. “How I suffer as a father,” he writes. This is who he was at that moment, and it is as such, as a bereaved father, that he spoke to me.
Later verses point toward some form of equilibrium, as if he had in time found a way forward. “Now that from the grief that has blackened my soul / I come out, pale and triumphant, Feeling the peace of great nature.” I did not understand, or fully believe, this talk of triumph. The verses that stayed with me conveyed the razor-sharp simplicity of loss, slicing through flesh. “To be nothing but a man passing by Holding his child by the hand! / Now, I want to be left alone!”
Forty-one at the time of Léopoldine’s death, Hugo could not understand why, given his devotion to the well-being of humanity, fate should deprive him of his daughter. Forty-one when Owen died, I could not understand why, despite my efforts to become a fair and affectionate father, fate should deprive me of my son. I told myself that this was not self-pity—no Why us?—but rather the bereaved parent’s befuddlement before cruel irony. Owen was gone, and yet, like Léopoldine’s, his voice still echoed around the house.
I continued to bump against him, too. Eyes wide open, I could comb my fingers through his thin blond hair and then follow his soft ears, his bony shoulder blades, his back as smooth as cold paper, his skinny thighs, all the way down to the outsized feet that we rubbed at night when he could not fall asleep. My recollections of Owen were enshrined in his body.
—
This is what I felt, what Hugo must have felt, and perhaps what Alison felt as well. Early one morning, she approached me as I sat at the breakfast table. “We will never smell Owen again,” Alison said. She talked about kissing the back of his neck, rubbing his chest, feeling the fuzz on his legs. Alison cried and then she walked away.
Still, she did not like it when I read her Hugo’s poems.
“You think too much,” she said.
Zack: Just to know, I feel really sorry for you and Owen was a great kid.
A cloud of words surrounded us during the early months—emails first and then cards and letters. They came from close friends and distant acquaintances, people who had known Owen and others who had never met him. They were sad, they were sorry, they were stunned by this boy’s death.
I’ve just heard the desperate news.
I can’t even begin to imagine the terror and the agony that you have experienced.
Such words told us exactly who we were: bereaved parents whose misery was so unfathomable that we had moved to a terra incognita, with its own contours and black holes. We were objects of wonder, beheld with fascination and trepidation. At drop-off in the mornings, some parents looked at us nervously, from afar. Upon greeting us, some acquaintances tilted their heads, dropped their voices an octave, and softly whispered our names. The whole town of Woodstock, we were told, knew about the Gersons. The aura that surrounded us magnified the distance from others.
Years later, I showed a friend some of the missives we had received, things like How terrible, there are no words. She deemed them clichéd—common, ordinary, terrible in themselves. I understood her aversion to sentimentality, but clichés become indispensable during our most harrowing moments precisely because we need the ordinary in order to take in the extraordinary. To eliminate the clichés with which we die and suffer and mourn would deny the power of coarse formulations, paper over the limitations of language at such moments, erase the collective dimension of grief. Even when we are alone, we do not grieve on our own. This goes beyond the fact that people take the time to write to us. The words we use when a child dies are seldom ours alone; we draw from a reservoir, a finite supply of words that shape what we feel and allow ourselves to feel. I sensed this while reading these cards and letters, which made me realize that we were all figuring this out together. These words confirmed that something real had taken place, something momentous, something that extended beyond our home.
To be sure, religious or spiritual condolences originated in a sensibility that was not mine. There were also messages I would have preferred to forget:
I am so saddened and shocked by the nature of the event that it makes me stop to appreciate and wonder at my own children.
This news has affected the w
ay I love, the way I parent, and the way I live. Without ever having met your son, when I think about him—my heart opens…and I soften and become a gentler person.
I should have derived satisfaction from the fact that something positive seemed to come out of the accident, but these words merely widened the chasm that separated us from a world in which other families remained on a path of growth.
Other messages had the same effect and yet proved soothing:
What I want most is to say something, anything that takes away even just a sliver of the pain of losing Owen. Therein lies the reason it has taken me so long to write: I know that’s not possible.
Times like this, as I am now finding out, are not helpful to reassure what I thought I knew, but instead present more of what I don’t know.
I feel so helpless.
These words gave voice to an absence, a deficiency, a want. They expressed what, in addition to Owen, was now missing. The impossibility of naming, understanding, and memorializing could not stand. And yet it had to be acknowledged. The failings and hesitations of people who confronted the new instability of the world made me feel less alone.
Though we now lived in a world of our own, Alison and I both yearned to come together with others. When someone wrote, “I cannot stop seeing Owen’s face,” I copied the sentence slowly and reread it. Each time, I pictured people looking at Owen while resurrecting the face I had so often cupped in my hands. We received other notes—about his smile, his freckles, his kindness with children. “Owen played trains and read to my boys,” a friend recalled. “Owen shared his dinner with my boys.” A mother told us that Owen noticed when her son took refuge in the bathroom at school; he noticed and checked on the boy. These anecdotes revealed new dimensions in the life of an eight-year-old who had had his own private relationships with the world and continued to do so, in death as much as in life.
Some friends wrote about their lives without Owen:
When I got back to work, many people came by and said they were sorry to hear what had happened. I felt very uncomfortable having people say they were sorry to me. After all, any sadness I felt was nothing compared to the pain your family has had to endure. They should express sympathy to you, not me. Last night as I sat at my desk at work, I was wondering why I felt so uncomfortable or guilty with people expressing condolences. I began to think about how I felt about Owen. I really liked and cared for him. He was so good to my son (who loved him). I loved the way he was able to have a relationship with girls his age and still be a real “guy.” I knew he had a maturity and softness about him that enabled that relationship. I always admired that. My daughter really cared for him (she gushed about the letter he wrote her). He was an important part of her life. I will really miss him and so will our entire family. So it was OK to feel that the loss of Owen was a big loss for our family too. And today when people expressed their condolences, I thought of Owen and just said thank you.
This, too, I read many times—as I did with those other notes that simply recognized the reality of the accident:
What a horrible blow.
That’s a hard lick.
Life dealt you a tough one.
One day, a colleague asked me Owen’s age, sat quietly for a moment, and then told me this was unjust. No consolation, no need to get up from her chair. This felt brutal, but true. Another day, a friend said over coffee that I now lived in a realm without an exit. “Even depression has a way out, but not you.” Spotting acquaintances at another table, she rose to greet them. When she returned, she said: “See, I got up, I left you, I went to say hi to friends. And you stayed here, still in your world, wondering how I could have done that.” The precision of her intuition touched me, but even more so her willingness to voice it on the spot.
—
Some of the starkest notes opened onto private expanses other than our own:
When my Dad died suddenly of a heart attack my world turned upside-down. And it stayed turned around, but I got used to it and used to being a smaller family (my Mom and me) with Dad’s presence always there, hovering outside, speaking to me from inside—paying attention to my fears and my wants and helping me with both.
My brother lost a daughter in an automobile accident eighteen years ago—she was six at the time. It seemed impossible that they would survive it. They have survived and are living full lives—their daughter always in their memory.
One friend told me that thirteen years earlier she had lost a newborn son, strangled by his umbilical cord. Another divulged that her mother had died when she was in high school, leaving her to fend with a remote father who later sold all of their belongings. My longtime barber revealed that his son had been involved in a fatal drunk-driving accident. For years, my barber had driven hours every weekend to visit him at the upstate penitentiary. An acquaintance talked about his teenage daughter’s accidental death many years earlier. We had never been close, but on that day he called me his friend. This must have enabled him to justify a disclosure that, whether planned or not, revealed his own attachment to once-sharp and now-dulled emotions.
I do not think that Julian encountered this, but Alison did, and it caught us both by surprise, this sharing of pain by people whom we had long known and yet, it turned out, not known at all. We soon understood that, while they originated in a place of compassion and empathy, most of these exchanges had more to do with the people who had initiated them than they did with us. People opened up because we were available and could hear them and hold what they had been holding for so long. We did not have to say much.
This power, which I had not wielded before, seemed undeserved; sometimes, it left me drained or hankering for Owen, who was absent from these stories. But we also discovered things we had never noticed: layers of hurt, gaping absences, traumas that had yet to heal, the tragedy that sits just below the surface, visible only to those who look or know where to look, or at least suspect that what one sees at first glance is not all there is.
—
Every day was now spent immersed in unseen depths of suffering. Sometimes it came to me through such exchanges and sometimes I sought it out. Reading the newspaper, I gravitated to human interest stories about disastrous events in which everything had gone wrong: a woman killed by a loose brick, a spectator run over during a bicycle race, a boat lost at sea, and of course children who had drowned in pools and lakes and oceans. These were real human beings, not mere anecdotes. I yearned for company in my desolation, and for this reason awaited the calamities that would befall other people. These people should not be friends or relatives, but neither should they be celebrities, since excessive distance prevented true identification. I was after three or four degrees of separation: people from the same background, whom I may have seen from afar or met at a function or could have known before they took my place in the spotlight of misfortune. Others would now use their name instead of mine as an injunction to hug their children a little tighter in the evening.
For instance: the Upper East Side father who was swept into the ocean with his seven-year-old daughter as they watched a hurricane from a cliff in Maine. He survived, but she did not. For a few days, I read all the articles I could find about this family, gauging where this man and his wife stood on the ladder of suffering that I constantly updated in my head. Bereaved parents were ranked according to their age, marital status (better to have a spouse), number of children, and the circumstances of their child’s death. Some categories were toss-ups: losing a young child was worse than losing an older one because there are so many things this kid did not get to do, but it was better because the child’s full personality still had not expressed itself. My calculations always kept me off the bottom rung, allowing me to believe that I was not experiencing the worst torment in the world. But this lasted only a short while. Soon enough, I realized that the Upper East Side father might place me at the bottom of his own ladder. There were no winners in this game.
Other sections of the newspaper no longer made sense
—for instance the New York Times’ weekly feature about a New Yorker’s Sunday routine. Written in the present tense, this series suggests that all Sundays resemble one another—that life proceeds without catastrophic disruption from one tranquil weekend to the next. Once upon a time, Alison and I had come to New York to partake in this fantasy world of organic markets, neighborhood joints, afternoon outings to the park, and fulfilling careers. That was the routine to which we had aspired.
Now, my thoughts went to New Yorkers for whom Sundays were days of agony, those who did not even notice that Sunday had arrived, and others who, unable to leave the house, whiled the hours away on a couch as they waited for the day to end. And also those who could not stay put. I wanted to learn about the aimless wanderings of New Yorkers who had never done anything aimlessly before but now found the streets more welcoming than their homes. These men and women scanned the faces of passers-by because they knew that at any point in time other people were adrift, on Sundays as on every other day.
I, too, now scanned faces while wandering the streets: Houston and Varick, Canal and the Bowery, sometimes up and down Hudson River Park although it was not easy to walk alongside water. The first months of grief were about retreating and at the same time opening up to the sorrow of a world that was both shrinking and expanding. It was about pain that seemed without equal and equals who had previously seemed without pain. Neither was true, and this sudden awareness, this unrelenting communion proved piercing and awe-inspiring. People showed me things they had kept hidden, and I did the same. Raw intimacy was the only admissible currency. Anything less was an offense to Owen.
—
Disaster Falls Page 4