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Disaster Falls: A Family Story - Hardcover

Gerson, Stephane

 
9781101906699: Disaster Falls: A Family Story
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1101906693 ISBN 13: 9781101906699
Verlag: Crown, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

A haunting chronicle of what endures when the world we know is swept away
 
On a day like any other, on a rafting trip down Utah’s Green River, Stéphane Gerson’s eight-year-old son, Owen, drowned in a spot known as Disaster Falls. That night, as darkness fell, Stéphane huddled in a tent with his wife, Alison, and their older son, Julian, trying to understand what seemed inconceivable. “It’s just the three of us now,” Alison said over the sounds of a light rain and, nearby, the rushing river. “We cannot do it alone. We have to stick together.”

Disaster Falls chronicles the aftermath of that day and their shared determination to stay true to Alison’s resolution. At the heart of the book is an unflinching portrait of a marriage tested. Husband and wife grieve in radically different ways that threaten to isolate each of them in their post-Owen worlds. (“He feels so far,” Stéphane says when Alison shows him a selfie Owen had taken. “He feels so close,” she says.) With beautiful specificity, Stéphane shows how they resist that isolation and reconfigure their marriage from within.

As Stéphane navigates his grief, the memoir expands to explore how society reacts to the death of a child. He depicts the “good death” of his father, which reveals an altogther different perspective on mortality. He excavates the history of the Green River—rife with hazards not mentioned in the rafting company’s brochures. He explores how stories can both memorialize and obscure a person’s life—and how they can rescue us.

Disaster Falls is a powerful account of a life cleaved in two—raw, truthful, and unexpectedly consoling.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Stéphane Gerson is a cultural historian and a professor of French studies at New York University. He has won several awards, including the Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History and the Laurence Wylie Prize in French Cultural Studies. He lives in Manhattan and Woodstock, New York, with his family. Visit his website at DisasterFalls.com.

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9781101906699|excerpt

Gerson / DISASTER FALLS

One

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. More often, they 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...

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Verlag
Crown
Erscheinungsdatum
2017
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1101906693
ISBN 13 
9781101906699
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
272
Kontakt zum Hersteller
CROWN
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