Gerson - Disaster Falls: a family story

Disaster Falls is prismatic, fractalit proceeds like an existential detective novel, beginning with a big bang of grief, after which the author begins to assemble associations, resonances, and clues, each a point of light guiding him and his family from death to life. The books suspense emanates from watching the author piece meaning back together, creating amidst darkness constellations entirely new. THOMAS BELLER, author of J.D. Salinger: The Escape Artist

Keenly observed and deeply felt, this book is not only a powerful reflection on grief and loss, but also an intimately textured history of fathers and sons. An unflinchingly honest, moving memoir of loss and recovery. KIRKUS REVIEWS

Disaster Falls is a fathers grief-stricken book, a work of expiation, homage, and remembrance, and it moved me, as it will move many others, because it is authentic, resonant and true, deeply thoughtful, utterly real. EDWARD HIRSCH, author of Gabriel: A Poem

StunningDisaster Falls leaps beyond death, avoiding the maudlin by turning toward connection. Gerson meditates on how to raise children to be confident, life-living risk-takers in spite of danger, and shares a generous portrait of a marriage in which husband and wife give each other space in grief and love. An astonishing book.

CHRISTA PARRAVANI, author of Her: A Memoir

This diamond-sharp book is both meticulous and breathtaking.While [Gerson] takes us to the precipice of the fatality, its as if the accident itself is secondary to the larger story. This creates a narrative tension.Though we know the outcome, we hold our breath as he and Owen approach the falls.A beautiful book, even as it deals with unthinkable anguish.

LIBRARY JOURNAL (starred)

W hat we came to call the accident occurred on the Green River, near the border between Utah and Colorado. Life was goodfilled 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.

Owens 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 boyfamily vacationturbulent watersaggressive searchtruly tragic. There is nothing to be drawn from these pieces, neither new information nor the comfort, however contrived, of obituaries and immortalization. My sons 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 timeperhaps 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 parents 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.