Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
In this piercing memoir, a father maps the contours of his grief and explores how his family navigates the unthinkable loss of eight-year-old Owen.
On a day like any other, on a rafting trip down Utah s Green River, Stephane Gerson s eight-year-old son, Owen, drowned in a spot known as Disaster Falls. That same night, as darkness fell, Stephane 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. Gerson captures the different ways of grieving that threatened to isolate each of them in their post-Owen worlds and then, with beautiful specificity, shows how he and Alison preserved and reconfigured their marriage from within. Blending family history (including the good death of his father, which offers a very different perspective on mortality) and the natural history of the river, he provides an expansive, unflinching meditation on loss, our responsibilities toward our children, and the stories we tell ourselves in the wake of traumatic events.
Slowly, inexorably, Gerson writes his way back to Owen, straight to the singularity that cleaved his life into before and after, creating a portrait of grief iridescent in its fullness, and unexpectedly consoling."
Synopsis
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, Stephane Gerson s eight-year-old son, Owen, drowned in a spot known as Disaster Falls. That same night, as darkness fell, Stephane 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 Fallschronicles the aftermath of that day and their shared determination to stay true to Alison s resolution. At the heart of the book is Stephane s portrait of a marriage critically 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, Stephane says, when Alison shows him a selfie Owen had taken. He feels so close, she says.) With beautiful specificity, Stephane shows how they resist that isolation and reconfigure their marriage from within.
As Stephane 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 enlarges Stephane s 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."