Grief is a bottomless emotion whose unforgiving depths have been explored by many fine writers. But few have ventured into its most harrowing corner with such unblinking reportorial awareness as Jayson Greene, author of the extraordinary memoir Once More We Saw Stars.
On the morning of 17 May 2015, Greene and his wife, Stacy, awoke in their Brooklyn apartment from a much-needed long sleep. In a rare case of respite, it had been uninterrupted by Greta, their energetic two-year-old, whose eagerness to start the day usually began at 4.30am. She was staying with her grandmother in Manhattan.
The couple had both felt the need of a break from the demands of their jobs and a precociously curious toddler. They had been getting grizzly with each other, but now on this lazy spring Sunday morning they savoured the quiet and enjoyed looking at photos of what their daughter was up to across town, texted to them by Stacy’s mother, Susan.
They were on the way to see a film when they both noticed that they had missed calls from Susan. When they got in touch with her they learned that there had been an accident. A bad one. Susan and Greta were on their way to the hospital. A piece of masonry had fallen from the eighth floor of a poorly maintained building and hit both of them, Susan on her leg, Greta on her head.
Greene and his wife rushed to their daughter’s bedside, but she was gravely injured. Staff will operate to save Greta’s life, her parents are informed, but she is extremely unlikely to survive.
“We glance around us,” writes Greene in his piercingly limpid prose, “realising this is the last we’ll ever see of the world as we’ve known it. Whatever comes next will raze everything to the ground.”
Greta is declared brain dead. Her parents make the instinctive but heartbreaking decision to donate her organs for transplantation. And so begins a rapid descent into that unimaginable hell that haunts every parent’s nightmares. In the hospital, the couple are given a folder on how to deal with grief: “Cry as often as you need”; “Talk about your loved one as much or as little as you like”.
“They are my first set of instructions on how to breathe on this new planet,” Greene writes.
A former senior editor at Pitchfork, the online music magazine, Greene is now in his late 30s. He’s a round-faced man in checked shirt, glasses and a day’s shadow of stubble. He looks like the archetypal Brooklyn parent, the kind of guy you’d see in countless hip cafes with a stroller and a laptop.
But he’s not like everyone else because he’s been through an annihilating experience, something that we tell ourselves will never happen. He mockingly describes himself in the book as a “rock star of grief”, noting that even among the bereaved his freakishly cruel loss had provided him with a special status.
I remember when my daughter was very young, she was anxious about the world around her. Most parents of small children have a heightened sensitivity to potential threats – sharp knives, steep stairs – but my job was to reassure her that, as I used to say, bad things don’t just fall out of the sky. What do you do when a loose brick does exactly that and crushes your precious daughter’s skull?
“Trauma is a rip in your understanding of the universe,” says Greene, Skyping from New York. “The idea that you can prepare for trauma is wrong. You can’t. Trauma is the unforeseen and the terrible. I think people are drawn to stories in which terrible things happen because in some ways they are one of the most proven mechanisms we have in making sense of the world and making sense of our emotions.”
His book is anything but a misery memoir, though it certainly includes vivid descriptions of people in the grip of unbearable suffering. More than anything it’s a survival memoir, the story of a couple who were engaged in that everyday struggle to establish a family in a big, bustling city, only to discover what “struggle” can really involve.
The adjustment required in losing a healthy, happy daughter out of the blue is too much for the human mind to absorb. There’s the basic acceptance that you’re never going to see your beautiful child again, which is hard enough, but beyond that an infinity of things and incidents tormenting you with what she once did, what she’d be doing if she were alive and all the many future events she won’t be there to experience.
Many couples find that they can’t go through this brutal terrain together, because the other person is a permanent reminder of what they’ve both lost, and also because people grieve in different ways that are very often not compatible. Soon after Greta’s death, Greene confides in his brother that he fears losing Stacy as well. But as we learn in the book, they remain together, if anything more unified in their pain than they were in their joy. How did they find their way to that enhanced understanding?
“I think that once Greta died our compassion for each other’s suffering was so great that it took the place of any petty annoyances that make up a marriage. There was no time for that, quite honestly. If in the course of an evening your spouse says something that rubs you up the wrong way because you’re also stressed or tired, you often don’t learn to control your momentary irritation. You lose sight that it doesn’t matter if you disagree over whether you should have chicken or something. When you’re both grieving your child and have such an ultimate focus on how much pain the other is in, we instinctively huddled towards each other. We’d already lost so much there was no way we could fathom losing the other.”
Aside from Stacy and an impressive network of friends and family, Greene’s greatest help was writing. He says that four days after Greta’s accident, he began typing notes to himself on his phone to try to make sense of what he was feeling. At first, this was purely a survival mechanism, a means of withstanding the overwhelming onrush of emotions that led to helpless sobbing fits, poisonous rage and the unshakeable feeling that life was no longer worth living.
But as time went on, he began to realise that there was something more than self-therapy taking shape. He had read several books that dealt with bereavement and found them helpful. He sensed that he too might make a valuable contribution.
“It’s universally famous now but Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air is a beautiful story of the inherent and ultimate meaning of an existence,” he says. “Another book that meant a lot to Stacy and to me was a graphic novel called Rosalie Lightning, written and illustrated by Tom Hart – he and his wife lost their daughter to sudden unexplained death syndrome around the same age as Greta.”
He also cites The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Van der Kolk, which describes the physiological processes of trauma, and The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion’s celebrated account of the period following the death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne. He says he’s reluctant to mention it because Didion has such a formidable body of work, and this details her lowest times, “yet when I needed that book it was profoundly meaningful”.
Both Greene and his wife returned quickly to work, in search of distraction, though they were offered further time off. But all the understanding, wisdom and support in the world can’t fill the void left by a beloved child. The couple kept searching for some deeper consolation. Though neither was religious they went to a grief retreat, where a medium was present, and also visited a spiritual sanctuary in New Mexico that they had identified from Hart’s graphic novel. You can feel them grappling with the outer edges of their reason, trying to extract meaning from the meaningless, solace from the unyielding silence.
“In some ways, the story I tell in the book is of two full-grown adults bumbling their way and learning a language that we’d never spoken,” he says. “I do see the world differently in the light of Greta’s death. I feel that I respond to life as it happens to me. I couldn’t help but be taught by her death that there were larger forces that, in order for me to keep living, to keep surviving and to rediscover any relationship to hope, I needed to get in touch with. I definitely consider my life to have a spiritual dimension that did not exist in any concentrated way when Greta was here.”
He says he still has no belief system, but that he’s learned not to try to place things that lie beyond his comprehension into some pattern of larger sense.
“Would Stacy and I have ever sat down with a medium before on purpose? Absolutely not. But that medium gave us something very real and powerful and tangible. She helped us get in touch with our grief and our love. I would never dream of discounting the experience we had there, because it was meaningful to us.”
All these efforts to get through the aftermath of Greta’s death, with its blasted vista of broken dreams and shattered assumptions, helped bring the couple to the life-affirming decision to try to have another child. Less than 18 months after his sister’s accident, a boy called Harrison entered the world, screaming with hope and new possibilities.
In most respects, we live in a much more child-focused universe today than perhaps at any time in the past. As the western world has become a progressively less lethal place for babies and young children, parental apprehension of danger has only grown. But how does a parent who has lost a child in such unforeseeable circumstances go about raising another without succumbing to fear and overprotectiveness?
“I can say that in terms of Greta’s accident, because what happened was so random and so freakish, we were faced with a choice. We could either be afraid of everything, because anything could happen and any random element of our environment could somehow become deadly, or we could step back and acknowledge that we lived in a world where freakish things did happen occasionally and one happened to us, and we can choose to be afraid of nothing. And I think in choosing to give birth to Harrison and raise him we’re explicitly choosing the latter.”
There are many lessons about the human spirit to be drawn from Greene’s moving testament to parental love and loss, but perhaps the most vital is that love is a mighty force, capable of raising us to the very pinnacle of being and into its darkest abyss. But love persists, as do we, and sometimes it can find a way forward when none seems to exist.
I tell Greene that, while reading his book, I felt compelled to send a gushing message to my younger daughter who is travelling in the far east. She wrote back: “Aw thanks Dad. What spurred that?”
He gives me a broad grin and says: “I couldn’t think of any better feedback to get than that.”
Once More We Saw Stars by Jayson Greene is published on 16 May by Hodder & Stoughton (£16.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
An extract from Once More We Saw Stars: going back to work
Two weeks after coming home, we go back to work. The timing is absurd, barbaric. But when you are in shock, just about any activity seems perfectly reasonable. Our respective bosses assure us we can take all the time we need, but we feel an instinctive urge to plow headlong into groups of people, to be handed projects.
I return to my editor position at Pitchfork, a website where I’ve freelanced for years. On my first day, I sit on the subway feeling bruised all over, like I might burst into tears if someone poked me. People at my office wince when they see me; they treat me with extraordinary kindness and care, but I feel them suppressing shudders behind my back.
I am ice-skating along the surface of my shock, and nothing I do seems unusual or beyond the pale. No one expects anything from me. I come to work, or I don’t. I slip in and out of the office, disappearing halfway through the day if I need to with nothing but a text to a coworker. It is a tremendous and scary freedom.
I learn something hidden and unpleasant about my chosen profession in these weeks. Yes, listening to music can be life affirming, a conduit to your deepest emotions. It can also be simply noise, a horse blanket blotting out sensation.
There is one album, by two young women in LA who call themselves Girlpool, that pierces the ice. It is campfire music, two guitar chords hinted at by fingers and lyrics about the dawning realisations of youth, the ones that feel like sunrise on your entire brain. I keep one song close, called “I Like That You Can See It.” I try to hold this thought in front of me.
Apart from brief moments like these, time passes mostly soundlessly. There are days when I am confused, panicked, like I’ve woken up in a dark room with unfamiliar contours: What is it? What is it that feels so awful? Then I calm down and I remember: Oh yes, I am in hell. The thought places me in time and space, like a dot dropped on a map. Once I am armed with this knowledge, my eyes clear, my walk straightens, my breathing slows.
Having exited the blaze of grief standing upright, we now find ourselves flattened by its drudgery. We go to work every day and then discuss the problems we tackled at a different restaurant every night, over food we barely taste. We drink wine, but not too much. We watch a few hours of one show or another, then go to bed, then sleep past 8am every day. We do not scream at anyone. Neither of us gets sick.
As long as your situation is unique, exceptional, there always remains the chance that things will revert back to “normal” if only you have the strength to endure it. “Haven’t we done this long enough?” Stacy sometimes says plaintively. “Can’t we have her back now?” Everyone tells us they are in awe of us. “I am in awe of your strength,” friends tell us. “You two are an inspiration.” I grow to hate the sound of these words, a steady drip from a faucet I want to yank shut with a wrench. “I feel like a coma patient being congratulated for not dying,” I tell Stacy.
Even worse than this ever-present concern and attention is the looming threat that it might disappear. On the one hand, coping with loss under a spotlight is intolerable. On the other hand, there is succor to be drawn from all that awe and care.
The idea that things will go back to normal – that I will be expected not only to keep on living but to gamely leap hurdles—tax season, crowded commutes, deadlines—makes me think about how the real pain isn’t in the leg being mangled. It’s in the way the bone sets.
© Jayson Greene.
This is an edited extract
