Moving On…

Disaster Falls – A Family Story – Stephane Gerson (Crown Books)

Lines like “no parent should ever have to bury/mourn a child” have become cliché when parents, all too often, lose a child. Much like the life of a child there is no instruction manual that comes with how to deal with losing a child.

While Stephane Gerson’s Disaster Falls certainly is not that instruction manual, it is a moving, raw testament of one family, the author’s family struggles with that difficult question. What would I do? What would you do? That is a question that is a natural response has you sift through the pages of this book. It is a question that I can honestly say I cannot answer and quite frankly don’t want to address, let alone think about.

Gerson works his way through how the family processed the grief, the varying perspectives; his own, his wife, his older son as the struggled with the loss of eight year old Owen due a a rafting accident on a family trip.

The story is introspective and at times profound as Gerson works through the layers of the family’s reaction to this tragic loss. He adds to that by working through his relationship with his own father. He offers up an interesting take on how we view death; his father’s passing as relief and his son’s as tragic.