Proof that love really IS what survives of us
JAYsON gReeNe never expected to become a connoisseur of the best places to scream, unheard, in New York.
But when a chunk of masonry fell eight storeys and killed his two-year-old daughter, greta, in August 2015, the music journalist often needed to yowl out his rage and grief.
He recommends: ‘early morning malls, before the shops have raised their shutters; one-way streets in Brooklyn’s industrial sector, surrounded by nothing but parked trucks and vacant warehouses . . . i make the city quake, rattling loose screws and hearing myself bounce off the walls.’ His wife stacy screamed in the car. Her brother Jack drank. Her mother susan struggled to leave her apartment.
susan had been looking after greta for the weekend when the accident happened. she was sitting on a bench with her granddaughter when the brick fell, striking her legs and greta’s head. it was a random catastrophe that nobody could process.
Reporters later interviewed the aide of the elderly woman whose windowsill had crumbled: ‘it was like an evil force reached down . . .’ she said.
‘it should have been me,’ said susan, when Jayson and stacy arrived at the hospital. Doctors did their best to save greta, but the child’s injuries were too severe. instead, they sat around her bed, willing her to keep breathing until her organs could be removed to help others.
Despite the staples holding her tiny head together, Jayson felt a strange urge to pull out his phone and snap one final photo, but a kindly nurse stayed his hand.
Jayson had spent the past two years protecting his daughter from choking hazards and sharp corners. then this. the story is
almost unbearable. Yet Greene’s account of his loss is remarkably uplifting. It’s hard- won proof that love can survive our worst fears and our darkest, most desperate emotions.
Cut adrift by their grief, the couple attend a variety of workshops to help them learn to live with it. They attend seminars and write letters to their lost child.
Jayson is cynical about the slick catchphrases of the bereavement industry — but surprises himself by how much the sessions release in him. The lonely screamer is encouraged to punch pillows in a room full of people bawling along with him: ‘I hate happy families!’
Lifelong sceptics, the pair visit a medium and travel to the desert to engage in a spiritual journey to make peace with Greta. There’s a ritual with a dead dove and some tobacco. Later, they will lie down while a man beats a drum to invoke their ‘spirit animals’. Jayson has a vision in which an eagle rips his heart from his chest: ‘I become Greta and Greta becomes me.’
Their second child, a boy called Harrison, arrived one year and three months after Greta’s death.
Jayson looks at a shelf of diapers: ‘I remember, briefly, when I wasn’t buying diapers any more because my kid was dead. My chest compresses and I take some odd gulping breaths to avoid sobbing in the checkout line.’
But, with each breath, Harrison is teaching them: ‘Sometimes, children live. We are still here, and we must learn to embrace our fragile lives.’