Photo: Courtesy Jayson Greene
Death is already an unsettling prospect, but when a child dies, it becomes unimaginable.
In May 2015, Greene and his wife Stacy’s 2-year-old daughter, Greta, waskilled after a piece of windowsill fell on her headfrom eight stories above. She’d been sitting on a bench with her maternal grandmother in N.Y.C.’s Upper West Side, discussing a kids’ play,Chuggington,they’d seen the night before, the author writes. Greta was fascinated with the character Koko, a talking train car whose friends help her get back on the track after she derails.
It was the last thing his little girl talked about. After the accident, Greta underwent brain surgery, but she never regained consciousness, according to Greene’s 2016 opinion piece inThe New York Times.
The cover ofOnce More We Saw Stars.
InOnce More We Saw Stars, Greene recalls the painful hours he and his family sat in the hospital waiting room, bracing for the worst possible news.
“We know Greta is going to die, all of us, although we haven’t allowed the thought into our conscious minds yet,” Greene writes, according toVulture. “None of us is ready for it to maraud through our subconscious, killing and burning everything it sees. But we hear the banging at the gates. We glance around us, realizing 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.”
After Gretawas declared brain-dead, theGreenes were given a private moment to decide if they wanted to donate her organs.
“Stacy and I sit alone. In retrospect, I don’t think either of us had a moment’s doubt,” Greene recalls, per the excerpt. “I am the writer, the overexplainer who strains to shut up so that others can avail themselves of oxygen. But it is Stacy who finds and speaks the words we need: ‘Ineed it to mean something,’ she tells me. ‘Maybe this way, it won’t be for nothing.’ ”
He continues, “I nod. I do not know from what clear water source she is drawing, but I know that she has found her way directly to our truth for both of us.”
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Later in the excerpt, Greene writes about running in the park for the first time after Greta’s death. It is there that he senses her spirit, according toVulture.
In September 2016, Greene and his wife welcomed their second child, son Harrison. The fact that Stacy was pregnant while he was writing made the memoir feel like a kind of “reckoning,” GreenetoldPublisher’s Weeklylast month.
“It became a place of reckoning. How much trauma could I purge and how much could I reckon with before we were tasked with caring for another child?” Greene said.“I wrote it on a countdown clock with the idea that we were going to clear a peaceful space for Harrison when he entered our lives.”
Jayson Greene and daughter Greta.Facebook
He continued, “It was unspeakably important to me that our child not be born into a haunted version of the life we gave to Greta or to grow up with a sense that their parents were broken. I loaded every possible metaphysical stake you could pile onto one project. I said, ‘Thisis going to be the story ofme, my wife, my daughter and my unborn son. ‘ ” And so it is.
“I grope for my phone, blindly choosing the most recent document, a mess of to-dos and grocery lists,” he writes, according toVulture. “Underneath a reminder to pick up pita and above a confirmation number for a UPS delivery, I write, ‘There will be more light upon this earth for me.’ ”
You can read thefull excerpt on vulture.comand pre-orderOnce More We Saw Stars: A Memoironamazon.comnow, ahead of its May 14 release.
source: people.com
