Welp, I’m bawling.
Over at the New York Times, Jayson Greene, a senior editor at Pitchfork, writes about his daughter Greta, who was killed when she was just 2 years old.
A piece of masonry fell eight stories from an improperly maintained building and struck her in the head while she sat on a bench on the Upper West Side of Manhattan with her grandmother. No single agent set it on its path: It wasn’t knocked off scaffolding by the poorly placed heel of a construction worker, or fumbled from careless hands. Negligence, coupled with a series of bureaucratic failures, led it to simply sigh loose, a piece of impersonal calamity sent to rearrange the structure and meaning of our universe.
She was rushed to the hospital, where she underwent emergency brain surgery, but she never regained consciousness. She was declared brain-dead, and my wife and I donated her organs. She was our only child.
Greene wrote the essay seven weeks after his son’s birth; Greta would’ve been exactly 3 1/2 years old then.
With his birth, I have become a father to a living child and a spirit — one child on this side of the curtain, and another whispering from beneath it. The confusion is constant, and in my moments of strength I succumb to it. I had a child die, and I chose to become a father again. There can be no greater definition of stupidity or bravery; insanity or clarity; hubris or grace.
He goes on to say that he will grieve his daughter forever, writing, "My son will always have a dead sister; when I am 50, my heart will ache in this exact same way it does today."
You should really read the whole thing. It’s a lovely, brave, moving tribute to Greta, and I imagine many of us won’t forget her after reading it.
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Laura Beck is a Los Angeles-based TV writer and frequent contributor to Cosmopolitan.com — her work has appeared in the New York Times, New Yorker, Jezebel, and the Village Voice.
