Poetry and death …

… Edward Hirsch: ‘Many of us carry the dead around with us. We shouldn’t feel ashamed of that’ | Books | The Guardian. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)

 On 26 August 2011, on the night that Hurricane Irene screamed into New York, Hirsch’s only son, Gabriel, aged 22, went out to meet a friend for a drink. He ended up at a party in New Jersey, following a lead on the website Craigslist. At the party it seems he was given a club drug, GHB, probably in a drink. Gabriel, who had been diagnosed with Tourette’s syndrome as a child, and who was at the independent end of the autistic spectrum, became violently sick and had a seizure. An ambulance took him to a hospital, where he died, shortly after six in the morning, from cardiac arrest. Hirsch and his ex-wife, Janet Landay, did not know these facts for three days. Hurricane Irene and its fallout was occupying the city police who had no time to search for missing 22-year-olds with known nocturnal tendencies. The poet himself wandered the storm-battered city in search of his lost son before eventually finding him at the hospital morgue.