How the Texas floods forever changed one family

**David Greene** (0:00)
Hey there, this is David Greene. I'm gonna be guest hosting In Conversation until Shumita returns from parental leave. Before we get into today's episode, just a warning that this episode does contain descriptions of child loss, drowning, and grief. This is In Conversation from Apple News. I'm David Greene in for Shumita Basu. Today, one family story of survival and healing after the Texas floods.
In the early morning of July 4th, 2025, Texas Monthly editor Aaron Parsley was at his family's home on the Guadalupe River northwest of San Antonio. He was there for the holiday weekend with his husband Patrick, his dad Clint, his sister Alyssa, her husband Lance, and their two small children, Rosemary and Clay. Aaron's dad and stepmom bought the house back in 2021 as a place for the family to vacation and to watch their grandkids grow up.

**Aaron Parsley** (1:05)
It sat on a stretch of the river that's really wide and really slow and really beautiful, lined with cypress trees. It's idyllic. It's beautiful.

**David Greene** (1:15)
Rain was in the forecast. The area was flood prone, but their house was built for it. It sat on huge concrete pillars, 20 feet off the ground, above the likely flood zone.

**Aaron Parsley** (1:27)
We know that this river floods and we thought that we were safe. It's really, really hard to imagine the river coming out of its banks and crawling all the way up the yard and up those pillars and onto the deck and into the house.

**David Greene** (1:43)
But tragically, that is exactly what happened. Around 4 a.m., the family woke up to water rapidly rising around their home.

**Aaron Parsley** (1:52)
I remember hearing the debris hitting the house. I remember seeing the lamps swing. I remember when the floor seemed to move. We saw water coming in along the walls and in a bedroom that's in the middle of the house.
My dad remembers when he walked into the bedroom and the carpet was floating.

**David Greene** (2:07)
They quickly realized there was no escape. 911 dispatchers said that they didn't even know when or if rescue would come. Then suddenly, the house ripped apart and the family was separated in the surging water.
Aaron survived the night by clinging to a tree. Aaron's sister, Alyssa, held on to her two children as best she could. Her four-year-old daughter Rosemary in one arm and her nearly two-year-old son Clay in the other. But the water was too strong. Clay was swept away.
Later, as the floodwater receded and rescue crews searched the area, over 130 people were found dead, including Clay, and more than 30 other children, many of whom were at a nearby summer camp called Camp Mystic.

**Aaron Parsley** (3:06)
We never could have imagined the scale of what was about to happen.

**David Greene** (3:10)
Aaron's harrowing account of what happened to his family that night won the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing. He's out now with another piece about their year since the flood, and he has a new podcast about the disaster. I sat down with Aaron to talk about his story of survival and what grief and recovery have looked like for his family and for his community nearly one year after the flood.
I wonder if we could kind of talk through the immediate aftermath. What did the area look like that morning when you survived the night and reunited with most of your family and came down from that tree?

**Aaron Parsley** (3:53)
Well, I had a pretty limited view. I was in the tree and it was dark, and I got out of the tree and it was light. I was at the edge of that river right in front of this home that is owned by a couple that lived there part-time.
I went right up their yard, up this hill and into their home.
I stayed there with my husband, Patrick, until we were evacuated by some first responders who came hours later. They drove us to Ingram Elementary, which was a reunification center that was just getting set up when we were there. I could see houses destroyed. I could see trees that had come down all over the place. I could see cars that looked like crumbled tin cans, sheds, large objects, just stuff everywhere, mud and sticks and debris. It looked like another world.

**David Greene** (4:51)
I imagine you experiencing this in different ways. You're a journalist and I could imagine the instinct of, I'm going to take in this scene and understand the scope, but also you had confronted the reality of maybe never seeing your husband again.
How, in a moment so traumatic, do you balance the writerly side of you taking in something so terrible, and also the personal trauma of both loss and survival?