LOCKHART, Texas – Aaron Parsley went to bed the night before the Fourth of July after enjoying a day along the Guadalupe River with his family.
Hours later, he woke in the dark to rushing water and a home being ripped apart around them.
“We went to bed a happy family,” Parsley said. “And we woke up in the middle of the night in a death trap.”
Parsley, a senior editor at Texas Monthly, was among the many along the Guadalupe River who were thrust into catastrophe when floodwaters tore apart homes and carried people downstream.
Parsley and his husband, Patrick, along with his father, sister, brother-in-law, niece and nephew were swept into the river.
Not everyone made it out.
“We lost my nephew, Clay,” Parsley said. “And it’s the most horrific morning of my life. And we’ve been dealing with the consequences ever since.”
Parsley said he lived through the flood by chance.
“I survived by sheer luck, I think,” he said. “I managed to get myself into a tree — a tree that held.”
What Parsley has done in the year since has been far more deliberate: reporting and writing about his loss and survival.
Through articles and a podcast for Texas Monthly, he has told his family’s story publicly while also using the work as a private form of processing — a way to grieve, to remember and to keep moving forward.
“The experience of survival changes you,” Parsley said. “It puts things in perspective. It changes your priorities.”
He said the flood reshaped the way he and his husband think about the future.
“Before the flood, I think I was more cautious around plans for my life and our life — my husband and I’s life together,” he said.
“I don’t want to say that we’re living on borrowed time,” Parsley added, “but it does feel like we’ve been given a chance to continue our story.”
That shift has come with tangible change. Parsley and Patrick have moved into a new home, trading the bustle of Austin for life in Lockhart, a smaller community southeast of the city.
Standing in a studio space tied to Patrick’s creative pursuit of painting professionally, Parsley described the move as part of a broader reordering of what matters.
“This kind of represents to me that shift in priority since the flood,” he said.
He said the disaster clarified what he wanted most in the moments when he wasn’t sure he would survive: time.
“When I was unsure about whether or not I would survive and unsure about whether I would see my husband again, the thought that I had more than anything was that I want more time with him,” Parsley said. “And I want him to have what he wants.”
Parsley’s account of what happened has received national recognition, including a Pulitzer Prize, but he emphasized that the flood’s impact continues long after headlines fade. Along the Guadalupe, he said, there are countless families still navigating loss and rebuilding.
“There are stories all up and down the river of loss, but also of resilience,” Parsley said. “And I think, you know, I will follow the story.”
For Parsley and his family, that story is ongoing — written in memory, in grief and in the deliberate choice to keep living.
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