August 26, 2021 • 42 mins
In this bonus episode, Dani speaks with writer Jennifer Senior about her cover story ‘What Bobby McIlvaine Left Behind’ for the September 2021 issue of The Atlantic.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. I'm
Danny Shapiro and this is a special bonus episode of
Family Secrets. The secrets that are kept from us, the
secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we keep
(00:20):
from ourselves. My guest today is the journalist Jennifer sr,
who joins me in conversation to discuss her extraordinarily moving
cover story in this month's Atlantic. Jen's story is about
a family, the macle Veins, who lost their son Bobby,
in the attacks of nine eleven, which, unbelievably enough, happened
(00:43):
twenty years ago. You had a personal connection to the
macle Veins, Yes, although the funny thing is, how well
do you know these kinds of people? Really? I will
(01:05):
describe you to you how I knew them, and you'll
see they didn't etch themselves particularly deeply into my brain
until after they had lost Bobby, which is a sad
thing to say. They were the parents of my brother's roommate,
both in college and in young adulthood. My brother moved
into Princeton, you know, it's freshman year. He throws his
(01:25):
stuff on a bunk bed, and the kid on the
other bunk bed was Bobby McIlvaine. And so when did
I see cocle Van's I saw them if we were
at the end of the year picking up my brother
or graduation, or then when the two of them were
living in New York. I would see them if I
just happened to run into them because they were in
town and I was picking something up, and my brother says,
(01:48):
you know, it wasn't a lot. I really didn't get
to know them until after Bobby died. Um. And my
impression of them is just that they were saintly warm
people who had devoted their lives to doing good in
the world. They were both teachers. They one taught, you know,
(02:08):
kids who were troubled teens who were in an adolescent
psych ward at a local hospital. Another taught reading in
a trailer in a parking lot of a Catholic school.
They were lovely people. Oh and and his brother was
this this cheerful, sweet kid you know, who was younger
and kind of goofy and uh and not nearly the
(02:31):
go getter that his older brother was, but very funny.
And Bobby made a much bigger and more singular impression
upon you. It seems during the time that you knew him.
Oh God, yeah, Bobby like a one off. He was
like a human being that never went into full production.
(02:52):
You know what I mean? It was he was an
exceptional kid. Nobody in his family expected him to go
to an Ivy League school, working class, um, you know,
Irish Catholic family. Uh, without any kind of expectation that
he would go off and conquer the Ivy League. And
he just came out freakishly smart even as this young kid.
(03:15):
And uh when I met him, he was always just
filled those ideas, very lively conversation, very precocious um charisma
personified I think intimidating to some people who knew him
until they got to know him to realize that inside
he was just a warm piece of peach pie. Um.
(03:37):
He just was dazzling and was as if he had
been sort of flung into the world from a sling shot,
you know what I mean. He just had lots of
purpose um and had that air about him that any
self invented person does. They're just kind of unstoppable. There's
a moment in your piece for you describe he was
also athletic, and there's this moment where you describe a
(03:58):
teenage Bobby matt Vane throwing an immaculate pass uh as
a basketball player that sets up an immaculate shot that
flies right over the teenage head of Kobe Bryant. I mean,
I mean it just sounds like on every level, this
kid was as you describe, but just a one off,
completely extraordinary. He was a miracle, yeah. I mean, and
(04:20):
Kobe Bryant. That's the other thing, right, there's something almost
Zelig like or Forrest Gumpian about Bobby's trajectory. Right. They
wound up playing each other in high school and they
were the two best kids on their team, and Bobby
got sixteen points off of Kobe and his teammates. I mean,
that's extraordinary. That became the stuff of legend in the
(04:41):
mclavaine family as Kobe Bryant became Kobe Bryant. Um. Then
Bobby goes up to and get the hand pick to
take a class with Tony Morrison. And when when Bobby dies,
Tony Morrison sends his family not one but two condolence
notes saying, what is star Bobby was? And he just
kept intersecting with exceptional people, you know, that's the kind
(05:05):
of guy he was so on on nine eleven. At first,
when the planes hit the towers, there wasn't a sense
in the family or among Bobby's friends that that Bobby
was in the towers right there. It was just um,
(05:25):
this horrific thing that was unfolding. But there was no
reason to He didn't work there, he didn't live right there.
There was no reason to think that he would have
been there. He worked nearer there, he was adjacent, right
But but and here's what's interesting. His mother had a
full on premonition, a real deep, visceral sense that something
(05:46):
wasn't matter. It was more than just a chirp in
her stomach. She really thought something was wrong. But his
father treated it like a news event. His brother had
just been in the city that Thursday and appear with him,
and he worked in Maryland. He had just moved there
to corporate communications in Maryland. It just so happened he
had to attend a conference that day, and you do
(06:09):
make things crazier. The theory about Bobby is that he
had to go to a restaurant that to windows in
the world that morning for a conference, but that he
had probably left before the planes hit, because they found
his body on the periphery of the site, and that
no one who was in windows on the world was found, right,
I mean, everybody was incinerated if they were up there.
(06:31):
So I want to quote something from from your Peace,
because really, so much of your piece is about the
shape or shapelessness or trajectory of grief and trauma, and
you right early on, the mckail vans spoke to a
therapist who warned them that each member of their family
(06:52):
would grieve differently. Imagine you're all at the top of
a mountain, she told them, But you all have broken bones,
so you can't help each other. You have to find
your own way down. It was a helpful metaphor, one
that may have saved the mcilvaine's marriage. But when I
mentioned it to Roxanne Cohen Silver, a psychology professor you see, Irvine,
(07:13):
who spent a lifetime studying the effect of sudden traumatic loss,
she immediately spotted a problem with it that suggests that
everyone will make it down. She told me, some people
never get down the mountain at all. This is one
of the many things you learn about mourning when examining
it at close range. It's idiosyncratic. Anarchic polychrome A lot
(07:35):
of the series you read about grief are great, beautiful
even they have a way of eracing individual experiences. Every
morner has a different story to tell. So what I'm
wondering is if you can tell us now the different
stories that Bobby's parents, in particular, went through in the
(08:00):
wake the long week of Bobby's death. Both Bob Sor
and Helen. Yes, Um, they are so different that they
almost look like photo negatives of one another. It really
struck me, Um, and particularly Bob Sor his story. Helen's
(08:22):
was more recognizable to me. It isn't how I think
I would have grieved, but it is a story that
I could have sort of seen and predicted. Which is
or not knowing her. So, Helen, this is how she
chose to grieve. She chose to starve her grief. She
didn't want people to pity her. She didn't want to
(08:44):
manage people's awkwardness. She didn't want to manage their discomfort
or listen to them babbling their condolences, and she didn't
want to feel terrible all the time when people accidentally
said the wrong thing to her. She went to a
different grocery store for fifteen years in order to not
run into people she knew, so that no one could
(09:04):
sit there and just start incoherently trying to console her
or muttering to preprint to you know, like pointing and gossiping.
She didn't want any of it. She would deflect, she
would joke. It was her way of coping with it,
and realized about ten years in that it wasn't serving
(09:25):
her very well to keep stoppering up all of her grief.
She realized at some point that it was making her angry,
that it was making her more of a gossip, that
she was on a shorter fuse, But she thought, no,
it is additionally compounded by the fact that I am
not allowing myself to grieve, to fully inhabit this grief.
The only act herself to do it was with this
(09:47):
group of local women, all lost children, with whom she
could speak in shorthand they all knew what it was.
They weren't going to single her ab for special pity.
She could say anything she wanted to them and it
was all okay, But they understood if she said, I
was just with a friend of mine who went on
and on and on about their child, and I just
couldn't stand listening to them talk about their child. I
(10:07):
am so jealous that she has this problem. I can't
listen to people talk about their child. They all got it,
It all made sense, but it was very hard for her.
She didn't want to be a victim. She didn't want
to be short, she didn't want to be short tempered,
you know, or hurt. All these things. She had like
a strong super ego kind of watching her own reactions.
(10:27):
That was helen. She gave the impression of having quote
unquote healed because she wasn't talking about it and she
was you know, moving on with her life. And so
it was this impossible conundrum totally one of her own making, right,
exactly right, she needed to do that in order to
(10:50):
get through the day. That was in some ways her
version of grieving was not grieving or not externally showing it.
And yet exactly something some part of her was permanently
you know, there was a scar tissue on top of
a whole bunch of stuff that had not stitched up.
There was something painfully paradoxical about this situation, right that
(11:14):
she was like all stitched up, but just a watery
mass inside. And so that was really hard. That was
really really hard for her um and she just woke
up one morning and decided she had to do something
about it, which makes her very unusual. I mean, to
make an executive decision one day that you were simply
going to be another person is extraordinary. And she actually
(11:35):
did that. She actually woke up one morning and did
that to be she decided she wanted to be somebody else,
She needed to be someone else, and so she was
going to be that person. And what was that someone else?
Someone who engaged more with her grief and who let
go of all of the anger that was just accumulating
(11:56):
in there. She really felt on some level like she
was marinating in a brain of her own resentment and
her own fury and her own hurt, and she hadn't
let it out, you know, and it was just curdling
her and curdling her insights. What you just described is
a version of a secret. It's you know, it's it's
(12:18):
this kind of almost one of the most toxic versions
because it's that bottling up, you know, the idea of
I can make this go away if I just try
hard enough, totally. And here's what's amazing, her suffering with
the secret and her son died and what must have
been the most public active mass murder in recent memory, right.
(12:42):
I mean, she was denying herself her own suffering. She
was keeping it almost from herself, and it's so poignant
and it can be so corrosive to our souls, you know,
it can just rip us up, and I think it
did her. And then meanwhile, her husband, Bobby's father, Bob Senior,
was having, as you say, a completely almost polar opposite
(13:08):
kind of way way of responding. Yes, Bob was the
polar opposite. Everything that was light colored on Helen's print
was dark color down hairs and everything that was dark
color and her print was light on his. I mean
that you just couldn't imagine two different ways of going
about grieving for Bob's Senior. It's not just that he
(13:32):
actively every day chooses to inhabit his grief and that
he cries every day, that his grief just lives very
close to the surface. You just touch him, if you,
a whole vat of grief kind of spills out. It's
not just that, it's that for him, every day is
kind of September twelve. It's like he wakes up and
(13:53):
he's as raw as he was almost the day he
discovered it. And to me, this was just an amazing
revelation because there are all these kind of cultural wide
imperatives that I think we have that, oh, you've got
to move on, You've got to move past your grief
or through your grief, or around your grief or something. Right. No,
(14:14):
not him. He had no interest. He wanted to live
in his grief. It seems like his form of grief
was about engaging with the details, real or imagined. Around
nine eleven and around Bobby's death was a way of
keeping Bobby alive exactly. I mean, he treated Bobby's death
(14:41):
as if it were an unsolved murder. He became over
time gradually very very interested in, um, all of the
I'm going to call them conspiracy theories. He never would
he calls this nine eleven truth to me, the air
conspiracy theories, that the government was behind this, that um,
(15:02):
this was an orchestrated hit. You know that the World
Trade Center was embroidered with explosives. And he became very
interested in in in sorry, explosive laid by the American
government and it was, you know, a controlled debt nation.
He had a theory for why they actually um destroyed it.
(15:22):
That's quite arcane. What got in his mind turning, though,
was that it was based on looking at the medical
examiners report of his son's death. You know, I think
what he initially was doing was simply worrying about um.
It was a very paternal instinct. He was haunted by
the idea that Bobby might have suffered right before he died,
(15:44):
that he might have expexiated, that he might have been up,
that he might have jumped right, that he didn't know
how he died. Um. And in getting medical examiner's report,
he saw how he died. I mean, he was decapitated,
and which to me suggested a giant piece of to breathe,
you know, came boring out of the sky, and then
he didn't know what hit him. But for whatever set
(16:07):
of reasons, Bob Sor decided that because most of Bobby's
injuries were on his front, not on his back, he
had he couldn't have been running away from the building,
he had to have been inside it, and that this
had to have been an inside job. So he started
doing a lot of reading. He started reading history. He
started doing all these things and came up with a
very laboratory for why the government might might have wanted
(16:30):
to destroy the World Trade Center. And you know, Bobby's
brother Jeff thinks that by saying, oh, this is merely
how he grieves, he thinks it's kind of trivializing his
efforts and that maybe so the Although what I think
is interesting is that Bob Senior said to me, in
doing this every day, he is definitely keeping his Bobby close,
(16:53):
that this is how he spends time in Bobby's company.
So I might be giving short trip to the theory
is because I don't believe in the theories. I think
the theories are wrong headed. But he does not deny
that like they serve. It serves a purpose for him.
And in doing all this research, he gets to stay
close to Bobby. He gets to do this and it's
a way to keep parenting. And it we kind of
(17:15):
forget Bobby was so young. He was so young, he
was only twenty six. He was still probably in some
way as a little boy to Bob, and he probably
wanted to actively parent him. You know. Still in some
ways this is him being a father. We'll be right back.
(17:39):
So Bobby kept he was a prolific journal keeper. He
left behind volumes and volumes of journals and thinking about
what it is to continue to parent, or to keep
someone alive, or to keep a relationship along Eve in
(18:00):
some way. You know, the journals become very very important
in this story. Helen and Bob, you know, have all
the journals. Um. There is a young woman named Jen
who is Bobby's girlfriend and is about to become Bobby's fiance.
(18:21):
He has a ring and he has asked her father
for her hand in marriage, and he um is about
to propose to her, and of course that never happens.
So Jen is his girlfriend and she doesn't have any
(18:44):
legal right to any of his possessions or belongings. And
Jen asks if she can have the last journal that
Bobby had been writing in, and Bob sr. Just hands
it to her without a thought, like, of course, here
here's a piece of Bobby. So that's a perfect summary. Um,
(19:07):
Bob Senior handed into her without giving it a second thought.
Because there they were cleaning out Bobby's bedroom, there was
his last remaining journal open on his desk, and Jen
started reading it and noticed that she was on practically
every page, so it would be perfectly natural for her
to want to have that right, and he was distributing
(19:30):
those journals anyway to everybody who was in the room.
It was my brother, it was two other friends. I
think we're there um And he was saying, you might
want to look at these in order to write your eulogies,
because me and my wife I am not being any
shape to write them. And Helen was not even in
any shape to go and clean out that bedroom. She
(19:51):
was elsewhere. And if she had been in that bedroom,
she might have stopped her husband from giving away that
final journal was it was hugely important to her that
she had every molecule of everything her son had ever had.
All the objects of the dead, a lot of them
(20:12):
can just assume almost kind of talismanic property, like they
just their proxies for the person you love. And what's
so interesting about a diary is that it's not even
the same as like a T shirt or a recovered photograph.
It's this unusual thing where you get to almost hear
that person's voice again and to spend time in their company.
(20:34):
It's not a conversation or that it's not two ways,
but you are hearing from them. And she was so
devastated when she found out that her husband had given
away this final journal, because here was this chance to
hear her son's voice one last time, and she was
being robbed at that opportunity. Particularly, I mean he was
(20:56):
at that moment. She had like all of his kind
of child journals when he was a kid, but he
wasn't a fully formed adult. It wasn't like a chance
to experience him and a grown human, you know. And
here was this most recent thing, and she she just
she didn't have it suddenly, right, So she asks Jen
(21:18):
if Jen will part with it? Correct, She asked Jen
for it. She said, I would really like to see
parts of it. I understand it's about you, but and
Jen kind of demurred. She hemmed an odd, and she
took the diary home with her. She went off to Michigan,
where she was from, and took some time by herself,
and then she came back and lived with the mcle
(21:39):
vans for about two months because she just couldn't stand
being in her apartment by herself. So there were many
opportunities for Helen to say, you know, I'd really like
to see that diary, which was no longer there, right,
It was in Jen's apartment, she had taken it and
then got off to Michigan, so the diary is not there.
(22:00):
Helen looking at this future almost daughter in law who
she doesn't know very well. She hadn't spent much time
in her company and asking for it and not getting
the response she wants, and by the end she was begging.
She was simply saying, look, if Bobby is describing a tree,
can you just give me the words, Just tell me
(22:22):
what he says about the tree. I just want the words,
just the words. And then still I never did it,
and her stay there ended in terrible tension, and with
Jen slamming the door behind her, bursting into tears and
getting in her car and driving off. And you never
(22:43):
saw the Macaile names again. And when I saw Helen before,
you know, to do this story Jen, she couldn't come
up with Jenn's last name. She kept saying, it's something short,
it's like Jen Cove. And I said it was Jennifer
Cobb and she said that's right, cop C O B B.
And I said she really had forgotten. She had buried
(23:08):
her to which she buried her son. She had just forgotten.
It always really amazes me and humbles me. To think
about what the ways in which our memories, especially our
memories under the pressure of intense emotion UM just either
(23:32):
end up with these huge lakunai, you know, just these gaps,
or tell their own stories just you know that are
just different stories. And you know, one of the things
that you're that you're describing now makes me think of
a moment in your piece where where you you describe
the yearning and searching stage of grief, right, and and
(23:55):
so at this point Helen and Jen too are in
this yearning and searching stage, and the journal has become
this kind of emblematic of that more than anything else.
It's a way to resurrect the dead, even though you
know that they can't be resurrected, right. That's when you
are just desperately searching for them though you know rationally
(24:19):
they're never coming back. So it's a widow crying out
to her husband as she's doing the dishes. They're talking
to him. You know, it's you can take many many forms.
It was first described by a pair of British second
psychiatrists UM. One of them was John Bulby, who did
um attachment theory. But yeah, I mean, but the real
(24:39):
kind of author of that is a guy named Colin
Murray Parks And yeah, it's perfect. And I think that
Helen was stuck on that diary for like ten years.
She was yearning and searching, and she really really, um
got served bogged down in it. She took it to
the members of her that group that I was describing
(25:02):
of women who had all lost kids. She would talk
about it with them and they would joke about breaking
into Jennifer's house and liberating the diary, you know, so
that you could have it, stealing it. Um. She was
really angry at her husband for a very long time.
She would needle him about it, you know, for years,
this one on. She couldn't get past it. There was
(25:24):
one phrase that Helen became very focused on. She wasn't
sure where she had read it or heard it, um,
but the phrase was Bobby's, she was certain, and it
was life loves on and she was very focused on that.
And that became a kind of motto or or a
(25:46):
way of thinking for the family that Bobby had said that,
and that that's what they needed to do exactly. It
became like some kind of organizing motto for their grief.
And to your point, about how humbling and mind blowing
it is that our memories can desert us. She has
that motto of life loves non engraved in a bracelet right,
(26:09):
that she wears every day. A friend gave it, gave
it to her. Her friends also took on that motto.
They have it like sort of stamped at the bottom
of their emails. His and Bob Senior has its tattooed
on his arm, right. I mean, so this is on
his skin. So you would think, if you are going
to live by that phrase that your son has written,
(26:31):
you would like know where it came from, where there
was some idea. And yet she hands me all these
diaries and tells me, okay, well, I know it's in here,
And she thinks that she knows where it is, and
she goes looking for it. She sure she knows where
it comes from, which is that when like a family
friend died, he wrote it then, but it turned out
(26:53):
out to be there. So I went on this mad
aunt to find this phrase. And you know how I
found it. I'm not sure I want to give it away,
but it was this extraordinarily I mean, it was this
insane kind of uh F loosing adventure that I went
on to find this thing, and it turns out. I mean,
(27:16):
if you want to talk about secrets you keep from yourself,
she knew, everyone in the family knew. They had just
all forgotten where it came from. They had just forgotten.
And it is amazing what we can. As you said,
the lakna and our memories are just extraordinary. I mean
they are. They are the size of an ocean sometimes
and you can't believe it. It should be solid land,
(27:37):
you know. I mean the things that we know to
be certain, sometimes they're just made of water. We'll be
back in a moment with more family secrets. I want
to quote one other little passage from from Your Peace,
(28:00):
which is memories of traumatic experiences are a curious thing.
Some are vivid, some are pale. Pretty much all of
them have been amended in some way great or small.
There seems to be no rhyme or reason to our
curated reels. We remember the trivial and forget the exceptional.
Our minds truly have minds of their own. So I
(28:25):
don't think it would be giving anything away, and everyone
should just simply read your beautiful piece. But to say
that down the road once this phrase and its origin
has been tracked down, you know, like the Holy Grail. Um.
You send it to your editor at the Atlantic, like
(28:45):
a screen, a screenshot of where it was, and he
sends you a note that says and and Bobby has
like very dense, sort of indecipherable, you know, difficult to
make out handwriting. And your editor writes to you and says,
(29:06):
isn't it life lives on, not life love? So exactly
yes he did, and my heart sank and I mean,
I I can't tell you. I mean I was on
an amtrack and I almost started to scream. I did
not know what to do, because then you're faced with
(29:28):
a real journalistic conundrum, which is do you tell a
family that's been living by this modo for twenty years?
You know, it's almost there's a word for this um
when when it's an oral misapprehension, when you hear something incorrectly,
it's called a Manda green And you know, like the
Jimi Hendricks excuse me while I kissed the sky and
everybody thinks it's excuse me while I kiss this guy?
(29:50):
You know, so it's like the equivalent of that, but
in print, where you're looking at the wrong like it
was just it was misinterpreted, it was misrad it didn't
mat are. In the end, it didn't matter. Bobby's journals
are filled with wisdom, all kinds of unexpected wisdom. The
funny and amazing and weird thing is that although Helen
(30:13):
and Bob had lots of Bobby's journals for a while, um,
they didn't read them very much. And there's lots of
great things in there. When I finally glimpsed that diary,
I'm happy to say that there was plenty in there
to look at that I thought was really much more
beautiful and much more resonant um then Life lives On.
(30:35):
Life loves On. You know, it's a little bit hallmarky.
Life loves On. It's slightly more profound because it suggests
we have some kind of drive to love in our
hearts no matter what. And I kind of liked it.
But Life Lives On is kind of disappointing. It didn't matter.
There's there's plenty that Bob observed and said in his
life that's much more interesting. But in the funny, I
(30:57):
mean that, like this is this is how our memories
get me. They get made falsely, or they don't matter
you know, we choose to live, but they become that
person's words. You know, we are constantly inventing and reinventing
the dead. At this point, Bobby may as well have
said it, and it's something he could have said. And
I think that that's even more interesting in a funny way,
is that we're all perfectly happy to assign him those
(31:19):
words because they seem so Bobby. He was just this
little Yoda boy, you know, so like why not sure?
It seemed Bobby like l his loves whatever, so true
that in the end it doesn't really matter. I mean
the way that Helen got, you know, fixated on the
(31:40):
journal for all those years, you the journalists got fixated
on the phrase right and find and finding it um.
And in the end, it doesn't really matter where the
phrase came from or even exactly what the phrase was
in the profound emotional scheme of the story. When you
(32:01):
do travel to Washington, d C. And And you you
meet Jen, Bobby's girlfriend, Um, she is prepared to and
has you know, wanted to for years, have Helen be
able to read the journal? Um. She gives you the
(32:21):
journal and says, at some point, I'd love to have
this back. But you know here, I mean, one of
the most moving parts of your piece are Helen's epiphany
when she reads Bobby's final journal that Bobby was a
young man, he wasn't a boy anymore, and that she
(32:46):
his mother, wasn't at the center of his life, that
Jen was at the center of his life, which is
why Jen had so desperately wanted to hold on to
that that piece of him, the painful secret that was
sort of in this journal. I mean, well, you know,
(33:09):
in some ways, Helen just wanted it because she wanted
everything that was Bobby's. She just wanted to reconstruct him.
It was just some metaphorical way of making him a
whole if she couldn't have him. But in some ways
it was also just glimpsing who he was at that
moment in time, being able to spend time in his
company again, and yes, wanting to see you know, she
(33:30):
was all over his previous journals. His family was all
over his previous journals. He spoke glowingly about his family
and those journals he was still a young boy, and
unlike most adolescent kids, he wasn't ripping up his family.
He was talking about how great that he were he
was very close to them, so I think her fantasy
in some way was that there would just be more
(33:52):
about the nuclear family. But it was a relief. I
think in some ways it is to discover, oh, he
was his own man. I was you know, I wasn't
a part of his life anymore. And there are things
in that journal that are so mind blowing that like
shed whole windows into like I mean, there are goose
(34:13):
pimpling things. But I mean I think that that was
like a big takeaway for her. In some ways, it
was to sort of see, oh, my boys all grown up,
he's all grown up. That this wasn't about me. I
mean the things that it was about We're extraordinary. That
the journal was about We're extraordinary, you know. And the
words in that journal were extraordinary. I mean I get
(34:36):
I get chills just thinking about them. What is so
amazing is that there was this thing that was looming
for twenty years that she was sure contained. It did
not contain it never does, It did not have inside
it what she thought it did, And the reasons Jen
kept it weren't the reasons she thought she did. You know,
all the motives we assigned to other people are never
(34:56):
the stories we tell ourselves are so often stories that
are true, you know, how we know what we think
we know did not end up being the right thing.
I mean, you know, having the wrong tattoo, having the
wrong story, and in some ways a metaphor for everything.
You know. It also strikes me that in the end,
(35:19):
in being able to see that final journal, she actually
had a moment that she would have had had Bobby lived,
which was the realization, oh, my boy is a young
man and I am not, you know, the sun at
the center of his universe, I am, and and and
(35:43):
that she she actually ended up developmentally getting to have that,
even though way later and in a completely heartbreaking way. Yeah,
that's a beautiful way of putting it. I mean, I
think that again, because he was so young, so much
of his life was still locked away in his mother's
(36:03):
heart as like her little boy, you know, and why
why wouldn't he be sort of enshrined in that way
and her heart in her memory? But you are dead,
and had she got to go to a wedding and
see him pledge his love to to Jen, had she
had a tiny grand baby, you know, from Bobby anything,
(36:26):
seen them by a house, seen them even move in together.
He was still living with my brother, you know. I
mean he still seemed like a kid. He still seemed
like a kid. So as you say, yes, I think
that it did allow her maybe to right go one
beat further down the road and see him as a
(36:46):
fully realized adult. I mean she knew it anyway, but
I think that this was living in his head, in
his mature head, as a person whose thoughts were now
utterly consumed by someone else. I will never ever encourage
anyone to get on with their lives, even gently. Um.
I think it's a kind of tyranny. I think some
(37:07):
people never get beyond their grief, and that's the choice
they make, and they or don't make their chiefs. Their
griefs just holds them and not the other way. They
can't hold it. And that's one thing I learned from
being around Bob SR. It's not for me to judge
if it gets in the way of your family's life.
It's something that you have to deal with, and it's
something you have to contend with within the marriage. All
(37:29):
those things. But I think the biggest thing is like
the epistemological thing that we have been discussing, which is like,
how do you know what you know? I mean, no
one had the same I mean, let me just put
this out there. Helen thought that Jen had lived with
the family for one week after Bobby died. Jeff, Bobby's
(37:51):
younger brother, who was living with his parents at the time,
I thought the Jen lived with them for six months.
Jen thought it was for two months. Okay. They thought
they were sure they knew where Life Loved On came from,
and they were wrong. They had no idea where it
came from. Jen was sure when she was living with
(38:12):
the mackail Vane's that she slept in Bobby's brother's room,
and that Jeff very bravely slept in his brother's bed,
his dead brother's bed, whereas Jeff was absolutely certain that
Jen very bravely slept in her dead fiance's bed. I mean,
(38:33):
in me think I can never sit anywhere and argue
with any kind of force about any memory that I have,
about anything that I think I know and be dead
certain anymore. And that doesn't mean that truth doesn't exist,
that there are isn't such a thing as like real
objective truth. I think that there is, But I mean,
(38:55):
I I just think in terms of the fallibility of
our own memories. I think that are our emotions so
shape them, misshaped them, reshape them, crittify them, discolor them,
do all sorts of things, you know. I mean the
image that I have have is of a snow globe
getting all shaken up. That if you had reported this
(39:16):
story four years ago, or if you had reported it
four years from now, those memories among all of the
macall vean's might be completely different than the ones that
they had during that sliver of time. Oh for sure.
I had memories of the macall van's telling me things
about their grief at years three and four, because I
(39:38):
would see them. They would come to inventit my parents,
you know. I would see them when I was visiting
my mom in Florida. They they would um, you know,
sort of describe things, and I would raise them during
the interview and they wouldn't remember having said them to me,
you know. I mean, I had very different memories of
what they told me about their grieving. And here's something, Okay,
(40:02):
here's something. This is I think the craziest thing. After
the piece came out, I had dinner with Jeff and Jen,
who hadn't seen each other, in twenty years and Jeff
said to me, you know, I really love the piece.
But I'll tell you something. I both did and did
not recognize my dad. Everything that he said to you,
(40:23):
you captured accurately and exactly. And it's one facet of
my father, but it's not the only facet of my father.
I know a very different man. I know a different guy.
And when my wife read that story, she wasn't sure
she recognized the man you described either. It's just one
side of himself that he was interested in showing you.
(40:44):
And I'm sitting there thinking, well, I'm a journalist. I
thought I captured him much better, you know, a much
fuller kind of complex. I thought I didn't. I didn't
think he was like mono dimensional at all. I thought
that I had really captured something about his essence. But
they were telling me that I missed something, which means
that I had the wrong tattoo. I mean, what do
(41:04):
you do with that? How do we know? What? We know?
All the selves, all of the selves within us, and
all the stories right, all the stories we tell? How
reliable are our stories and our memories? How well you know?
How reliable was the thing that I wrote you? Know.
I thought it was pretty darn reliable and it was,
(41:27):
you know, and it wasn't. For more podcasts for my
(41:54):
heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcast,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,
Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. I'm
Danny Shapiro and this is a special bonus episode of
Family Secrets. The secrets that are kept from us, the
secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we keep
(00:20):
from ourselves. My guest today is the journalist Jennifer sr,
who joins me in conversation to discuss her extraordinarily moving
cover story in this month's Atlantic. Jen's story is about
a family, the macle Veins, who lost their son Bobby,
in the attacks of nine eleven, which, unbelievably enough, happened
(00:43):
twenty years ago. You had a personal connection to the
macle Veins, Yes, although the funny thing is, how well
do you know these kinds of people? Really? I will
(01:05):
describe you to you how I knew them, and you'll
see they didn't etch themselves particularly deeply into my brain
until after they had lost Bobby, which is a sad
thing to say. They were the parents of my brother's roommate,
both in college and in young adulthood. My brother moved
into Princeton, you know, it's freshman year. He throws his
(01:25):
stuff on a bunk bed, and the kid on the
other bunk bed was Bobby McIlvaine. And so when did
I see cocle Van's I saw them if we were
at the end of the year picking up my brother
or graduation, or then when the two of them were
living in New York. I would see them if I
just happened to run into them because they were in
town and I was picking something up, and my brother says,
(01:48):
you know, it wasn't a lot. I really didn't get
to know them until after Bobby died. Um. And my
impression of them is just that they were saintly warm
people who had devoted their lives to doing good in
the world. They were both teachers. They one taught, you know,
(02:08):
kids who were troubled teens who were in an adolescent
psych ward at a local hospital. Another taught reading in
a trailer in a parking lot of a Catholic school.
They were lovely people. Oh and and his brother was
this this cheerful, sweet kid you know, who was younger
and kind of goofy and uh and not nearly the
(02:31):
go getter that his older brother was, but very funny.
And Bobby made a much bigger and more singular impression
upon you. It seems during the time that you knew him.
Oh God, yeah, Bobby like a one off. He was
like a human being that never went into full production.
(02:52):
You know what I mean? It was he was an
exceptional kid. Nobody in his family expected him to go
to an Ivy League school, working class, um, you know,
Irish Catholic family. Uh, without any kind of expectation that
he would go off and conquer the Ivy League. And
he just came out freakishly smart even as this young kid.
(03:15):
And uh when I met him, he was always just
filled those ideas, very lively conversation, very precocious um charisma
personified I think intimidating to some people who knew him
until they got to know him to realize that inside
he was just a warm piece of peach pie. Um.
(03:37):
He just was dazzling and was as if he had
been sort of flung into the world from a sling shot,
you know what I mean. He just had lots of
purpose um and had that air about him that any
self invented person does. They're just kind of unstoppable. There's
a moment in your piece for you describe he was
also athletic, and there's this moment where you describe a
(03:58):
teenage Bobby matt Vane throwing an immaculate pass uh as
a basketball player that sets up an immaculate shot that
flies right over the teenage head of Kobe Bryant. I mean,
I mean it just sounds like on every level, this
kid was as you describe, but just a one off,
completely extraordinary. He was a miracle, yeah. I mean, and
(04:20):
Kobe Bryant. That's the other thing, right, there's something almost
Zelig like or Forrest Gumpian about Bobby's trajectory. Right. They
wound up playing each other in high school and they
were the two best kids on their team, and Bobby
got sixteen points off of Kobe and his teammates. I mean,
that's extraordinary. That became the stuff of legend in the
(04:41):
mclavaine family as Kobe Bryant became Kobe Bryant. Um. Then
Bobby goes up to and get the hand pick to
take a class with Tony Morrison. And when when Bobby dies,
Tony Morrison sends his family not one but two condolence
notes saying, what is star Bobby was? And he just
kept intersecting with exceptional people, you know, that's the kind
(05:05):
of guy he was so on on nine eleven. At first,
when the planes hit the towers, there wasn't a sense
in the family or among Bobby's friends that that Bobby
was in the towers right there. It was just um,
(05:25):
this horrific thing that was unfolding. But there was no
reason to He didn't work there, he didn't live right there.
There was no reason to think that he would have
been there. He worked nearer there, he was adjacent, right
But but and here's what's interesting. His mother had a
full on premonition, a real deep, visceral sense that something
(05:46):
wasn't matter. It was more than just a chirp in
her stomach. She really thought something was wrong. But his
father treated it like a news event. His brother had
just been in the city that Thursday and appear with him,
and he worked in Maryland. He had just moved there
to corporate communications in Maryland. It just so happened he
had to attend a conference that day, and you do
(06:09):
make things crazier. The theory about Bobby is that he
had to go to a restaurant that to windows in
the world that morning for a conference, but that he
had probably left before the planes hit, because they found
his body on the periphery of the site, and that
no one who was in windows on the world was found, right,
I mean, everybody was incinerated if they were up there.
(06:31):
So I want to quote something from from your Peace,
because really, so much of your piece is about the
shape or shapelessness or trajectory of grief and trauma, and
you right early on, the mckail vans spoke to a
therapist who warned them that each member of their family
(06:52):
would grieve differently. Imagine you're all at the top of
a mountain, she told them, But you all have broken bones,
so you can't help each other. You have to find
your own way down. It was a helpful metaphor, one
that may have saved the mcilvaine's marriage. But when I
mentioned it to Roxanne Cohen Silver, a psychology professor you see, Irvine,
(07:13):
who spent a lifetime studying the effect of sudden traumatic loss,
she immediately spotted a problem with it that suggests that
everyone will make it down. She told me, some people
never get down the mountain at all. This is one
of the many things you learn about mourning when examining
it at close range. It's idiosyncratic. Anarchic polychrome A lot
(07:35):
of the series you read about grief are great, beautiful
even they have a way of eracing individual experiences. Every
morner has a different story to tell. So what I'm
wondering is if you can tell us now the different
stories that Bobby's parents, in particular, went through in the
(08:00):
wake the long week of Bobby's death. Both Bob Sor
and Helen. Yes, Um, they are so different that they
almost look like photo negatives of one another. It really
struck me, Um, and particularly Bob Sor his story. Helen's
(08:22):
was more recognizable to me. It isn't how I think
I would have grieved, but it is a story that
I could have sort of seen and predicted. Which is
or not knowing her. So, Helen, this is how she
chose to grieve. She chose to starve her grief. She
didn't want people to pity her. She didn't want to
(08:44):
manage people's awkwardness. She didn't want to manage their discomfort
or listen to them babbling their condolences, and she didn't
want to feel terrible all the time when people accidentally
said the wrong thing to her. She went to a
different grocery store for fifteen years in order to not
run into people she knew, so that no one could
(09:04):
sit there and just start incoherently trying to console her
or muttering to preprint to you know, like pointing and gossiping.
She didn't want any of it. She would deflect, she
would joke. It was her way of coping with it,
and realized about ten years in that it wasn't serving
(09:25):
her very well to keep stoppering up all of her grief.
She realized at some point that it was making her angry,
that it was making her more of a gossip, that
she was on a shorter fuse, But she thought, no,
it is additionally compounded by the fact that I am
not allowing myself to grieve, to fully inhabit this grief.
The only act herself to do it was with this
(09:47):
group of local women, all lost children, with whom she
could speak in shorthand they all knew what it was.
They weren't going to single her ab for special pity.
She could say anything she wanted to them and it
was all okay, But they understood if she said, I
was just with a friend of mine who went on
and on and on about their child, and I just
couldn't stand listening to them talk about their child. I
(10:07):
am so jealous that she has this problem. I can't
listen to people talk about their child. They all got it,
It all made sense, but it was very hard for her.
She didn't want to be a victim. She didn't want
to be short, she didn't want to be short tempered,
you know, or hurt. All these things. She had like
a strong super ego kind of watching her own reactions.
(10:27):
That was helen. She gave the impression of having quote
unquote healed because she wasn't talking about it and she
was you know, moving on with her life. And so
it was this impossible conundrum totally one of her own making, right,
exactly right, she needed to do that in order to
(10:50):
get through the day. That was in some ways her
version of grieving was not grieving or not externally showing it.
And yet exactly something some part of her was permanently
you know, there was a scar tissue on top of
a whole bunch of stuff that had not stitched up.
There was something painfully paradoxical about this situation, right that
(11:14):
she was like all stitched up, but just a watery
mass inside. And so that was really hard. That was
really really hard for her um and she just woke
up one morning and decided she had to do something
about it, which makes her very unusual. I mean, to
make an executive decision one day that you were simply
going to be another person is extraordinary. And she actually
(11:35):
did that. She actually woke up one morning and did
that to be she decided she wanted to be somebody else,
She needed to be someone else, and so she was
going to be that person. And what was that someone else?
Someone who engaged more with her grief and who let
go of all of the anger that was just accumulating
(11:56):
in there. She really felt on some level like she
was marinating in a brain of her own resentment and
her own fury and her own hurt, and she hadn't
let it out, you know, and it was just curdling
her and curdling her insights. What you just described is
a version of a secret. It's you know, it's it's
(12:18):
this kind of almost one of the most toxic versions
because it's that bottling up, you know, the idea of
I can make this go away if I just try
hard enough, totally. And here's what's amazing, her suffering with
the secret and her son died and what must have
been the most public active mass murder in recent memory, right.
(12:42):
I mean, she was denying herself her own suffering. She
was keeping it almost from herself, and it's so poignant
and it can be so corrosive to our souls, you know,
it can just rip us up, and I think it
did her. And then meanwhile, her husband, Bobby's father, Bob Senior,
was having, as you say, a completely almost polar opposite
(13:08):
kind of way way of responding. Yes, Bob was the
polar opposite. Everything that was light colored on Helen's print
was dark color down hairs and everything that was dark
color and her print was light on his. I mean
that you just couldn't imagine two different ways of going
about grieving for Bob's Senior. It's not just that he
(13:32):
actively every day chooses to inhabit his grief and that
he cries every day, that his grief just lives very
close to the surface. You just touch him, if you,
a whole vat of grief kind of spills out. It's
not just that, it's that for him, every day is
kind of September twelve. It's like he wakes up and
(13:53):
he's as raw as he was almost the day he
discovered it. And to me, this was just an amazing
revelation because there are all these kind of cultural wide
imperatives that I think we have that, oh, you've got
to move on, You've got to move past your grief
or through your grief, or around your grief or something. Right. No,
(14:14):
not him. He had no interest. He wanted to live
in his grief. It seems like his form of grief
was about engaging with the details, real or imagined. Around
nine eleven and around Bobby's death was a way of
keeping Bobby alive exactly. I mean, he treated Bobby's death
(14:41):
as if it were an unsolved murder. He became over
time gradually very very interested in, um, all of the
I'm going to call them conspiracy theories. He never would
he calls this nine eleven truth to me, the air
conspiracy theories, that the government was behind this, that um,
(15:02):
this was an orchestrated hit. You know that the World
Trade Center was embroidered with explosives. And he became very
interested in in in sorry, explosive laid by the American
government and it was, you know, a controlled debt nation.
He had a theory for why they actually um destroyed it.
(15:22):
That's quite arcane. What got in his mind turning, though,
was that it was based on looking at the medical
examiners report of his son's death. You know, I think
what he initially was doing was simply worrying about um.
It was a very paternal instinct. He was haunted by
the idea that Bobby might have suffered right before he died,
(15:44):
that he might have expexiated, that he might have been up,
that he might have jumped right, that he didn't know
how he died. Um. And in getting medical examiner's report,
he saw how he died. I mean, he was decapitated,
and which to me suggested a giant piece of to breathe,
you know, came boring out of the sky, and then
he didn't know what hit him. But for whatever set
(16:07):
of reasons, Bob Sor decided that because most of Bobby's
injuries were on his front, not on his back, he
had he couldn't have been running away from the building,
he had to have been inside it, and that this
had to have been an inside job. So he started
doing a lot of reading. He started reading history. He
started doing all these things and came up with a
very laboratory for why the government might might have wanted
(16:30):
to destroy the World Trade Center. And you know, Bobby's
brother Jeff thinks that by saying, oh, this is merely
how he grieves, he thinks it's kind of trivializing his
efforts and that maybe so the Although what I think
is interesting is that Bob Senior said to me, in
doing this every day, he is definitely keeping his Bobby close,
(16:53):
that this is how he spends time in Bobby's company.
So I might be giving short trip to the theory
is because I don't believe in the theories. I think
the theories are wrong headed. But he does not deny
that like they serve. It serves a purpose for him.
And in doing all this research, he gets to stay
close to Bobby. He gets to do this and it's
a way to keep parenting. And it we kind of
(17:15):
forget Bobby was so young. He was so young, he
was only twenty six. He was still probably in some
way as a little boy to Bob, and he probably
wanted to actively parent him. You know. Still in some
ways this is him being a father. We'll be right back.
(17:39):
So Bobby kept he was a prolific journal keeper. He
left behind volumes and volumes of journals and thinking about
what it is to continue to parent, or to keep
someone alive, or to keep a relationship along Eve in
(18:00):
some way. You know, the journals become very very important
in this story. Helen and Bob, you know, have all
the journals. Um. There is a young woman named Jen
who is Bobby's girlfriend and is about to become Bobby's fiance.
(18:21):
He has a ring and he has asked her father
for her hand in marriage, and he um is about
to propose to her, and of course that never happens.
So Jen is his girlfriend and she doesn't have any
(18:44):
legal right to any of his possessions or belongings. And
Jen asks if she can have the last journal that
Bobby had been writing in, and Bob sr. Just hands
it to her without a thought, like, of course, here
here's a piece of Bobby. So that's a perfect summary. Um,
(19:07):
Bob Senior handed into her without giving it a second thought.
Because there they were cleaning out Bobby's bedroom, there was
his last remaining journal open on his desk, and Jen
started reading it and noticed that she was on practically
every page, so it would be perfectly natural for her
to want to have that right, and he was distributing
(19:30):
those journals anyway to everybody who was in the room.
It was my brother, it was two other friends. I
think we're there um And he was saying, you might
want to look at these in order to write your eulogies,
because me and my wife I am not being any
shape to write them. And Helen was not even in
any shape to go and clean out that bedroom. She
(19:51):
was elsewhere. And if she had been in that bedroom,
she might have stopped her husband from giving away that
final journal was it was hugely important to her that
she had every molecule of everything her son had ever had.
All the objects of the dead, a lot of them
(20:12):
can just assume almost kind of talismanic property, like they
just their proxies for the person you love. And what's
so interesting about a diary is that it's not even
the same as like a T shirt or a recovered photograph.
It's this unusual thing where you get to almost hear
that person's voice again and to spend time in their company.
(20:34):
It's not a conversation or that it's not two ways,
but you are hearing from them. And she was so
devastated when she found out that her husband had given
away this final journal, because here was this chance to
hear her son's voice one last time, and she was
being robbed at that opportunity. Particularly, I mean he was
(20:56):
at that moment. She had like all of his kind
of child journals when he was a kid, but he
wasn't a fully formed adult. It wasn't like a chance
to experience him and a grown human, you know. And
here was this most recent thing, and she she just
she didn't have it suddenly, right, So she asks Jen
(21:18):
if Jen will part with it? Correct, She asked Jen
for it. She said, I would really like to see
parts of it. I understand it's about you, but and
Jen kind of demurred. She hemmed an odd, and she
took the diary home with her. She went off to Michigan,
where she was from, and took some time by herself,
and then she came back and lived with the mcle
(21:39):
vans for about two months because she just couldn't stand
being in her apartment by herself. So there were many
opportunities for Helen to say, you know, I'd really like
to see that diary, which was no longer there, right,
It was in Jen's apartment, she had taken it and
then got off to Michigan, so the diary is not there.
(22:00):
Helen looking at this future almost daughter in law who
she doesn't know very well. She hadn't spent much time
in her company and asking for it and not getting
the response she wants, and by the end she was begging.
She was simply saying, look, if Bobby is describing a tree,
can you just give me the words, Just tell me
(22:22):
what he says about the tree. I just want the words,
just the words. And then still I never did it,
and her stay there ended in terrible tension, and with
Jen slamming the door behind her, bursting into tears and
getting in her car and driving off. And you never
(22:43):
saw the Macaile names again. And when I saw Helen before,
you know, to do this story Jen, she couldn't come
up with Jenn's last name. She kept saying, it's something short,
it's like Jen Cove. And I said it was Jennifer
Cobb and she said that's right, cop C O B B.
And I said she really had forgotten. She had buried
(23:08):
her to which she buried her son. She had just forgotten.
It always really amazes me and humbles me. To think
about what the ways in which our memories, especially our
memories under the pressure of intense emotion UM just either
(23:32):
end up with these huge lakunai, you know, just these gaps,
or tell their own stories just you know that are
just different stories. And you know, one of the things
that you're that you're describing now makes me think of
a moment in your piece where where you you describe
the yearning and searching stage of grief, right, and and
(23:55):
so at this point Helen and Jen too are in
this yearning and searching stage, and the journal has become
this kind of emblematic of that more than anything else.
It's a way to resurrect the dead, even though you
know that they can't be resurrected, right. That's when you
are just desperately searching for them though you know rationally
(24:19):
they're never coming back. So it's a widow crying out
to her husband as she's doing the dishes. They're talking
to him. You know, it's you can take many many forms.
It was first described by a pair of British second
psychiatrists UM. One of them was John Bulby, who did
um attachment theory. But yeah, I mean, but the real
(24:39):
kind of author of that is a guy named Colin
Murray Parks And yeah, it's perfect. And I think that
Helen was stuck on that diary for like ten years.
She was yearning and searching, and she really really, um
got served bogged down in it. She took it to
the members of her that group that I was describing
(25:02):
of women who had all lost kids. She would talk
about it with them and they would joke about breaking
into Jennifer's house and liberating the diary, you know, so
that you could have it, stealing it. Um. She was
really angry at her husband for a very long time.
She would needle him about it, you know, for years,
this one on. She couldn't get past it. There was
(25:24):
one phrase that Helen became very focused on. She wasn't
sure where she had read it or heard it, um,
but the phrase was Bobby's, she was certain, and it
was life loves on and she was very focused on that.
And that became a kind of motto or or a
(25:46):
way of thinking for the family that Bobby had said that,
and that that's what they needed to do exactly. It
became like some kind of organizing motto for their grief.
And to your point, about how humbling and mind blowing
it is that our memories can desert us. She has
that motto of life loves non engraved in a bracelet right,
(26:09):
that she wears every day. A friend gave it, gave
it to her. Her friends also took on that motto.
They have it like sort of stamped at the bottom
of their emails. His and Bob Senior has its tattooed
on his arm, right. I mean, so this is on
his skin. So you would think, if you are going
to live by that phrase that your son has written,
(26:31):
you would like know where it came from, where there
was some idea. And yet she hands me all these
diaries and tells me, okay, well, I know it's in here,
And she thinks that she knows where it is, and
she goes looking for it. She sure she knows where
it comes from, which is that when like a family
friend died, he wrote it then, but it turned out
(26:53):
out to be there. So I went on this mad
aunt to find this phrase. And you know how I
found it. I'm not sure I want to give it away,
but it was this extraordinarily I mean, it was this
insane kind of uh F loosing adventure that I went
on to find this thing, and it turns out. I mean,
(27:16):
if you want to talk about secrets you keep from yourself,
she knew, everyone in the family knew. They had just
all forgotten where it came from. They had just forgotten.
And it is amazing what we can. As you said,
the lakna and our memories are just extraordinary. I mean
they are. They are the size of an ocean sometimes
and you can't believe it. It should be solid land,
(27:37):
you know. I mean the things that we know to
be certain, sometimes they're just made of water. We'll be
back in a moment with more family secrets. I want
to quote one other little passage from from Your Peace,
(28:00):
which is memories of traumatic experiences are a curious thing.
Some are vivid, some are pale. Pretty much all of
them have been amended in some way great or small.
There seems to be no rhyme or reason to our
curated reels. We remember the trivial and forget the exceptional.
Our minds truly have minds of their own. So I
(28:25):
don't think it would be giving anything away, and everyone
should just simply read your beautiful piece. But to say
that down the road once this phrase and its origin
has been tracked down, you know, like the Holy Grail. Um.
You send it to your editor at the Atlantic, like
(28:45):
a screen, a screenshot of where it was, and he
sends you a note that says and and Bobby has
like very dense, sort of indecipherable, you know, difficult to
make out handwriting. And your editor writes to you and says,
(29:06):
isn't it life lives on, not life love? So exactly
yes he did, and my heart sank and I mean,
I I can't tell you. I mean I was on
an amtrack and I almost started to scream. I did
not know what to do, because then you're faced with
(29:28):
a real journalistic conundrum, which is do you tell a
family that's been living by this modo for twenty years?
You know, it's almost there's a word for this um
when when it's an oral misapprehension, when you hear something incorrectly,
it's called a Manda green And you know, like the
Jimi Hendricks excuse me while I kissed the sky and
everybody thinks it's excuse me while I kiss this guy?
(29:50):
You know, so it's like the equivalent of that, but
in print, where you're looking at the wrong like it
was just it was misinterpreted, it was misrad it didn't
mat are. In the end, it didn't matter. Bobby's journals
are filled with wisdom, all kinds of unexpected wisdom. The
funny and amazing and weird thing is that although Helen
(30:13):
and Bob had lots of Bobby's journals for a while, um,
they didn't read them very much. And there's lots of
great things in there. When I finally glimpsed that diary,
I'm happy to say that there was plenty in there
to look at that I thought was really much more
beautiful and much more resonant um then Life lives On.
(30:35):
Life loves On. You know, it's a little bit hallmarky.
Life loves On. It's slightly more profound because it suggests
we have some kind of drive to love in our
hearts no matter what. And I kind of liked it.
But Life Lives On is kind of disappointing. It didn't matter.
There's there's plenty that Bob observed and said in his
life that's much more interesting. But in the funny, I
(30:57):
mean that, like this is this is how our memories
get me. They get made falsely, or they don't matter
you know, we choose to live, but they become that
person's words. You know, we are constantly inventing and reinventing
the dead. At this point, Bobby may as well have
said it, and it's something he could have said. And
I think that that's even more interesting in a funny way,
is that we're all perfectly happy to assign him those
(31:19):
words because they seem so Bobby. He was just this
little Yoda boy, you know, so like why not sure?
It seemed Bobby like l his loves whatever, so true
that in the end it doesn't really matter. I mean
the way that Helen got, you know, fixated on the
(31:40):
journal for all those years, you the journalists got fixated
on the phrase right and find and finding it um.
And in the end, it doesn't really matter where the
phrase came from or even exactly what the phrase was
in the profound emotional scheme of the story. When you
(32:01):
do travel to Washington, d C. And And you you
meet Jen, Bobby's girlfriend, Um, she is prepared to and
has you know, wanted to for years, have Helen be
able to read the journal? Um. She gives you the
(32:21):
journal and says, at some point, I'd love to have
this back. But you know here, I mean, one of
the most moving parts of your piece are Helen's epiphany
when she reads Bobby's final journal that Bobby was a
young man, he wasn't a boy anymore, and that she
(32:46):
his mother, wasn't at the center of his life, that
Jen was at the center of his life, which is
why Jen had so desperately wanted to hold on to
that that piece of him, the painful secret that was
sort of in this journal. I mean, well, you know,
(33:09):
in some ways, Helen just wanted it because she wanted
everything that was Bobby's. She just wanted to reconstruct him.
It was just some metaphorical way of making him a
whole if she couldn't have him. But in some ways
it was also just glimpsing who he was at that
moment in time, being able to spend time in his
company again, and yes, wanting to see you know, she
(33:30):
was all over his previous journals. His family was all
over his previous journals. He spoke glowingly about his family
and those journals he was still a young boy, and
unlike most adolescent kids, he wasn't ripping up his family.
He was talking about how great that he were he
was very close to them, so I think her fantasy
in some way was that there would just be more
(33:52):
about the nuclear family. But it was a relief. I
think in some ways it is to discover, oh, he
was his own man. I was you know, I wasn't
a part of his life anymore. And there are things
in that journal that are so mind blowing that like
shed whole windows into like I mean, there are goose
(34:13):
pimpling things. But I mean I think that that was
like a big takeaway for her. In some ways, it
was to sort of see, oh, my boys all grown up,
he's all grown up. That this wasn't about me. I
mean the things that it was about We're extraordinary. That
the journal was about We're extraordinary, you know. And the
words in that journal were extraordinary. I mean I get
(34:36):
I get chills just thinking about them. What is so
amazing is that there was this thing that was looming
for twenty years that she was sure contained. It did
not contain it never does, It did not have inside
it what she thought it did, And the reasons Jen
kept it weren't the reasons she thought she did. You know,
all the motives we assigned to other people are never
(34:56):
the stories we tell ourselves are so often stories that
are true, you know, how we know what we think
we know did not end up being the right thing.
I mean, you know, having the wrong tattoo, having the
wrong story, and in some ways a metaphor for everything.
You know. It also strikes me that in the end,
(35:19):
in being able to see that final journal, she actually
had a moment that she would have had had Bobby lived,
which was the realization, oh, my boy is a young
man and I am not, you know, the sun at
the center of his universe, I am, and and and
(35:43):
that she she actually ended up developmentally getting to have that,
even though way later and in a completely heartbreaking way. Yeah,
that's a beautiful way of putting it. I mean, I
think that again, because he was so young, so much
of his life was still locked away in his mother's
(36:03):
heart as like her little boy, you know, and why
why wouldn't he be sort of enshrined in that way
and her heart in her memory? But you are dead,
and had she got to go to a wedding and
see him pledge his love to to Jen, had she
had a tiny grand baby, you know, from Bobby anything,
(36:26):
seen them by a house, seen them even move in together.
He was still living with my brother, you know. I
mean he still seemed like a kid. He still seemed
like a kid. So as you say, yes, I think
that it did allow her maybe to right go one
beat further down the road and see him as a
(36:46):
fully realized adult. I mean she knew it anyway, but
I think that this was living in his head, in
his mature head, as a person whose thoughts were now
utterly consumed by someone else. I will never ever encourage
anyone to get on with their lives, even gently. Um.
I think it's a kind of tyranny. I think some
(37:07):
people never get beyond their grief, and that's the choice
they make, and they or don't make their chiefs. Their
griefs just holds them and not the other way. They
can't hold it. And that's one thing I learned from
being around Bob SR. It's not for me to judge
if it gets in the way of your family's life.
It's something that you have to deal with, and it's
something you have to contend with within the marriage. All
(37:29):
those things. But I think the biggest thing is like
the epistemological thing that we have been discussing, which is like,
how do you know what you know? I mean, no
one had the same I mean, let me just put
this out there. Helen thought that Jen had lived with
the family for one week after Bobby died. Jeff, Bobby's
(37:51):
younger brother, who was living with his parents at the time,
I thought the Jen lived with them for six months.
Jen thought it was for two months. Okay. They thought
they were sure they knew where Life Loved On came from,
and they were wrong. They had no idea where it
came from. Jen was sure when she was living with
(38:12):
the mackail Vane's that she slept in Bobby's brother's room,
and that Jeff very bravely slept in his brother's bed,
his dead brother's bed, whereas Jeff was absolutely certain that
Jen very bravely slept in her dead fiance's bed. I mean,
(38:33):
in me think I can never sit anywhere and argue
with any kind of force about any memory that I have,
about anything that I think I know and be dead
certain anymore. And that doesn't mean that truth doesn't exist,
that there are isn't such a thing as like real
objective truth. I think that there is, But I mean,
(38:55):
I I just think in terms of the fallibility of
our own memories. I think that are our emotions so
shape them, misshaped them, reshape them, crittify them, discolor them,
do all sorts of things, you know. I mean the
image that I have have is of a snow globe
getting all shaken up. That if you had reported this
(39:16):
story four years ago, or if you had reported it
four years from now, those memories among all of the
macall vean's might be completely different than the ones that
they had during that sliver of time. Oh for sure.
I had memories of the macall van's telling me things
about their grief at years three and four, because I
(39:38):
would see them. They would come to inventit my parents,
you know. I would see them when I was visiting
my mom in Florida. They they would um, you know,
sort of describe things, and I would raise them during
the interview and they wouldn't remember having said them to me,
you know. I mean, I had very different memories of
what they told me about their grieving. And here's something, Okay,
(40:02):
here's something. This is I think the craziest thing. After
the piece came out, I had dinner with Jeff and Jen,
who hadn't seen each other, in twenty years and Jeff
said to me, you know, I really love the piece.
But I'll tell you something. I both did and did
not recognize my dad. Everything that he said to you,
(40:23):
you captured accurately and exactly. And it's one facet of
my father, but it's not the only facet of my father.
I know a very different man. I know a different guy.
And when my wife read that story, she wasn't sure
she recognized the man you described either. It's just one
side of himself that he was interested in showing you.
(40:44):
And I'm sitting there thinking, well, I'm a journalist. I
thought I captured him much better, you know, a much
fuller kind of complex. I thought I didn't. I didn't
think he was like mono dimensional at all. I thought
that I had really captured something about his essence. But
they were telling me that I missed something, which means
that I had the wrong tattoo. I mean, what do
(41:04):
you do with that? How do we know? What? We know?
All the selves, all of the selves within us, and
all the stories right, all the stories we tell? How
reliable are our stories and our memories? How well you know?
How reliable was the thing that I wrote you? Know.
I thought it was pretty darn reliable and it was,
(41:27):
you know, and it wasn't. For more podcasts for my
(41:54):
heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcast,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,
Family Secrets News
Host
Dani Shapiro
Popular Podcasts
The Breakfast Club
The World's Most Dangerous Morning Show, The Breakfast Club, With DJ Envy And Charlamagne Tha God!
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Decisions, Decisions
Welcome to "Decisions, Decisions," the podcast where boundaries are pushed, and conversations get candid! Join your favorite hosts, Mandii B and WeezyWTF, as they dive deep into the world of non-traditional relationships and explore the often-taboo topics surrounding dating, sex, and love. Every Monday, Mandii and Weezy invite you to unlearn the outdated narratives dictated by traditional patriarchal norms. With a blend of humor, vulnerability, and authenticity, they share their personal journeys navigating their 30s, tackling the complexities of modern relationships, and engaging in thought-provoking discussions that challenge societal expectations. From groundbreaking interviews with diverse guests to relatable stories that resonate with your experiences, "Decisions, Decisions" is your go-to source for open dialogue about what it truly means to love and connect in today's world. Get ready to reshape your understanding of relationships and embrace the freedom of authentic connections—tune in and join the conversation!