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