What 9/11 Did to One Family

[Nevilledog]

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Ava DuVernay
@ava
This long-read by @JenSeniorNY stayed with me. It’s about the ripples that each of our lives makes on other lives. In this case, the focus is a bright young man lost on 9/11 and the waves of pain and misunderstanding, but also purpose for those left behind.

What 9/11 Did to One Family
Bobby McIlvaine was 26 when he died in the attacks. Two decades later, his loved ones are still grappling with the loss.
theatlantic.com
2:15 PM · Sep 11, 2021

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/09/twenty-years-gone-911-bobby-mcilvaine/619490/

When Bobby McIlvaine died on September 11, 2001, his desk at home was a study in plate tectonics, coated in shifting piles of leather-bound diaries and yellow legal pads. He’d kept the diaries since he was a teenager, and they were filled with the usual diary things—longings, observations, frustrations—while the legal pads were marbled with more variety: aphoristic musings, quotes that spoke to him, stabs at fiction.

The yellow pads appeared to have the earnest beginnings of two different novels. But the diaries told a different kind of story. To the outside world, Bobby, 26, was a charmer, a striver, a furnace of ambition. But inside, the guy was a sage and a sap—philosophical about disappointments, melancholy when the weather changed, moony over girlfriends.

Less than a week after his death, Bobby’s father had to contend with that pitiless still life of a desk. And so he began distributing the yellow legal pads, the perfect-bound diaries: to Bobby’s friends; to Bobby’s girlfriend, Jen, to whom he was about to propose. Maybe, he told them, there was material in there that they could use in their eulogies.

One object in that pile glowed with more meaning than all the others: Bobby’s very last diary. Jen took one look and quickly realized that her name was all over it. Could she keep it?

*snip*

[MsLeopard]

1. Excellent read

Very long but worth it. Really delves into the varying experiences of those who lost loved ones on 9/11. I’m not big on the “remembrance” thing, but this article presented a realistic and touching account of one family’s (and those around them) loss. Loved his dad, Bob Sr.!

[MustLoveBeagles]

2. K&R