What Bobby McIlvaine Left Behind

“The hardest part of early grief was trying to process alongside shared loved ones. I wish I’d read this essay years earlier… TW: this is a 9/11 story “Early on, the McIlvaines spoke to a therapist who warned them that each member of their family would grieve differently. Imagine that 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 each have to find your own way down. It was a helpful metaphor, one that may have saved the McIlvaines’ marriage. But when I mentioned it to Roxane Cohen Silver, a psychology professor at UC Irvine who’s spent a lifetime studying the effects of sudden, traumatic loss, she immediately spotted a problem with it: “That suggests everyone will make it down,” she told me. “Some people never get down the mountain at all.””

“A little more serious than what I usually share here, but this is a remarkable piece of writing I revisit every year. Simultaneously a beautiful eulogy, an intimate study of a family's grief, and a deep understanding of how easily you'd live through it all again.”

“A poignant essay on grief, 9/11 and really what it is to be human. Tuck away some time to read this.”