Collective or individual, grief changes us

This is a story about 9/11.

You could argue that Bobby McIlvaine shouldn’t have been in the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. His Merrill Lynch office was a five-minute walk away. But that Tuesday, he helped a colleague set up for a conference at Windows on the World. Bobby was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and the people who loved him will spend the rest of their days missing him.

Early on, a therapist told the family that their experience was like being stranded on a mountain, each family member unable to help the others because of their own injuries. “You each have to find your own way down,” she said. But a psychology professor author Jennifer Senior interviewed saw a problem: “That suggests everyone will make it down … Some people never get down the mountain at all.”

Senior writes: “A lot of the theories you read about grief are great, beautiful even, but they have a way of erasing individual experiences. Every mourner has a very different story to tell.”

This is a story about the McIlvaine family and their specific loss. And, more broadly, this is also a story about all grief.

If you were alive on Sept. 11, 2001, it affected you in some way. Heck, there are ways it has affected you even if you were born later. Lower Manhattan will never appear the same. We’ve got the Department of Homeland Security. Airport security has changed radically. Many other flight changes have been economic rather than security-oriented, but in my subconscious they’re one and the same. My last flight in the “before” was to Denver and included a meal I recall as delicious. (I was 20. This may not have been true! But Delta still does a pretty good job when you catch a flight with meal service.) And I’m sure I checked my oversized suitcase for free.

9/11 also taught me about terrorism. I’m not sure I’d ever heard the term until I called my mom as I left class and walked to my car on that blue-sky day. Communications classes at Florida State, where I was a senior, were canceled before the rest of the university that day. As I headed off campus, I sought my mother’s explanation for what was happening. I probably consumed as much television news that day as I have combined in the years since.

For The Atlantic staff writer Jennifer Senior, 9/11 was a prominent lesson on grief, both communal and specific. Bobby was her brother’s roommate, had been for the eight years since they were randomly paired together in their freshman dorm. Senior loved Bobby and his family. And for the 20^th anniversary of his death, she reported on how the people who loved him mourned and reeled from his death.

On Sept. 11, 2001, the McIlvaines slept together in their den as they awaited news about Bobby. They had learned that work took him to the Twin Towers that day, and even with phone lines down, it was unusual that he hadn’t found a way to communicate. I relate to the togetherness impulse. My parents and I stayed on the phone together the night we waited for the coroner’s call to confirm my sister’s death.

And in the aftermath of any tragedy, everyone is left with their individual grief. There are shared elements, of course there are. But we each bring our own perspectives and experiences to loss. Who we are afterward can be shaped by a collective grief, but we are our own creatures.

Bob Sr. spent the next 20 years obsessed with understanding his son’s final moments. (“The only thing I do is 9/11 stuff,” Bob Sr. says. “My whole basis of everything revolves around the day.”) His fixation has affected his marriage. How could it not?

“How do you get on in your decades-long marriage after your son has died and your spouse wakes up each morning livid as an open wound and determined to expose the truth,” Senior writes. “Helen would be lying if she said this didn’t cause friction.”

Helen, Bobby’s mother, was determined to avoid becoming “At-Least-I’m-Not-Helen.” That was a tough role to avoid with well-meaning people flinging platitudes at her in the early days. Bobby’s girlfriend, Jen, was days from becoming his fiancée. After living for some time with her late boyfriend’s family, she spent decades without speaking to them.

And Bobby’s brother, Jeff, grew up to become a father of four. If anything ever happens to one of his children, they won’t be left an only child. At 22, Jeff realized he couldn’t die. He had to live a good life or Bobby’s would have been meaningless.

I had my wisdom teeth extracted the day after my sister would have turned 35. It was her first birthday since she died nine months earlier, the latest in that year of milestone firsts. It was also my first time under general anesthesia. All week leading up to the surgery I thought, “I just can’t die.”

I lived.

And I continue to live a life filled with meaning and love. Nine years after Cristin’s death, I still feel the urge to call her when I stumble across a bit of Broadway gossip. Our cousin’s newborn daughter shares a name with one of my sister’s favorite theater actresses, a name that was inspired by a character on a TV show Cristin would’ve loved.

A phrase wends its way through “On Grief”: “Life loves on.” I won’t elaborate on its origins; Senior’s writing does the work. But I will say that I agree. Even years after a person you love has died, somehow life does, indeed, love on.

If you read this reported essay, I’d love to know how it strikes you. Grief is universal; did you see your own experience reflected in the McIlvaines and Jen?

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