Autobiography

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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I moved to Colorado in January 2017 with only possessions I could fit in my car. Housing is tough on the state’s Western Slope. Even before the affordable housing crisis dominated the country, finding a place to live in a resort town on a newspaper editor’s salary was going to be a challenge. So I packed a limited wardrobe, yoga essentials, my two cats and 12 books to accompany me during an undetermined period of living on the basement level of my best friend’s condo.

One of those books was the classic grief memoir “The Year of Magical Thinking.” It had been on my to-read shelf for a while, but I couldn’t tell you why it made the cut out of hundreds of options. Sometimes books come to you at the right time, I suppose. A week after I arrived in Colorado, my sister died of alcoholism.

It was time to read Joan Didion.

“The Year of Magical Thinking” is one of the first books people suggest to someone in mourning, at least in my experience. Perhaps that says something about my demographics—white, upper middle class, female, writer, academically motivated. And I’ll confess, it isn’t my favorite grief book, not by a long shot.

But there are also good reasons for this recommendation. After the sudden death of her husband, John Dunne, Didion is disoriented and grasping for reality. When her literary agent calls The New York Times’ chief obituary writer to report John’s death, Didion panicks. Friends in Los Angeles couldn’t learn about John’s death in The New York Times!

“I found myself wondering, with no sense of illogic, if it had also happened in Los Angeles,” she wrote. “I was trying to work out what time it had been when he died and whether it was that time yet in Los Angeles. (Was there time to go back? Could we have a different ending on Pacific time?)”

Time can become elastic during times of crisis. When I learned my sister had died, minutes crawled as we tried to figure out why she hadn’t shown up for work that day. After a friend confirmed Cristin’s death, time snapped back into place like a rubber band. Its recoil was punishing. During time’s slow expansion, I carried a sense of dread but hoped against hope that my sister was well. Once I knew she was not, a strange new reality demanded my attention.

Didion also wrestles with the truth of her husband’s death. She requires solitude that first night, even though her agent offers to stay over, because Didion isn’t ready to accept John was gone. If she’s alone, she can cling to hope.

Though it covers the first year following Dunne’s death, which coincides with their daughter’s significant illness, “The Year of Magical Thinking” is nonlinear. The book skips through the couple’s relationship, reflecting on their early days together and the years they spent working from the same apartment. Their intimacy and the lack left by his death renders Didion a wanderer who struggles to complete an essay without her husband, her first editor, on hand for review.

Didion’s ruminations often pull focus from the narrative. That sometimes makes for difficult reading; we’re reflecting on one person’s pain, sometimes meandering through these difficult observations.

But the central conceit resonates. Maybe “The Year of Magical Thinking” doesn’t grab me because it can be so painful to return to grief’s disorientation. Perhaps my mind is protecting me and the progress I’ve made over the past nine years.

Like Didion, I struggled to accept my sister’s death. I saw her over Christmas weeks before. She attended my farewell party before I set out on the cross-country road trip to Colorado. We said goodbye outside a mall hamburger shop, and I don’t think either of us would have guessed that meal would be our final hour together.

Didion was an early guide on my journey to understand grief through literature—and it’s an impulse she understood. “In time of trouble, I had been taught since childhood, read, learn, work it up, go to the literature. Information was control,” she wrote. Didion found relevant literature tough to find when she mourned her husband’s death in the early 2000s. Though her book was one of the first I turned to in my own journey, it’s one of dozens in which I’ve found consolation. Together, they’ve formed a support group that reminds me that my pain was real. My confusion was understandable. And the hole left by my sister’s absence is a scar that keeps her present in my life.

What resonated with you from The Year of Magical Thinking? Did you find any pieces helpful? How have you grounded yourself during times of grief? Have you read Blue Nights, the book Didion wrote after her daughter’s death? Should I? Let’s talk about it in the comments.

Disclosure: I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org and I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase via the link in this post.