> 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.”
It's not clear if all the family members in the story made it down.
I appreciate when the Atlantic publishes these early releases of next month's content. It seems Bobby got lucky in death to have a friend of his eventually become a writer at a periodical of note and memorialize him like this. It's a fascinating study of how grief affects people very differently and it makes me think of all the friends I had who died young and are forever lost to the memory of just about everyone.
My girlfriend back then had a roommate named Sarah Potter who worked for Merrill Lynch in the World Trade Center. She happened to be sick that day and didn't go in. It's not likely that it made a difference since the vast majority of Merrill Lynch employees survived, and given the sheer number, I doubt she knew this guy. She did have pretty serious survivor guilt, though.
It's interesting the weight we place on some deaths compared to others based on how they happened. I eventually joined the Army after this, and it was always an interesting factoid that Texas highways were consistently about 8-10 times as deadly as combat. We lost way more soldiers to traffic accidents than we did to the enemy. There was a counter at the front gate to Fort Hood showing days since the last person had died on the road, and that counter never went past 7 for four years once.
Yet we memorialized the heck out of the combat deaths, drank to them, put pictures of them in the headquarters, reserved empty tables for them at unit events. Nothing for the vehicular deaths. They were just slowly forgotten.
How many bad things have killed 10s, 100s, 1000s more than 9/11, yet no one cares and the people just quietly fade from memory, whereas this triggered a drastic and probably permanent shift in law enforcement, intelligence collection, and defense strategies, started a war we just ended a few weeks ago, and has become the greatest source of spilled ink for an entire generation of writers?
It may be one of the greater expressions ever of what activists were complaining about last year with respect to policing and laws valuing property more than people. Massive numbers of deaths can become a meaningless statistic, but the loss of a national landmark scars the country forever. But I think they are quite wrong to pin that kind of thing on capitalism. It seems to be a much more fundamental aspect of human group psychology. Symbols really matter to us.
I hope people don't read your comment and choose not to read the article. I was very moved by how Bobby's death impacted his family and fiancee in different ways. It's an extremely well written piece and doesn't deserve (IMHO) the flippant "tl/dr" treatment given its subject matter and quality.
While the mysterious and unsolved death of their son on 9/11 is a sad and captivating story, I find the juxtaposition between the way his mother and father each handled the grief to be equally fascinating.
> “The only thing I do is 9/11 stuff,” Bob Sr. says. “My whole basis of everything revolves around the day.”
> This is not, it should be said, anything like what Helen does with her days. A two-decade investigation into 9/11 was not part of her retirement plan.
> Crucial to Bob Sr.’s understanding of September 11—that it was the cynical skulduggery of the U.S. government, not a grisly act of terrorism by jihadists using commercial planes filled with helpless civilians—is the work of Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, which popularized the idea that jet fuel couldn’t burn at a high enough temperature to melt beams into molten steel.
> Only a preplanned detonation, he argues, could bring down those towers, and only a lobby embroidered with explosives could explain the injuries to Bobby’s body. He has the full medical examiner’s report.
It was a bit long winded for sure. But learning about the Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth organization was interesting at least [1].
Fair point - A good chunk of the story is about the father trying to figure out exactly how and where his son was killed, that frame of reference is why I phrased it like that, but you're right in hindsight it seems a little silly to say.
every other day, when this topic comes up, someone comes here full of themselves pretending like we've all come to consensus about what happened that day, mean while study after study shows 50% of Americans are split on what transpired that day.
> 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.”
It's not clear if all the family members in the story made it down.