Bonus: Our Conversation With 2022 Pulitzer Prize Winning Writer ...

Home » What Bobby Mcilvaine Left Behind » Bonus: Our Conversation With 2022 Pulitzer Prize Winning Writer ...

Maybe your like

  • Your Library
  • Podcasts
  • News

All Episodes

Bonus: Our Conversation with 2022 Pulitzer Prize Winning Writer Jennifer Senior

May 12, 2022 • 42 mins

In this replay bonus episode, Dani speaks with writer Jennifer Senior about her cover story ‘What Bobby McIlvaine Left Behind’ for the September 2021 issue of The Atlantic.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

ShareMark as PlayedTranscriptAll Episodes

Episode Transcript

Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.Speaker 1 (00:00):Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio HighFamily Secrets Listeners, It's Danny. Some of you may rememberthat last August we ran a special bonus episode aconversation with the journalist Jennifer Sr, who had just published(00:23):her cover story in The Atlantic titled What Bobby McIlvaineleft Behind Grief, conspiracy Theories, and one Family's search formeaning in the two decades since nine eleven. It wasa searing, extraordinary piece of journalism, and my conversation withJennifer about the way secrets can be buried in a(00:43):family was profound and revealing. So it is with greatpleasure that I learned this week that Jennifer has beenawarded journalism's top honor, the two Pulitzerprise for Feature Writing.In honor of this crowning achievement, and as we're deepinto producing season seven of Family Secrets, which will drop(01:04):on September one, here again is our conversation. You hada personal connection to the macle van's. Yes, although thefunny thing is, how well do you know these kinds(01:26):of people? Really, I will describe you to you howI knew them, and you'll see they didn't etch themselvesparticularly deeply into my brain until after they'd lost Bobby,which is a sad thing to say. They were theparents of my brother's roommate, both in college and inyoung adulthood. My brother moved into Princeton, you know, as(01:48):freshman year. He throws his stuff on a bunk bed,and the kid on the other bunk bed was Bobbymcle vain. And so when did I see the macle van's.I saw them if we were at the end ofthe year picking up my brother there or graduation, orthen when the two of them were living in New York.I would see them if I had just happened torun into them because they were in town and I(02:09):was picking something up, and my brother says, you know,it wasn't a lot. I really didn't get to knowthem until after Bobby died. Um. And my impression ofthem is just that they were saintly warm people whohad devoted their lives to doing good in the world.They were both teachers. They one taught you know, kids(02:32):who were the troubled teens who were in an adolescentpsych ward at a local hospital. Another taught reading ina trailer in a parking lot of a Catholic school.They were lovely people. Oh and and his brother wasthis this cheerful, sweet kid you know, who was youngerand kind of goofy and uh and not nearly the(02:55):go getter that his older brother was, but very funny.And Bobby made a much bigger and more singular impressionupon you, it seems during the time that you knew him.Oh God, Yeah, Bobby was like a one off. Hewas like a human being that never went into full production,(03:15):you know what I mean. It was he was anexceptional kid. Nobody in his family expecting him to goto an IVY League school, working class, um, you know,Irish Catholic family, Uh, without any kind of expectation thathe would go off and conquer the Ivy League. Andhe just came out freakishly smart even as this young kid.(03:39):And uh when I met him, he was always justfilled with ideas, very lively conversation, very precocious um charismapersonified I think, intimidating to some people who knew himuntil they got to know him and realized that insidehe was just a warm piece of peach pie. Um.(04:01):He just was dazzling and with this if he hadbeen sort of flung into the world from a sling shot,you know what I mean. He just had lots ofpuppets um and had that air about him that anyself invented person does. They're just kind of unstoppable. There'sa moment in your piece for you describe he wasalso athletic, and there's this moment where you describe a(04:22):teenage Bobby mcilvane throwing an immaculate pass uh as abasketball player that sets up an immaculate shot that fliesright over the teenage head of Kobe Bryant. I mean,I mean, it just sounds like on every level, thiskid was, as you describe, just a one off, completely extraordinary.(04:42):He was a miracle, yeah, I mean, and Kobe Bryant.That's the other thing, right, There's something almost Zelig likeor Forrest gumpi in about Bobby's trajectory. Right. They woundup playing each other in high school and they werethe two best kids on their team, and Bobby gotsixteen points off of Kobe and his teammates. I mean,that's extraordinary. That became the stuff of legend in the(05:05):mclavaine family. As Kobe Bryant became Kobe bryant Um. ThenBobby goes up to end get the handpick to takea class with Tony Morrison. And when when Bobby dies,Tony Morrison sends his family not one but two condolencenotes saying what a star Bobby was. And he justkept intersecting with exceptional people. You know, that's the kind(05:28):of guy he was. So on on nine eleven. At first,when the planes hit the towers, there wasn't a sensein the family or among Bobby's friends that that Bobbywas in the towers right there. It was just um,(05:49):this horrific thing that was unfolding. But there was noreason to He didn't work there, he didn't live right there.There was no reason to think that he would havebeen there. You were nearer there. He was adjacent, rightBut But and here's what's interesting. His mother had afull on premonition, a real, deep, visceral sense that something(06:09):wasn't matter. It was more than just a chirp inher stomach. She really thought something was wrong. But hisfather treated it like a news event. His brother hadjust been in the city that Thursday and appear with him,and he worked in Maryland he had just moved thereto corporate communications in Marylynch. It just so happened hehad to attend a conference that day, and you do(06:32):anythings crazier. The theory about Bobby is that he hadto go to a restaurant that to Windows in theWorld that morning for a conference, but that he hadprobably left before the planes hit, because they found hisbody on the periphery of the site, and that noone who was in Windows on the World was found, right,I mean, everybody was incinerated if they were up there.(06:55):So I want to quote something from from your Peace,because really, so much of your piece is about theshape or shapelessness or trajectory of grief and trauma, andyou write early on the macaile Veins spoke to atherapist who warned them that each member of their family(07:15):would grieve differently. Imagine you're all at the top ofa mountain, she told them, But you all have broken bones,so you can't help each other. You have to findyour own way down. It was a helpful metaphor, onethat may have saved the Macailvan's marriage. But when Imentioned it to Roxanne Cohen Silver, a psychology professor you see, Irvine,(07:36):who spent a lifetime studying the effect of sudden traumatic loss.She immediately spotted a problem with it that suggests thateveryone will make it down. She told me, some peoplenever get down the mountain at all. This is oneof the many things you learn about mourning when examiningit at close range. It's idiosyncratic, anarchic polychrome. A lot(07:59):of the series you read about grief are great, beautiful,even they have a way of eracing individual experiences. Everymorner has a different story to tell. So what I'mwondering is if you can tell us now the differentstories that Bobby's parents, in particular went through in the(08:23):wake the long wake of Bobby's death, Both Bob Sorand Helen. Yes, Um, they are so different that theyalmost look like photo negatives of one another. It reallystruck me, Um, and particularly Bob Sor his story. Helen's(08:46):was more recognizable to me. It isn't how I thinkI would have grieved, but it is a story thatI could have sort of seen and predicted, which isnot knowing her. So Helen, this is how she choseto grief. She chose to starve her grief. She didn'twant people to pity her. She didn't want to manage(09:07):people's awkwardness. She didn't want to manage their discomfort orlisten to them babbling their contolences, and she didn't wantto feel terrible all the time when people accidentally saidthe wrong thing to her. She went to a differentgrocery store for fifteen years in order to not runinto people she knew, so that no one could sit(09:28):there and just start incoherently trying to consol her ormuttering to preprint to you know, like pointing and gossiping.She didn't want any of it. She would deflect, shewould joke. It was her way of coping with it,and realized about ten years in that it wasn't serving(09:48):her very well to keep stoppering up all of her grief.She realized at some point that it was making her angry,that it was making her more of a gossip, thatshe was on a shorter fuse. She thought, No, itis additionally compounded by the fact that I am notallowing myself to grieve, to fully inhabit disgrief. The only(10:08):type herself to do it was with this group oflocal women all lost children with whom she could speakin shorthand they all knew what it was. They weren'tgoing to single her ad for special pity. She couldsay anything she wanted to them and it was all okay.But they understood if she said, I was just witha friend of mine who went on and on andon about their child, and I just couldn't stand listening(10:29):to them talk about their child. I am so jealousthat she has this problem. I can't listen to peopletalk about their child. They all got it. It allmade sense, but it was very hard for her. Shedidn't want to be a victim. She didn't want tobe short, she didn't want to be short tempered, you know,or hurt. All these things. She had like a strongsuper ego kind of watching her own reactions. That was helen.(10:53):She gave the impression of having quote unquote healed becauseshe wasn't talking about it. She was, you know, movingon with her life. And so it was this impossibleconundrum totally one of her own making right, exactly right.She needed to do that in order to get through(11:14):the day that was in some ways her version ofgrieving was not grieving or not externally showing it, andyet exactly something some part of her was permanently you know,there was scar tissue on top of a whole bunchof stuff that had not stitched up. There was somethingpainfully paradoxical about this situation, right that she was like(11:38):all stitched up, but just a watery mass inside. Andso that was really hard. That was really really hardfor her um and she just woke up one morningand decided she had to do something about it, whichmakes her very unusual. I mean, to make an executivedecision one day that you were simply going to beanother person is extraordinary. And she actually did that. She(11:59):actually woke up one morning and did that to beShe decided she wanted to be somebody else. She neededto be someone else, and so she was going tobe that person. And what was that someone else? Someonewho engaged more with her grief and who let goof all of the anger that was just accumulating in there.(12:20):She really felt, on some level like she was marinatingin a braid of her own resentment and her ownfury and her own hurt, and she hadn't let it out,you know, and it was just curdling her and curdlingher insights. What you just described is a version ofa secret. It's you know, it's it's this kind of(12:43):almost one of the most toxic versions because it's thatbottling up, you know, the idea of I can makethis go away if I just try hard enough, totally.And here's what's amazing, her suffering with the secret andher son died and what must have been the mostblick active mass murder in recent memory, right, I mean,(13:06):she was denying herself, her own suffering. She was keepingit almost from herself, and it's so poignant and itcan be so corrosive to our souls, you know, itcan just rip us up, and I think it did her.And then meanwhile, her husband, Bobby's father, Bob Senior, was having,as you say, a completely almost polar opposite kind of(13:32):way way of responding. Yes, Bob was the polar opposite.Everything that was light colored on Helen's print was darkcolored down hairs and everything that was dark color andher print was light on his. I mean that youjust couldn't imagine two different ways of going about grievingfor Bob's senior. It's not just that he actively every(13:56):day chooses to inhabit his grief, and he cries everyday that his grief just lives very close to the surface.You just touch him, if you a whole vat ofgrief kind of spills out. It's not just that, it'sthat for him, every day is kind of September twelve.It's like he wakes up and he's as raw as(14:18):he was almost the day he discovered it. And to me,this was just an amazing revelation because there are allthese kind of cultural wide imperatives that I think wehave that, oh, you've got to move on, You've gotto move past your grief or through your grief, oraround your grief or something. Right. No, not him. He(14:39):had no interest. He wanted to live in his grief.It seems like his form of grief was about engagingwith the details, real or imagined. Around nine eleven andaround Bobby's death was a way of keeping Bobby alive exactly.(15:02):I mean, he treated Bobbies death as if it werean unsolved murder. He became over time gradually very veryinterested in um all of the I'm going to callthem conspiracy theory. He never would he calls this nineeleven truth. Um to me, the air conspiracy theories thatthe government was behind this, that um, this was an(15:26):orchestrated hit. You know, that the World Trade Center wasembroidered with explosives. And he became very interested in inin sorry, explosive laid by the American government and it was,you know, a control debt nation. He had a theoryfor why they actually um destroyed it. That's quite arcane.(15:46):What got in his mind turning though, was that itwas based on looking at the medical examiners report, yes,Son's death. You know, I think what he initially wasdoing was some we worrying about um. It was avery paternal instinct. He was haunted by the idea thatBobby might have suffered right before he died, that he(16:08):might have aspixiated, that he might have been up, thathe might have jumped right, that he didn't know howhe died. Um. And in getting medical examiner's report, hesaw how he died. I mean, he was decapitated andwhich to me suggested a giant piece of debris you know,came worring out of the sky and then he didn'tknow what hit him. But for whatever sort of reasons,(16:31):Bob Sr. Decided that because most of Bobby's injuries wereon his front, not on his back, he had hecouldn't have been running away from the building, he hadto have been inside it, and that this had tohave been an inside job. So he started doing alot of reading. He started reading history. He started doingall these things and came up with a very laboratoryfor why the government might might have wanted to destroy(16:54):the World Trade Center. And you know, Bobby's brother Jeffthinks that by saying, oh, this is merely how he grieves,he thinks it's kind of trivializing his efforts. And thatmay be so, Although what I think is interesting isthat Bob Senior said to me, in doing this every day,he is definitely keeping his Bobby close, that this is(17:18):how he spends time in Bobby's company. So I mightbe giving short trift to the theories because I don'tbelieve in the theories. I think the theories are wrongheaded.But he does not deny that like they serve, itserves a purpose for him. And in doing all this research,he gets to stay close to Bobby. He gets todo this and it's a way to keep parenting, andit would kind of forget. Bobby was so young. He(17:40):was so young, he was only twenty six. He wasstill problem with in some way as a little boyto Bob SR. And he probably wanted to actively parent him,you know. Still in some ways, this is him beinga father. We'll be right back. So Bobby kept He(18:06):was a prolific journal keeper. He left behind volumes andvolumes of journals and thinking about what it is tocontinue to parent, or to keep someone alive, or tokeep a relationship alive in some way. You know, thejournals become very very important in this story. Helen and Bob,(18:31):you know, have all the journals. Um. There is ayoung woman named Jen who is Bobby's girlfriend and isabout to become Bobby's fiance. He has a ring, andhe has asked her father for her hand in marriage,(18:52):and he um is about to propose to her, andof course that of her happens. So Jen is his girlfriend,and she doesn't have any legal right to any ofhis possessions or belongings. And Jen asks if she can(19:14):have the last journal that Bobby had been writing in,and Bob SR. Just hands it to her without athought of like, of course, here here's a piece of Bobby.So that's a perfect summary. Um. Bob Senior handed intoher without giving it a second thought. Because there they(19:36):were cleaning out Bobby's bedroom. There was his last remainingjournal open on his desk, and Jen started reading itand noticed that she was on practically every page, soit would be perfectly natural for her to want tohave that right. And he was distributing those journals anywayto everybody who was in the room. It was my brother,(19:57):it was two other friends. I think we're there, um,And he was saying, you might want to look atthese in order to write your eulogies because me andmy wife I am not being any shape to write them.And Helen was not even in any shape to goand clean out that bedroom. She was elsewhere. And ifshe'd been in that bedroom, she might have stopped her(20:21):husband from giving away that final journal, because it washugely important to her that she had every molecule ofeverything her son that ever had. All the objects ofthe dead, a lot of them can just assume almostkind of tellismanic property, like they just their proxies for(20:41):the person you love, And what's so interesting about adiary is that it's not even the same as likea T shirt or a recovered photograph. It's this unusualthing where you get to almost hear that person's voiceagain and to spend time in their company. It's nota conversation or that, it's not two ways, but youare hearing from them. And she was so devastated when(21:07):she found out that her husband had given away thisfinal journal, because here was this chance to hear herson's voice one last time, and she was being robbedof that opportunity. Particularly, I mean he was at that moment.She had like all of his kind of childhood journalswhen he was a kid, but he wasn't a fullyformed adult. It wasn't like a chance to experience him(21:30):and a grown human, you know, And here was thismost recent thing, and she she just she didn't haveit suddenly, right, So she asks Jen if Jen willpart with it? Correct, She asked Jen for it. She said,I would really like to see parts of it. Iunderstand it's about you, but and Jen kind of demurred.(21:53):She hemmed in odd, and she took the diary homewith her. She went off to Michigan, where she wasfrom and took some I by herself, and then shecame back and lived with the mcle vans for abouttwo months because she just couldn't stand being in herapartment by herself. So there were many opportunities for Helento say, you know, I'd really like to see that diary,(22:15):which was no longer there, right, it was in Jim's apartment.She had taken it and then got off to Michigan,so the diary is not there. Helen and looking atthis future almost daughter in law who she doesn't knowvery well, she hadn't spent much time in her company,and adding for it and not getting the response she wants,(22:36):and by the end she was begging. She was simply saying, look,if Bobby is describing a tree, can you just giveme the words, Just tell me what he says aboutthe tree. I just want the words, just the words.And then still never did it, and her stay there(22:56):ended in terrible tension, and with Jen slamming the doorbehind her, bursting into tears, getting in her car anddriving off, and you never saw the macle vains again.And when I saw Helen before, you know, to dothis story, Jen, she couldn't come up with Jen's last name.She kept saying, it's something short, it's like Jen Cove(23:20):And I said it was Jennifer Cobb and she said, oh,that's right, cob c O B And I said cO b by. She really had forgotten. She had buriedher the way she had buried her son. She hadjust forgotten. It always really amazes me and humbles me(23:42):to think about what the ways in which our memories,especially our memories under the pressure of intense emotion, umjust either end up with these huge lakunai, you know,just these gaps, or tell their own stories just you(24:02):know that are just different stories. And you know, oneof the things that you're that you're describing now makesme think of um a moment in your piece wherewhere you you describe the yearning and searching stage of grief, right,and and so at this point Helen and Jen who(24:23):are in this yearning and searching stage, and the journalhas become this kind of emblematic of that more thananything else. It's a way to resurrect the dead, eventhough you know that they can't be retirected. Right. That'swhen you are just desperately searching for them though you know,rationally they're never coming back. So it's a widow crying(24:46):out there her husband as she's doing the dishes, aretalking to him. You know. It's you can take manymany forms. It was first described by a pair ofBritish psychiatrists. Um. One of thom was John Bulby, whodid attachment theory. But yeah, I mean, but the realkind of author of that is a guy named ColinMurray Parks. And yeah, it's perfect. And I think that(25:08):Helen was stuck on that diary for like ten years.She was yearning and searching, and she really really umgot served bogged down in it. She took it tothe members of her that group that I was describingof women who had all lost kids. She would talkabout it with them and they would joke about breaking(25:31):into Jennifer's house and liberating the diary, you know, sothat you could have it, stealing it. Um. She wasreally angry at her husband for a very long time.She would needle him about it, you know, for yearsthis one on. She couldn't get past it. There wasone phrase that Helen became very focused on. She wasn't(25:53):sure where she had read it or heard it um,but the phrase was Bobby's, she was certain, and itwas life love's on, and she was very focused on that.And that became a kind of motto or or away of thinking for the family that Bobby had said(26:14):that and that that's what they needed to do exactly.It became like some kind of organizing motto for their grief.And to your point about how humbling and mind blowingit is that our memories can desert us. She hasthat motto of life loves on engraved in a bracelet,right that you wear it every day. A friend gave it,(26:35):gave it to her. Her friends also took on that motto.They have it like sort of stamped at the bottomsof their emails his and Bob Senior has it tattooedon his arm, right, I mean, so this is onhis skin. So you would think, if you are goingto live by that phrase that your son has written,you would like know where it came from or was(26:57):some idea. And yeah, but she hands me all thesediaries and tells me, okay, well, I know it's in here,And she thinks that she knows where it is, andshe goes looking for it. She sure she knows whereit comes from, which is that when like a familyfriend died, he wrote it then, But it turned outout to be there. So I went on this mad(27:19):aunt to find this phrase, and you know how Ifound it. I'm not sure I want to give it away,but it was this extraordinarily I mean, it was thisinsane kind of uh flothing adventure that I went onto find this thing. And it turns out I mean,(27:39):if you want to talk about secrets you keep from yourself,she knew, everyone in the family knew. They had justall forgotten where it came from. They had just forgotten.And it is amazing what we can And as you say,the lacina and our memories are just extraordinary. I meanthey are there the size of an ocean sometimes andyou can't believe it. It should be solid land, you know,(28:01):I mean, the things that we know to be certain,sometimes they're just made of water. We'll be back ina moment with more family secrets. I want to quoteone other little passage from from Your Peace, which is(28:25):memories of traumatic experiences are a curious thing. Some are vivid,some are pale. Pretty much all of them have beenamended in some way great or small. There seems tobe no rhyme or reason to our curated reels. Weremember the trivial and forget the exceptional. Our minds trulyhave minds of their own. So I don't think it(28:49):would be giving anything away, and everyone should just simplyread your beautiful peace. But to say that down the road,once this phrase and it's our gen has been tracked down,you know, like the Holy grail. Um, you send itto your editor at The Atlantic, like a screen, a(29:09):screenshot of where it was, and he sends you anote that says and and Bobby has like very dense,sort of indecipherable, you know, difficult to make out handwriting.And your editor writes to you and says, isn't it(29:30):life lives on, not life love? So exactly, yes, he did,And my heart sank. And I mean, I I can'ttell you. I mean I was on an amtrack andI almost started to scream. I did not know whatto do, because then you're faced with a real journalistic conundrum,(29:53):which is do you tell a family that's been livingby this mode over twenty years? You know, it's almostthere's a word for this when when it's an oral misapprehension,when you hear something incorrectly, it's called the Manda greenAnd you know, like VI, Jimie Andricks excuse me whileI kissed the sky, and everybody thinks it's excuse mewhile I kiss this guy, you know, So it's like(30:14):the equivalent of that, but in print, where you're lookingat the wrong like it was just it was misinterpreted,it was misread. It didn't matter. In the end, itdidn't matter. Bobby's journals are filled with wisdom, all kindsof unexpected wisdom. The funny and amazing and weird thingis that although Helen and Bob had lots of Bobby's(30:39):journals for a while, um they didn't read them very much.And there's lots of great things in there. When Ifinally glimpsed that diary, I'm happy to say that therewas plenty in there to look at that I thoughtwas really much more beautiful and much more resonant umthen Life lives On, Life Love On. You know, it's(31:01):a little bit hallmarky. Life loves On It's slightly moreprofound because it suggests we have some kind of driveto love in our hearts no matter what. And Ikind of liked it, but life lives on is kindof disappointing. It didn't matter. There's there's plenty that Bobobserved and said in his life that's much more interesting.But in the funny I mean that like this is(31:22):this is how our memories get made. They get madefalsely or they don't matter. You know, we choose to live,but they become that person's words. You know, we areconstantly inventing and reinventing the dead. At this point, Bobbymay as well have said it, and it's something hecould have said. And I think that that's even moreinteresting in a funny way, is that we're all perfectlyhappy to assign him those words because they seem so Bobby.(31:45):He was just this little Yota boy, you know, solike why not sure? It seemed Bobby like Lata's loves whatever,so true that in the end it doesn't really matter.I mean the way that Helen got, you know, fixatedon the journal m for all those years, you the(32:06):journalist got fixated on the phrase right and find andfinding it um And in the end, it doesn't reallymatter where the phrase came from, or even exactly whatthe phrase was in the profound emotional scheme of the story.When you do travel to Washington, d C. And And(32:29):you you meet Jen, Bobby's girlfriend. Um, she is preparedto and has you know, wanted to for years. HaveHelen be able to read the journal? Um. She givesyou the journal and says, at some point, I'd loveto have this back, but you know here, I mean,(32:51):one of the most moving parts of your Peace areHelen's epiphany when she reads Bobby's final journal that Bobbywas a young man, he wasn't a boy anymore, andthat she his mother, wasn't at the center of his life.(33:14):That Jen was at the center of his life, whichis why Jen had so desperately wanted to hold ontothat that piece of him, a painful secret that wassort of in this journal. I mean, you know, insome ways, Helen just wanted it because she wanted everything(33:36):that was Bobby's. She just wanted to reconstruct him. Itwas just a metaphorical way of making him the wholeif she couldn't have him. But in some ways itwas also just glimpsing who he was at that moment.In time, being able to spend time in his company again,and yes, wanting to see you know, she was allover his previous journals. His family was Oliver his previous journals.(33:57):He spoke glowingly about his family in those journals. Hewas still a young boy, and unlike most adolescent kids,he wasn't ripping up his family. He was talking abouthow great that he were. He was very close to them.So I think her fantasy in some way was thatthere would just be more about the nuclear family. But(34:18):it was a relief. I think in some ways, it'sjust is to discover, oh, he was his own man.I was, you know, I wasn't a part of hislife anymore. And there are things in that journal thatare so mind blowing that like shed whole windows intolike I mean, there are goose pumpling things. But Imean I think that that was like a big takeaway(34:39):for her. In some ways. It was to sort of see, oh,my boys all grown up, he's all grown up. Thatthis wasn't about me. I mean, the things that itwas about were extraordinary. That the journal was about were extraordinary,you know, And the words in that journal were extraordinary.I mean, I get, I get she was just thinking(35:00):about them. What is so amazing is that there wasthis thing that was looming for twenty years that shewas sure contained. It did not contain it never does.It did not have inside it at what she thoughtit did, And the reasons Jim kept it weren't thereasons she thought she did. You know, all the motiveswe assigned to other people are never the stories we(35:21):tell ourselves are so often not stories that are true.You know, how we know what we think we knowdoes not end up being the right thing. I mean,you know, having the wrong tattoo, having the wrong story,and in some ways a metaphor for everything. You know.It also strikes me that in the end, in being(35:43):able to see that final journal, she actually had amoment that she would have had had Bobby lived, whichwas the realization, oh, my boy is a young manand I am not you know, the son at thecenter of his universe. I am that's right, and and(36:06):and she she actually ended up developmentally getting to have that,even though uh way later and in a completely heartbreaking way. Yeah,that's a beautiful way of putting it. I mean, Ithink that again, because he was so young, so muchof his life was still locked away in his mother's(36:27):heart as like her little boy, you know, And whywhy wouldn't he be sort of enshrined in that wayand her heart in her memory? But you were? Andhad she got to go to a wedding and seehim pledge his love to to Jen, had she hada tiny grand baby, you know, from Bobby anything, seen(36:50):them by a house, seen them even move in together.He was still living with my brother, you know. Imean he still seemed like a kid. He still seemedlike a kid. So as you say, yes, I thinkthat it did allow her maybe to right go onebeat further down the road and see him as afully realized adult. I mean she knew it anyway, But(37:13):I think that this was living in his head, inhis mature head, as a person whose thoughts were nowutterly consumed by someone else. I will never ever encourageanyone to get on with their lives, even gently. Um.I think it's a kind of tyranny. I think somepeople never get beyond their grief, and that's the choice(37:33):they make, and they or don't make their chiefs theirgriefs just to hold them and not the other waythey can't hold it. And that's one thing I learnedfrom being around Bob sr. It's not for me tojudge if it gets in the way of your family's life.It's something that you have to deal with, and it'ssomething you have to contend with within the marriage. Allthose things, But I think the biggest thing is like(37:55):the epistemological thing that we have been discussing, which is like,how do you know what you know? I mean, noone had the same I mean, let me just putthis out there. Helen thought that Jen had lived withthe family for one week after Bobby died. Jeff, Bobby'syounger brother, who was living with his parents at the time,(38:18):I thought that Jim lived with them for six months.Jen thought it was for two months. Okay, they thoughtthey were sure they knew where Life Loved On came from,and they were wrong. They had no idea where itcame from. Jen was sure when she was living withthe mackail Vane's that she slept in Bobby's brother's room,(38:41):and that Jeff very bravely slept in his brother's bed,his dead brother's bed, Whereas Jeff was absolutely certain thatJen very bravely slept in her dead fiance's bed. I mean,AMY think I can never sit anywhere and argue with(39:04):any kind of force about any memory that I have,about anything that I think I know and be deadcertain anymore. And that doesn't mean that truth doesn't exist,that there are isn't such a thing as like realobjective truth. I think that there is. But I mean,I I just think in terms of the fallibility ofour own memories. I think that our our emotions so(39:25):should shape them, misshape them, reshape them, prittify them, discolor them,do all sorts of things, you know. I mean theimage that I have have is of a snow globegetting all shaken up. That if you had reported thisstory four years ago, or if you had reported itfour years from now, those memories among all of the(39:47):macle van's might be completely different than the ones thatthey had during that sleiver of time. Oh for sure,I had memories of the macall van's telling me thingsabout at their grief at years three and four, becauseI would see them. They would come to visit my parents,you know, I see them when I was visiting mymom in Florida. They they would um, you know, sort(40:12):of describe things, and I would raise them during theinterview and they wouldn't remember having said them to me,you know, I mean, I had very different memories ofwhat they told me about their grieving. And here's something, okay,here's something. This is I think the craziest thing. Afterthe piece came out, I had dinner with Jeff and Jen,(40:33):who hadn't seen each other in twenty years, and Jeffsaid to me, you know, I really love the piece,but I'll tell you something. I both did and didnot recognize my dad. Everything that he said to you,you captured accurately and exactly. And it's one facet ofmy father, but it's not the only facet of my father.(40:54):I know a very different man. I know a different guy.And when my wife read that's story, she wasn't sureshe recognized the man you described either. It's just oneside of himself that he was interested in showing you.And I'm sitting there thinking, well, I'm a journalist. Ithought I captured him much better, you know, a muchfuller kind of complex. I thought I didn't. I didn't(41:16):think he was like mono dimension all at all. Ithought that I had really captured something about his essence.But they were telling me that I missed something, whichmeans that I had the wrong tattoo. I mean, whatdo you do with that? How do we know? What?We know? All the selves, all of the selves within us,and all the stories, right, all the stories we tell?(41:39):How reliable are our stories and our memories? How well?You know? How reliable was the thing that I wrote?You know, I thought it was pretty darn reliable, andit was, you know, and it wasn't mm hmmm. For(42:17):more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the I HeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to yourfavorite shows. H

Family Secrets News

  • About Family Secrets

Follow Us On

Host

Dani Shapiro

Dani Shapiro

Show Links

AboutStore

© 2026 iHeartMedia, Inc.

  • Help
  • Privacy Policy
  • Your Privacy Choices
  • Terms of Use
Learn More

Tag » What Bobby Mcilvaine Left Behind