2021.08.09 9/11 二十年过去了

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CULTURE
WHAT BOBBY MCILVAINE LEFT BEHIND
Grief, conspiracy theories, and one family’s search for meaning in the two decades since 9/11

By Jennifer Senior
SEPTEMBER 2021 ISSUE
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This article was published online on August 9, 2021.


When bobby mcilvaine died on September 11, 2001, his desk at home was a study in plate tectonics, coated in shifting piles of leather-bound diaries and yellow legal pads. He’d kept the diaries since he was a teenager, and they were filled with the usual diary things—longings, observations, frustrations—while the legal pads were marbled with more variety: aphoristic musings, quotes that spoke to him, stabs at fiction.


The yellow pads appeared to have the earnest beginnings of two different novels. But the diaries told a different kind of story. To the outside world, Bobby, 26, was a charmer, a striver, a furnace of ambition. But inside, the guy was a sage and a sap—philosophical about disappointments, melancholy when the weather changed, moony over girlfriends.

Less than a week after his death, Bobby’s father had to contend with that pitiless still life of a desk. And so he began distributing the yellow legal pads, the perfect-bound diaries: to Bobby’s friends; to Bobby’s girlfriend, Jen, to whom he was about to propose. Maybe, he told them, there was material in there that they could use in their eulogies.

One object in that pile glowed with more meaning than all the others: Bobby’s very last diary. Jen took one look and quickly realized that her name was all over it. Could she keep it?

Bobby’s father didn’t think. He simply said yes. It was a reflex that he almost instantly came to regret. “This was a decision we were supposed to make together,” his wife, Helen, told him. Here was an opportunity to savor Bobby’s company one last time, to hear his voice, likely saying something new. In that sense, the diary wasn’t like a recovered photograph. It raised the prospect, however brief, of literary resurrection. How, Helen fumed, could her husband not want to know Bobby’s final thoughts—ones he may have scribbled as recently as the evening of September 10? And how could he not share her impulse to take every last molecule of what was Bobby’s and reconstruct him?

“One missing piece,” she told me recently, “was like not having an arm.”

Over and over, she asked Jen to see that final diary. Helen had plenty of chances to bring it up, because Jen lived with the McIlvaines for a time after September 11, unable to tolerate the emptiness of her own apartment. Helen was careful to explain that she didn’t need the object itself. All she asked was that Jen selectively photocopy it.

RECOMMENDED READING

Excerpts From ‘American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center’
WILLIAM LANGEWIESCHE
New York City on September 12, 2001
The 9/11 Era Is Over
BEN RHODES
An illustration of a woman looking at a man sitting upside down in a maze of stairs.
Dear Therapist: When I Bring Up Anything Serious, My Boyfriend Falls Apart
LORI GOTTLIEB
Jen would say she’d consider it. Then nothing would happen. Helen began to plead. I just want the words, she’d say. If Bobby’s describing a tree, just give me the description of the tree. Jen demurred.

The requests escalated, as did the rebuffs. They were having an argument now. Helen, Jen pointed out, already had Bobby’s other belongings, other diaries, the legal pads.

When she finally left the McIlvaines’ house for good, Jen slammed the door behind her, got into her car, and burst into tears. Shortly after, she wrote Helen a letter with her final answer: No, just no. If Helen wanted to discuss this matter any further, she’d have to do so in the presence of Jen’s therapist.

Helen and her husband never saw Jen again. “She became a nonperson to me,” Helen told me. Today, she can’t so much as recall Jen’s last name.

But for years, Helen thought about that diary. Her mind snagged on it like a nail; she needled her husband for giving it away; it became the subject of endless discussion in her “limping group,” as she calls it, a circle of six mothers in suburban Philadelphia who’d also lost children, though not on September 11. They became indignant on her behalf. A number proposed, only half jokingly, that they break into Jen’s apartment and liberate the diary. “You don’t get any more memories,” one of the women told me. “So anything written, any video, any card—you cling to that. That’s all you’re going to get for life.”

The McIlvaines would have to make do with what they already had. Eventually, they did. Three words of Bobby’s became the family motto: Life loves on. No one could quite figure out which diary or legal pad it came from, but no matter. Helen wears a silver bracelet engraved with this phrase, and her husband got it tattooed in curlicue script on his upper arm.

Photo of Helen, Bobby, and Bob Sr. smiling and standing in an outdoor tent at graduation
Bobby McIlvaine, with his parents, Helen and Bob Sr., at his Princeton graduation in 1997. Bobby’s body was found in the wreckage of the Twin Towers. (Danna Singer; original photo courtesy of the McIlvaine family)
Here i should note that I know and love the McIlvaine family. On my brother’s first day of college, he was assigned to a seven-person suite, and because he arrived last, Bobby became his roommate. My brother often thinks about what a small miracle that was: If he’d arrived just 30 minutes earlier, the suite would have been an isomer of itself, with the kids all shuffled in an entirely different configuration. But thanks to a happy accident of timing, my brother got to spend his nights chattering away with this singular kid, an old soul with a snappity-popping mind.

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Eight years later, almost to the day, a different accident of timing would take Bobby’s life. He and my brother were still roommates, but this time in a two-bedroom apartment in Manhattan, trying to navigate young adulthood.

Back when Bobby was still alive, I would occasionally see the McIlvaines. They struck me as maybe the nicest people on the planet. Helen taught reading to kids who needed extra help with it, mainly in a trailer in the parking lot of a Catholic high school. Bob Sr. was a teacher who specialized in working with troubled adolescents; for a decade, he’d also owned a bar. Jeff, Bobby’s younger brother, was just a kid in those days, but he was always unreasonably good-natured when he turned up.

And Bobby: My God. The boy was incandescent. When he smiled it looked for all the world like he’d swallowed the moon.

Then, on the morning of September 11, 2001, Bobby headed off to a conference at Windows on the World, a restaurant in a building to which he seldom had reason to go, for a media-relations job at Merrill Lynch he’d had only since July. My brother waited and waited. Bobby never came home. From that point forward, I watched as everyone in the blast radius of this horrible event tried to make sense of it, tried to cope.

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.”

This is one of the many things you learn about mourning when examining it at close range: It’s idiosyncratic, anarchic, polychrome. 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.

That therapist was certainly right, however, in the most crucial sense: After September 11, those who had been close to Bobby all spun off in very different directions. Helen stifled her grief, avoiding the same supermarket she’d shopped in for years so that no one would ask how she was. Jeff, Bobby’s lone sibling, had to force his way through the perdition of survivor’s guilt. Bob Sr. treated his son’s death as if it were an unsolved murder, a cover-up to be exposed. Something was fishy about 9/11.

And then there was Jen. She’s married now, has two terrific kids, but she wonders sometimes, when she’s quarreling with her husband or feeling exasperated with her life, what it would have been like if she’d been with Bobby all this time. I tracked her down in April, and of course she’s nothing like the heartless villainess I had come to imagine her to be. That was just the story I’d told myself, the one I’d used to make sense of the senseless, to give shape to my own rage. Like I said: We all need our stories.

One thing I knew when I finally visited her, though: I wanted to see that diary. And I wanted the McIlvaines to see it too. “I’m not a saver,” she said when we first met up for cocktails. My heart froze.

But she still had it, just so you know.

Listen to Jen Senior discuss this story on The Experiment podcast, a show about people navigating our country's contradictions.Listen and subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Google Podcasts
Tell me about your son.

Helen welcomed this invitation the first time she heard it, because it focused her thinking, gave her an outlet for her grief. But soon it filled her with dread, and she felt herself straining under the weight of it. How can you possibly convey who your firstborn was or what he meant to you?

Helen usually starts by telling people that Bobby went to Princeton, but that’s hardly because she’s status-fixated. It’s because she and Bob Sr. did not expect to have a child who went to an Ivy League school. They both went to state schools in Pennsylvania, not even particularly well-known ones. Both of their kids were sporty. But when Bobby was 8, his third-grade teacher said to them—and they both remember her exact words—“Start saving your pennies.” This one’s education might cost you.

“The amount of things that had to go right for my brother to go to Princeton were, like, astronomical,” says Jeff, a high-school biology teacher and track coach in Somerdale, New Jersey. “To us, it was like someone from our family becoming the president.”

This is how everyone in the family remembers Bobby: as a sui generis creature, exceptional and otherworldly, descended from the heavens through a basketball hoop.

He was an intense student. He was an even more intense athlete, competitive to the point of insolence. Writing in The Philadelphia Inquirer last year, Mike Sielski, an old high-school classmate of Bobby’s, described him as “all bones and acute angles and stiletto elbows” on the basketball court. It was a goose-pimpling story, one he had occasion to write because another classmate of theirs had unearthed 36 seconds of video from 1992, in which a teenage Bobby McIlvaine throws an immaculate pass that sets up an immaculate shot that flies right over the teenage head of …

Kobe Bryant.

Bobby scored 16 points off Kobe and his team that day, in addition to setting up that floater.

When he arrived at college, Bobby retained a bit of that alpha-dog streak. He was still competitive, even while playing mindless, made-up dorm games. He wasn’t bashful about ribbing friends. He was tall and handsome and had a high level of confidence in his sense of style, which may or may not have been justified. “There were times you wanted him to step back and not be so serious and intense,” says Andre Parris, a former suitemate and one of Bobby’s closest friends. “But it was part of who and what he was, and what he thought he had to do to get ahead.”

What “getting ahead” meant to Bobby was complicated. Financial worries are all over his journals from those years (I don’t feel like a real person sitting here with no money, reads one typical entry). Yet he was conflicted about what it might take to make money, flummoxed by all the kids who were beating a dutiful path to business school. (Is youth really just a hobby? he asked about them, with evident pique.) He wanted to be a writer. Which paid nothing, obviously.

This conflict continued into his brief adulthood. He spent two years in book publishing before realizing that it was no way to make a living, and switched instead to corporate PR. He could still write his novels on the side.

But for all Bobby’s hunger and swagger, what he mainly exuded, even during his college years, was warmth, decency, a corkscrew quirkiness. He doted on girlfriends. He gave careful advice. His senior year, he took a modern-dance class because, well, why not? It would be fun. And different. His final project involved physically spelling out his girlfriend’s name.

That was just a lark, though. Bobby’s real intellectual passion was African American culture and history. After Bobby died, the McIlvaines got not one but two condolence notes from Toni Morrison, with whom he’d taken a class. The second came with the term paper he’d written for her. “It is certainly one of the more accomplished and insightful,” she wrote, “as was he.” His senior thesis received an honorable mention for the main prize in the department of African American studies.

At his funeral, Bobby’s oldest friends spoke of what a role model he was to them. I was five years older than Bobby, which meant I mainly saw him as charming and adorable, intelligent and unstoppable.

But strangely, I wanted to impress him too. When I started my job at New York magazine, writing short features in the theater section each week, Bobby gave me grief about ending each one of them with a quote. At first I was annoyed, defensive—the little shit—but in hindsight, it’s amazing that I cared so much about this 22-year-old’s opinion, and even more amazing that he’d read me attentively enough to discover an incipient tic. To this day, I credit Bobby with teaching me a valuable lesson: If you’re going to cede the power of the last word to someone else, you’d better be damn sure that person deserves it.

Bob mcilvaine sr. cries easily and regularly when you speak to him. Everyone in the family knows this and has grown accustomed to it—his grief lives close to the surface, heaving up occasionally for air. He cried at our first lunch after the McIlvaines picked me up at the train station a few months ago; he cried again just minutes into our first chat when the two of us were alone; he cried in a recent interview with Spike Lee for a documentary series about 9/11 on HBO.

In talking with Bob Sr., something heartbreaking and rudely basic dawned on me: September 11 may be one of the most-documented calamities in history, but for all the spools of disaster footage we’ve watched, we still know practically nothing about the last moments of the individual dead. It’s strange, when you think about it, that an event so public could still be such a punishing mystery. Yet it is, and it is awful—the living are left to perseverate, to let their imaginations run amok in their midnight corrals.

Photo of Bob McIlvaine Sr. sitting in wooden chair at desk
“The only thing I do is 9/11 stuff,” Bob McIlvaine Sr. says. “My whole basis of everything revolves around the day.” (Danna Singer)
For Bob Sr., what that meant was wondering where Bobby was and what he was doing when the chaos began. For years, that was all he could think about. The idea of Bobby suffering tortured him. Was he incinerated? Was he asphyxiated? Or even worse? “I think Bobby jumped,” he shouted up the stairs one day to his wife. The thought nearly drove Helen mad.

Over time, it became clear that Bobby didn’t jump. Bobby’s was one of fewer than 100 civilian corpses recovered from the wreckage. But it haunted Bob Sr. that he never saw the body. At the morgue on September 13, the pathologist strongly advised him against viewing it. Only years later—four? five? he can no longer remember—did he finally screw up the courage to go to the medical examiner’s office in New York City and get the official report.

From the July/August, September, and October 2002 issues: Excerpts from William Langewiesche’s American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center

That’s when everything changed. “My whole thesis—everything I jump into now—is based upon his injuries,” he tells me. “Looking at the body, I came to the conclusion that he was walking in and bombs went off.”

A controlled demolition, he means. That is how he thinks Bobby died that day, and how the towers eventually fell: from a controlled demolition. It was an inside job, planned by the U.S. government, not to justify the war in Iraq—that was a bonus—but really, ultimately, to destroy the 23rd floor, because that’s where the FBI was investigating the use of gold that the United States had unlawfully requisitioned from the Japanese during World War II, which it then leveraged to bankrupt the Soviet Union. The planes were merely for show.

Does a man wake up on September 12, 2001, and believe such a thing? No. This belief takes shape over the span of years, many years.

That first year, Bob Sr. was numb. His sole objective was to get through each day. But he eventually got involved in a group called 9/11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, protesting the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. “It opened up my life,” he tells me. “I became very active. That’s how I grieved. It was perfect.”

Before Bobby went to Princeton, Bob Sr. had been indifferent to politics, voting sometimes for Democrats and sometimes for Republicans—including, he thinks, Ronald Reagan. “I was not a well-read person,” he says. “I owned a bar in the city. If I even mentioned the word progressive, my customers probably would have shot me.”

But then Bobby started taking classes with Princeton’s glamorous tenured radicals. He started writing for the school’s Progressive Review. His father devoured everything he wrote. Soon, he had Bob Sr. reading Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States and Z Magazine, the radical monthly. Bob Sr. has been interested in politics ever since. “That’s all because of Bobby.”

So this anti-war activity? It was perfect—a natural outlet for him.

But as time wore on, Bob Sr. got impatient. In 2004, he went down to Washington to hear Condoleezza Rice speak to the 9/11 Commission, and her testimony—or lack thereof, he’d say—so enraged him that he left in a huff, cursing in the halls of Congress. “I wanted answers,” he explains. Yet no answers were forthcoming. That’s when he realized: The government was hiding something. “I became militant,” he says. “To this day, I’m very militant.”

Bob Sr. is a bespectacled, soft-spoken man, slender and slightly stooped. But his affect is deceptive. We’re sitting in the upstairs den of the McIlvaines’ three-bedroom home in Oreland, Pennsylvania, the same house where Bobby and Jeff grew up. It’s sweet, modest, cluttered with family pictures. But this room has been transformed into a 9/11 research bunker, stuffed with books and carefully organized files—by event, subject, country. The largest piece of art on the wall is a world map freckled with pins marking every country that’s invited Bob Sr. to tell his story.

“I speak out so much, the word just spreads,” he tells me. “I’ll show you Italy.” Pictures and clippings from a Rome film festival, he means, because he appeared in the documentary Zero: Inchiesta sull’11 Settembre. He got to walk the red carpet. “The Russians came over. They spent two days here, wanted to hear what I had to say.” Meaning Russian state news agencies. They parked themselves on the McIlvaines’ back deck. “France came here, stayed a few days to talk.” Same deal, though he doesn’t remember which media outfit. (“My dad is practically a celebrity in that community,” Jeff told me.)

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. This is, it should go without saying, contrary to all observable fact.

But this theory is what Bob Sr. is eager to illustrate for me. He has visuals prepared, lots of building diagrams. I tell him we’ll get there; I just want to ask a few more questions about those early days—

He’s disappointed. “Everything I’ve done in my life is based upon those seconds.” This is something he very much wants to discuss.

And so we discuss it. 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 is very upsetting to read. Most of Bobby’s head—that beautiful face—was missing, as was most of his right arm. The details are rendered in generic diagrams and the dispassionate language of pathology (“Absent: R upper extremity, most of head”), as well as a chilling pair of responses on a standard checklist.

Hair color: None.

Eye color: None.

But a subtle thing made Bob Sr. think something was amiss. The report describes many lacerations and fractures, but they appear almost entirely on the front of Bobby’s body. The back of his corpse is basically described as pristine, besides multiple fractures to what remained of his head.

The story we’ve told ourselves all these years is that Bobby had already left the building when the planes hit. Bobby didn’t work in the World Trade Center; from what we could piece together, he’d gone to Windows on the World simply to help a new colleague set up for a morning presentation at an all-day conference, not to attend it. So Bobby did his part, was our assumption, then said his goodbyes and was making his way back to nearby Merrill Lynch when he was suddenly killed in the street by flying debris.

Bobby’s daily planner is cluttered with appointments. But the day of September 11 is blank. Whatever he was doing was not significant enough to merit its own entry.
Bob Sr. doesn’t buy it. If that were true—if Bobby were moving away from the World Trade Center—wouldn’t he have fallen forward? Wouldn’t there be injuries on his back? “If you’re running away, it’d be more of a crushing type of thing,” he tells me. “Probably every bone in his body would be breaking.”

I tell him I’m not a pathologist, but it seems just as plausible to me that he heard the roaring sound of a plane flying too low and too fast, or maybe the sound of a hijacked aircraft hitting the North Tower itself, and turned around to see what had happened and never knew what hit him.

He rejects this explanation. “My theory is he was walking into the building at the time, because he had the conference up there.”

“I thought his conference started at 8:30?” I ask. The first plane hit at 8:46 a.m. That would have meant Bobby was arriving late.

“I thought it started at 9,” Bob Sr. says.

“Isn’t there a way to find out?” I ask.

“You know, to tell you the truth, I never …”

He’d never checked.

Breakfast and registration for the conference began at 8 o’clock. Opening remarks were scheduled for 8:30. Bobby’s colleague was scheduled to speak at 8:40. The full brochure is available on the 9/11 Memorial & Museum’s website.

When I eventually visit Jen—she of the purloined diary, the woman to whom Bobby was about to be engaged—she shows me the daily planner that was sitting on his desk at Merrill. It’s cluttered with appointments. But the day of September 11 is blank. Whatever he was doing was not significant enough to merit its own entry.

Read: Everything my husband wasn’t there for

My brother also tells me that he still has the note Bob Sr. left for him on his kitchen table on Thursday, September 13. It said that an investigator with the New York City Police Department, Joe Gagliardi, had just come by to drop off the wallet they’d pulled from Bobby’s pocket. One line in particular stood out. He was found on the perimeter. Not near the lobby.

“Was he really?” Bob Sr. says when I phone him and ask him about the note. He’d completely forgotten that he’d written it. “If that’s true, that’s great.” He thinks for a moment. “Though the perimeter—he still could have been 10 feet away. He certainly wasn’t 100 feet from the building.”

I then tell him about the conference schedule, which actually did leave open the possibility that he was 100 feet from the building. If he’d left before his colleague started speaking—or the opening remarks—he could have been quite close to his office at Merrill Lynch, a five-minute walk away. Bob Sr. takes it all in. He repeats that he finds Bobby’s injuries too extreme, too savage, to be caused by flying debris. “But you know what?” he finally says. “That’s no longer relevant to me. My whole thing is who did it and why. It’s been 20 years and I still can’t get any answers.”


It takes me some time, but eventually I summon the courage to ask Bob Sr. an obvious question: What makes his claims about the destruction of the World Trade Center more credible than the claims of, for instance, Donald Trump supporters who say the 2020 election was stolen?

“I can believe it was stolen!” he tells me. “But I’m not going to go around preaching that, because I don’t know. Because I’m doing my homework.” Bob Sr. is always reading. His latest is a biography of Allen Dulles. “Probably 99.9 percent of the people that you will find in those radical groups—the Oath Keepers, whatever—they really haven’t done any research.”

But then he adds that he sympathizes with Trump voters, as much as he despises Trump himself. “This country hasn’t done anything for them in such a long time. So you can’t blame them for voting for him.”

Bob sr. asks if I would like to see Bobby’s wallet. I didn’t realize he had it, but he does, stuffed in a biohazard bag, itself entombed in a plastic box in the room that once belonged to Bobby. He carefully opens them for me.

“Helen and Jeff have never seen this,” he tells me.


They haven’t?

“No.”

The wallet is covered in dust, still, and faintly redolent of that World Trade Center tang, a scent once so powerful that New Yorkers could smell it in their eyes. He starts pulling out a 26-year-old’s modest possessions: a Pennsylvania driver’s license, a Visa card, some kind of work or building ID, a library card. The wallet still contains $13 in cash, but the money is disintegrating, almost completely rotted away.

“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. In one of our earliest conversations, she specifically told me that she’d walk across the United States to not discover some of the things that Bob Sr. has learned. So as he and I sit here, inspecting a wallet that she’s never seen, I ask: Doesn’t all this searching, this interrogating, have unhealthy consequences for his marriage?

He readily admits that it does: “We’d socialize and she’d catch me saying stuff, and she would go nuts. She’d say, ‘Do not talk about 9/11.’ But then someone would come up to me and say, ‘Can I ask you about it?’ And I’d start talking. Then she’d find out about it. She’d get so upset.” They now tend to socialize separately. “I will talk 9/11 with anyone I see, if they want to talk about it,” he says. “And I think that’s why I don’t have many friends. They’re afraid I’m going to talk about it.”


It may be hard to imagine why anyone would want to spend so much time immersed in the story, sensations, and forensics of his son’s death. But for Bob Sr., that’s precisely the point: to keep the grief close. “I don’t want to get away from it,” he tells me. He wants to stay at the top of the mountain. This is how he spends time in Bobby’s company—by solving this crime, by exposing the truth about the abuses of American empire. “Doing what I’m doing, that’s really helped me, because I think of him every day. Every time I talk, I talk about Bobby.”

Photo of Bobby's dusty wallet on top of plastic bags, one with biohazard symbol, surrounded by several rocks
Bobby’s wallet is still covered in dust, and faintly redolent of the World Trade Center tang that hung over New York in the fall of 2001. (Danna Singer)
He’s aware that there are other ways to spend time with Bobby that wouldn’t be quite so excruciating. He could read his diaries, for example. To this day, he feels terrible that he handed that last one off to Jen. He felt so guilty about it for so long that he was still mentioning it in interviews in 2011. A British newspaper referred to it as “the journal episode.”


“I’m just not that big on the journals,” he tells me. “They don’t mean that much to me.”

So what means the most to you? I ask.

“That he was murdered,” he says.

On the morning of September 11, Helen, the most stoic of the McIlvaines, was the only one who panicked. Jeff knew that his brother didn’t work in the World Trade Center. Bob Sr., who was teaching that day in the adolescent psych unit of a local hospital, treated the macabre, smoldering towers like a news event and, along with everyone else, began watching the coverage on TV.

Helen, however, took one look at the television and needed to sit down. She knew it seemed ridiculous, superstitious, but she’d spoken with Bobby the night before and forgotten to end the conversation the way she always did: “Be careful.” She’d later say those words to his casket as it was lowered into his grave.

By midday, when no one had heard from Bobby, everyone in the family felt like Helen. Yes, the cell towers were down in Lower Manhattan and the phones were working only sporadically, but surely Bobby, who could spend hours on the phone talking with his parents (How do you guys find so much to talk about? his friends always asked), would have found a way to call, and Jen had heard nothing, which really made no sense. Bobby had just asked her father for permission to marry her two days earlier.


In the late afternoon, Andre, his close friend and old suitemate, finally reached a woman at Merrill Lynch who awkwardly told him that Bobby and a colleague had been scheduled to attend a conference at Windows on the World that morning and no one had heard from them since. Andre called the McIlvaines.

“That first night was probably worse than after we found out for sure that he’d died,” Jeff says, “because we had no idea what had happened. I couldn’t get that out of my head—that he was in that, you know?”

They slept in the den, the three of them. Jen stayed in her own living room that night, glued to the TV.

On Wednesday morning, Jeff and Bob Sr. were too agitated to remain in Oreland. They took a train to New York and made a fruitless tour of the city’s triage centers. Nothing. My brother stood on line at a missing-persons center; Andre ran a command center out of his apartment, working the phones and every lead he had; Jeff checked every website he could find. Refresh, refresh, refresh.

Jen sat and waited.


Bob Sr. spent Wednesday night in my brother and Bobby’s apartment, sleeping in his son’s bed.

The next day, Andre got a call from the NYPD, this time with grim news: Everyone needed to go immediately to the armory on Lexington Avenue.

Once again, Andre had to tell the McIlvaines. Helen calmly did as she was told. She treated these instructions as if she were an astronaut, doing whatever step came next if one of the modules of the International Space Station caught on fire.

The armory was a seething mass of the desperate. Hundreds of families were lined up outside, carrying posters with faces of their loved ones. A minister escorted my brother, Jen, Andre, and the McIlvaine family inside. Helen gave him Bobby’s name. A police officer approached her from across the room. “Are you the mother?”

Much of what followed was a blur. They were shown to a private room where grief counselors descended on them. Then something unusual happened: Rudy Giuliani walked in.

The mayor was unaccompanied. Without aides, without cameras, nothing. He looked genuinely relieved to have a family to console at that moment, with so many bereaved New Yorkers still twisting in limbo, posting flyers with pictures of the missing on lampposts, chain-link fences, hospital walls.

Giuliani embraced everyone. Then he took a seat opposite the McIlvaines. He uttered just five words: “Tell me about your son.”

Photo of Helen McIlvaine sitting on a couch in front of stairs and a glass-paned door.
After Bobby died, Helen McIlvaine begged his girlfriend, Jen, to share his final diary with the family, to no avail. (Danna Singer)
If bob sr. chose to feed his grief, Helen chose to starve hers. She spoke about it with her limping group, because they understood. But she was determined not to be, as she puts it, “At-Least-I’m-Not-Helen.” Living with the impossible was hard enough. But to be in the position of having to console others about her misfortune, or to manage their discomfort, or, worst of all, to smile politely through their pity—that was more than she could bear. Helen can still rattle off a list of all the well-meaning things people said that stung.

No parent should bury a child.

You will never be the same.

I was with my children last night and realized you’ll never have something like that again.

Did people not realize that they were building a moat, not a bridge, when they said such things? That they were drawing attention to the pretty castles they lived in, their walls still lined with luck?

That first year was brutal. Once, while she was sitting in a diner with some friends, one of them started going on and on about the musical talents of her son. “I wanted to scream,” Helen says. “I had to get out. I couldn’t listen to somebody else talk about their child. For years. I couldn’t.”

The second year wasn’t much better. She tried going to Italy on a tour with a friend. She says she came across as cold, distant, strange. She dreaded the most innocuous question: Have any kids?

Work helped. Her students needed her, and her colleagues were great. “Except I didn’t want their help, because it was too soon,” Helen says. “So afterwards, a few years down the road, I looked like I’d healed. And it wasn’t true. I wanted to talk about it sometimes. But I had to find other means to do it, because I’d kind of shut that door.”

I can’t decide whether this corresponds with the Helen I’ve come to know. Maybe?

Helen: She wears little or no makeup. She is exceedingly good-humored. She is always brimming with questions about your life. She’s the kind of person who goes along with any plan and can spend 20 minutes in a drugstore trying on funny pairs of reading glasses with you.

We actually did this together in Florida a couple of years ago. We both happened to be visiting my mom.

So the reserve she’s describing is a little foreign to me. “I have a weird personality,” she tells me. “I can cry over a blouse that I ruined in the laundry and then be stoic for something …” She trails off, but I believe the word she’s looking for is big.

“They deserve more than I can ever give them, and yet they will never ask for more than me,” Bobby wrote in his diary, of his parents. “I love them so much.”
But with Bobby … ! Bobby brought out her more emotional self, because he was such a sensitive kid. “Once, after about half an hour of listening to his woe-is-me girlfriend stories,” she tells me, “I said to him, ‘You do understand I’ve been married to Dad for almost 30 years and I’ve never given him this much thought, right?’ ” But of course she loved every minute of it.

The last time she saw Bobby was two nights before he died. Not an hour before, he had asked Jen’s father for permission to marry her; now the two families were having dinner at a restaurant in Lambertville, New Jersey, where Jen had an apartment. Helen took one look at her son and saw that his forehead was still shimmering with sweat. She reached under the table to find his hand. He locked his pinkie with hers. They stayed that way until the food came.

Around the tenth anniversary of September 11, Helen realized that she was not all right. She’d lost a child, so maybe this was what her new life was destined to be: not all right. But she wasn’t convinced. Somewhere along the way, her toughness, her steadfast refusal to be a victim—it had backfired. “I found myself being petty. And bickering. I found myself being too gossipy sometimes.”

I’ve never heard Helen say a cross word about anyone. Even when I mention that I’ll soon be seeing Jen, she reacts with anxiety, not bitterness. She doesn’t want to open old wounds. They were both suffering terribly back then; neither was her finest self.

Okay, but what if she lends me the diary? I ask.

“Oh my God. Would you marry me?”

But this is today’s Helen. The Helen of a decade ago decided she wasn’t who she wanted to be. Her therapy had stalled. She had trouble managing her anger. “My life just feels so amazingly off kilter,” she wrote in a reminiscence marking the tenth anniversary.

She’d kept too much in, and she was fermenting in her own brine.

Not long after, she started seeing a different therapist. This one was spiritual. That new perspective changed everything. “She really believes that we don’t see all.”

Even before Bobby died, Helen was a big fan of self-help books. But after September 11, she bought them by the dozen, hoovering up everything she could about loss. She found Elisabeth Kübler-Ross indispensable—not so much for her writing about the five stages of grief, though that was fine, but for her writing about life after death.

Kübler-Ross once considered a belief in the afterlife a form of denial. But starting in the mid-1970s, she had a change of heart, compiling thousands of testimonies from those who’d had near-death experiences in order to show that our souls outlast us.

“I looked at life-after-death books, but they were too faith-based,” Helen says. “I wanted to believe what I was taught in my Catholic upbringing. But what I liked about Kübler-Ross is that she had a science background.”

It was precisely because she was a scientist, of course, that Kübler-Ross’s fellow physicians were so dismayed by this strange turn in her interests. They thought it kooky and unrigorous, a stain on her legacy. I tell this to Helen. She laughs. “Bet they didn’t sell millions of books.”

Kübler-Ross used a hokey but intuitive metaphor to describe the body and soul: Our bodies are our mortal coils, our “cocoons”; when we die, we shudder them off and our souls—our “butterflies”—are released into the wilds of the universe. Helen cherished this idea. It was a notion that could redeem a violently, capriciously abbreviated life. “One day I actually thought, What if there’s a hierarchy and Bobby’s a part of that, and he just came down as a human for a bit? ”

She and Bob Sr. began watching Supernatural and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, shows they’d never have imagined watching before.

And here in this world, Helen came to understand that there was nothing to be gained by bottling up her grief. At age 60, she took up running, not only because it felt good but because it allowed her to cry. She started expressing herself more. She noticed one day that the tempest of grievances she unloosed in her therapist’s office were all so trivial, so petty, so pointless. What was she getting so worked up about?

Now she’s doing the very thing the self-help books tell you to do: letting stuff go. She tells me about a friend whose towering self-involvement used to infuriate her. But recently, she chatted with her on the phone and decided just to enjoy the good bits.

Wow, I say. What makes you so forgiving?

“It wasn’t serving me well.”

You know what radical acceptance is? Living with a husband who has dedicated his life to spreading the word that the United States deliberately orchestrated the collapse of the World Trade Center and then conspired to cover it up. Forget all the chipper advice columns about how to get along with your Trump-loving uncle at Thanksgiving. 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?

Helen would be lying if she said this didn’t cause friction.

“There were many moments where I was like, Oh, please,” she says. She was perfectly open to some of the things Bob Sr. said. “But a lot of it was emotional, and a lot of it, I couldn’t trace to find out myself, and I’m not a go-on-a-website kind of person. I didn’t want to burst his bubble by constantly saying, ‘Well, did you check, is it a valid website?’ ”

Perhaps the more challenging issue, the nuts-and-bolts-of-living-in-a-marriage issue, was daily conversation. Bob Sr.’s single-minded focus meant that any conversation could segue without warning into September 11. She’d come downstairs and tell him she was thinking about buying a new sweater; he’d reply by asking if she knew that the government had lied about the actual date of Osama bin Laden’s death.

“So has it gotten in the way?” she asks. “Yeah, many times. We’d be going somewhere, and I’d say to Bob, ‘You cannot talk about 9/11.’ And he’d say, ‘Well, they ask me about it.’ I fell for that for the first 99 times until my therapist said, ‘That’s not good enough.’ When we’re out at a social event, we’re out. I don’t want to be always victim, victim, victim.”

How do you handle it now, I ask, if you feel another soliloquy coming on?

“Now I say, ‘Bob, you have the I-won’t-talk-about-anything-else-but-9/11 look on your face.’ We’ve come to a point where we can actually joke about it.”

Helen wants me to understand: There are some aspects of Bob Sr.’s obsessions that she doesn’t merely tolerate; she actively supports them. Two years ago, she listened to a presentation by Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth and found it persuasive. It’s the other parts of his narrative, which keep evolving, that leave her at loose ends. “If I were him, I’d just stick with the buildings,” she says. I ask if she’s up-to-date on his latest theory, involving Japanese gold. She shakes her head. “I don’t even hear it,” she says. “I’m defending the person, not the view.”

Long ago, Helen realized that “9/11 truth,” as Bob Sr. likes to call it, had sunk its hooks into her husband, and she’s never thought it her place to pry them loose. “I’m very protective of him,” she says. “If he decided to be a male stripper in an old people’s home, it’s okay with me. He has to be who he has to be, because damn it, this happened, you know? And if that’s going to give him comfort—”

She interrupts herself, gives an embarrassed smile. “Get that visualization out of your head.”

Helen would never dream of abandoning this dear man. He was Bobby’s Little League coach. The one who organized races around the house when the kids were little, using a piece of tape for the finish line. Bob Sr. was her only suitor who ever suggested they play sports together—the others thought that was strictly for the fellas.

And now he’s the only other person in the world who understands what it feels like to have raised Bobby McIlvaine and lost him.

She walks me over to the wall with a giant framed poster she had custom-made for her husband five years ago. It’s a periodic table of Bob Sr., basically—dozens of images of him, all tidily laid out in a grid. Bob Sr. talking to Rosie O’Donnell. Bob Sr. giving an interview on French television. Bob Sr. speaking at a forum about the 9/11 Commission report, captured on C-SPAN. “I gave him that on his 70th birthday,” she says. She went online, punched his name into Google, and voilà. A hero’s gallery. “I love looking at it.” He’s become the superstar, strangely, that his son never had the chance to be.

Bob Sr.’s crusade may look to the outside world like madness. Helen sees it as an act of love. “He’s almost going to war for his son,” she tells me. “He’s being a father in the best way he knows how. How can I not allow that?”

Most theories of grief, particularly the ones involving stages, are more literary than literal. People don’t mourn sequentially, and they certainly don’t mourn logically. But there’s an aspect of one of those models I keep circling back to whenever I think of the McIlvaines. It’s the “yearning and searching” stage of grief, first described by the British psychiatrists Colin Murray Parkes and John Bowlby in the 1960s. “When searching,” Parkes writes, “the bereaved person feels and acts as if the lost person were recoverable, although he knows intellectually that this is not so.”

How Bob Sr. searches is obvious. But it occurs to me, after speaking with Helen, that perhaps her years-long preoccupation with Bobby’s final diary is her equivalent of Bob Sr.’s obsessions. “Yes!” she says when I tentatively raise the possibility. “Yes, yes. It’s ‘If I can’t have this, then I’ll have that.’ ”

Yet here’s what’s curious. Helen has two earlier diaries of Bobby’s. She also has stacks of legal pads of his writing, many with diarylike entries in them. But she’s barely dipped into them at all.

One reason is practical: They’re hard to decipher. Bobby’s handwriting is neat but small and slightly peculiar. Another is instinctive: For a long time, Helen feared that reading them would be a violation of a sacred boundary, “like going into his room without knocking.” Yet another is how much pain it causes her. “I tried today again,” she wrote in another reminiscence on the tenth anniversary of Bobby’s death. “I thought, ‘If I don’t tackle these before I’m dead, who will?’ ” She lasted 10 minutes. Bob Sr. has never looked at them at all.

“But somewhere I did find the words Life loves on,” Helen tells me.

I’ve been meaning to ask her about this, because I’m now reading Bobby’s diaries and legal pads, and I can’t find the phrase anywhere. Does she still not know where it came from?

She doesn’t. She thought he’d written it about a close family friend who’d died, but she was wrong. I tell her I’ll keep looking.

I take one of the two diaries back to my hotel that night. And I realize, as I’m reading, that there’s probably another reason Helen never dug too deep into either one of them. They’re from his freshman and sophomore years of college, when he was still a proto-person, still essentially a kid. He was clearly older when he scribbled in some of those legal pads, but they’re chaotic and undated. Only the diaries feel manageable and chronological, and they read like the musings of a boy in his late teens—florid, soulful, a little mushy. He doesn’t sound at all like the Bobby of September 11, 2001, who was almost 27 years old.


Yet I still get a kick out of them, and those chaotic legal pads, especially the parts about writing. Even at 19, Bobby was trying to find his voice, sometimes shifting from the first person to the third to see if he liked it better (and then saying so in the margins—third-person experiment!). They’re filled with exhortations and reminders to himself: I need to stay true to my voice, whatever it is. I write horrible stuff in other people’s voices. And my favorite: Hope is even more important than talent.

There’s also tons of beautiful stuff about his family. This may be what astonishes me most, given that Bobby was in late adolescence, a time when most kids morph into ruthless family vivisectionists. Yet he devotes page after page to how much he loves and admires Helen, Bob Sr., and Jeff. In May 1995, for instance, he wrote about discovering that Bob Sr.’s father had been an alcoholic. Bobby had had no inkling. He made sure that he didn’t give me the bullshit, Bobby wrote of his own father.

He made sure I had something better, and only asked that I do my best. That’s all he asked. That’s all my mom asked. And I want so badly to make them proud, even more proud than they already are. They deserve the pride. They deserve more than I can ever give them, and yet they will never ask for more than me. I love them so much.
You can hardly blame Helen for wanting to hear what he had to say once he’d become a young man.

Photo of Jen Middleton sitting with left arm over back of couch by window
Jen Middleton, Bobby’s soon-to-be fiancée when he died, has not spoken to the McIlvaines in nearly two decades. (Danna Singer)
Jen cobb, now middleton, wears her hair long, rather than in her old pixie cut, but her style and demeanor remain the same. She is still animated, still gracious, still beautiful to look at; when I walk up to her door in Washington, D.C., she greets me with a long hug. There are rescue dogs, there are sunlit rooms, there is a kitchen straight from a Nancy Meyers film. (I half-expect Meryl Streep to come gliding up with a tray of unbaked croissants.)


Jen has made for herself what is, to all outward appearances, a lovely life. But she had to assemble that life brick by brick, and she works hard to keep the joints from coming apart.

When I spoke briefly with Helen about Jen, she made an astute observation: Jen came from a family with lots of money but little love, while the McIlvaines had lots of love but little money. Jen says that yes, that’s partly true, though her mother was a loving soul; she just didn’t see enough of Jen’s life. Susan E. Cobb died on April 20, 2001, less than five months before Bobby did, of a cancer that spread slowly, then fast.

Which is to say: On September 11, Jen was already a husk of herself.

Jen’s father, her remaining parent, was highly successful but only narrowly rational, a bully and a screamer. This had predictable consequences in her romantic life: Jen always demanded complete control. She was done being bossed around.

Then along came Bobby, asking for more vulnerability and a shared say in both of their lives. Somehow, she trusted him. They first met a couple of years earlier, at the PR firm Burson-Marsteller, and around the office, he was known as the good guy who made everyone feel important. The inveterate romantic, he made her feel important, asking question after question about her family, writing her love notes for no reason. For her 27th birthday, on December 6, 2000, he asked my brother to scram and rearranged the furniture in their apartment to turn it into a restaurant, where he cooked her a three-course meal.

“It felt like she was saying my grief was less important than hers,” Jen said. “I remember thinking, How does she know I’m going to be okay?”
Jen would later learn that the dinner was a dry run for a proposal. She put a hold on the Ritz-Carlton in Philadelphia for October 20, 2002.


When her mother died, Jen could barely function. Her mother was the one who’d protected her from her father’s storms of rage; she was the one who’d chatted with her late at night after Jen had spent a boisterous evening out with girlfriends. Yet Bobby remained steadfastly by her side, making the intolerable seem survivable. He would be with her every step of the way. She would still be loved.

Then Bobby died. The world became a mean, untrustworthy place. “There was not one thing I could control,” she says. “Not one thing at all.”

Jen keeps a steamer trunk of Bobby’s things in the attic above her garage. In anticipation of my arrival, she’s brought his belongings down in a turquoise canvas bag. She starts sifting through it. “There’s the diary,” she says, pointing. “The thing that caused all that trouble.”

Bobby’s other two diaries were hundreds of pages long. This one, I will shortly discover, had only 17 pages of entries. All that fuss over what was barely a pamphlet.

Then again, they’re a dense 17 pages.

Jen has no memory of getting the diary from Bob Sr. But she does remember reading it immediately, voraciously, and returning to it night after night. She remembers, too, Helen asking for it back, though the tensions didn’t start immediately. At first, everything was fine. Helen even gave her the engagement ring Bobby had bought for her. It was awkward and unceremonious—“He’d have wanted you to have this”—but Jen was grateful, and she wore it everywhere for months.


At some point, though, Helen started getting more vocal about that diary. “In hindsight, I don’t know what my problem was,” Jen says. “I was probably in pain and also grasping for control and wanted something of his that no one else had. It seems kind of ridiculous now. It’s just how I felt at the time—that it was mine and I wanted it to be mine and I didn’t want anyone else to have it. It probably felt like it was all I had left.”

Top photo: Jen and Bobby in 2001; bottom: the engagement ring on a mirrored surface
Jen and Bobby in 2001; the ring Bobby planned to propose to Jen with. (Danna Singer; original photo courtesy of Jen Middleton)
What I had to understand about those awful, leaden days, Jen says, is that she wasn’t just depressed. She was wretched—“double grieving,” as she puts it, for her mother and then her future husband. When her mother and Bobby died in rapid succession, she fell into a deep depression, though she did her valiant best to conceal it. She still has anxiety attacks to this day. “When something upsets me,” she says, “it goes downhill fast.”


Which all makes perfect sense, I say. The only thing I can’t understand is why she refused to transcribe the nonpersonal parts of Bobby’s diary for Helen. That’s not the act of a depressed person or a grieving person. That’s the act of someone who’s angry. She must have been upset with Helen for some reason, no?

Here Jen pauses. Then she starts measuring her words. “This isn’t a knock on Helen at all,” she says. “I’m so beyond it. But at the time I remember resenting that she said, ‘You’re going to be okay, because you’re young.’ ” Jen recognized that there was a difference between their two losses. “But it felt like she was saying my grief was less important than hers. I know it was coming from a place of extreme pain, but I remember thinking, How does she know I’m going to be okay? What if I’m not okay? What if I have a different kind of not-okay? ”

One thing you don’t say to a person who’s mourning, Jen tells me, is that they’re going to be okay. She might have added: Nor do you say that to a depressed person. Depression does that—convinces you that you are never going to be okay.

“Now I get it,” she says. Because of course Helen was right. Jen did find love again. But at the time, she was convinced that she wouldn’t. She considered freezing her eggs. Once, in a moment of near-hallucinatory panic, she wondered if she could get impregnated with Bobby’s DNA from strands of hair he’d left in a comb.

“It just would’ve come out better if she’d said: ‘This is really sucky for you. And I’m sorry. Chances are, you’ll meet somebody.’ I guess there was just a nicer way to say it,” she says. “However she said it set me off. Just because of my own personal shit.”

I ask if it’s possible that Helen did say those things, though she may have said a few artless things too. Maybe Jen missed them—or heard insults that weren’t necessarily intended as such—because she’d grown up in a house that required an extra set of threat detectors, given her father’s volatility.

“A hundred percent,” she says. “It was probably me regressing into a little, you know, tantruming child. I was mad at the world. Of course she didn’t intend to hurt me. She’s the nicest person.”

She and Helen are more similar than either of them realizes. Like Helen, Jen believed, at the time, in hiding her grief. Like Helen, she today takes refuge in the idea that Bobby’s soul is rattling about somewhere. “I’m really showing my woo-woo side here,” she says, “but I think that he’ll be back, and I’ll be back, and we’ll finish our unfinished business.”

And like Helen, she has learned to let a lot of things go. That’s one of the most ruthless lessons trauma teaches you: You are not in charge. All you can control is your reaction to whatever grenades the demented universe rolls in your path. Beginning with whether you get out of bed. “And that’s where I started my day, literally,” she says. For years.

Today, Jen is choosing to hand me Bobby’s diary as I’m walking out the door and heading back to New York. She has zero reservations about it. She says she’d like to have the original copy back, but there’s no rush; the McIlvaines are free to read all of it, free to make as many photocopies as they’d like.

“I would have done it years ago,” she tells me. “I think about them all the time.”

Before I leave, I ask if she remembers where the phrase Life loves on comes from. She looks at me blankly. “I don’t even remember him saying that. Is it in a book that he liked or something?” Tried that, I say. Searched Google Books. Nope. “Or was it a hymn?” Hymns aren’t my strong suit, but I don’t think so. I tell her that the McIlvaines are certain Bobby wrote it somewhere, but never mind, this is not her problem. I’ll keep looking.

Memories of traumatic experiences are a curious thing. Some are vivid; some are pale; pretty much all of them have been emended in some way, great or small. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to our curated reels. We remember the trivial and forget the exceptional. Our minds truly have minds of their own.

Jeff, for instance, remembers that Jen stayed at his parents’ house for half a year after Bobby died, while Helen says it was one week, and Jen thinks it was probably two months.

Or here’s another: Jen remembers that Jeff gallantly slept in Bobby’s childhood bedroom while she stayed with them, so that she wouldn’t have to be traumatized by waking up to all of Bobby’s things, while Jeff remembers her sleeping in Bobby’s bedroom, and bravely waking up each day to all of Bobby’s things.

Jeff McIlvaine seated on stairs behind a bannister
“I knew that if this ruined my life, his whole life was worthless,” Jeff McIlvaine says. “I wanted to work very hard to make sure that I had a good life.” (Danna Singer)
And strangest of all: Though no one can remember where Life loves on came from, everyone—and I do mean everyone (Jen, Jeff, Bob Sr., and Helen)—once knew.

It’s from Jen’s eulogy. Which she based on Bobby’s diary. The one she kept for 20 years.

“This past week I have been searching for some sort of comfort to get me through the shock of losing the love of my life,” she told the mourners at Queen of Peace Church. “I came across one of Bob’s journals and as I opened it, I said to myself, ‘Please let there be something in here that will comfort me.’ ” Then she described finding this passage, which Bobby had written as her mother was dying. She read it aloud.

It is OK for people to die. It hurts, and it is a deep loss, but it is OK. Life loves on. Do not fear for those who are dying. Be kind to them. And care for them.

“Life loves on,” she repeated to the crowd. “After I read this, I vowed that very instant to love on in my life, just as I had made a promise to my mom to never let her be forgotten. It was a way that I could extend a life cut short.”

The only reason I know this is because my brother found a copy of Jen’s eulogy. Jen had tossed hers out. She is not, as she says, a saver.

Somehow she’d completely forgotten those words, as well as their provenance. And the McIlvaines had forgotten where they came from, too, even though Helen wears them in an engraved bracelet and Bob Sr. enshrined them on his skin.

Then I remembered what Helen told me about Jen: She became a nonperson to me. She kept the words. But not Jen. She buried her future daughter-in-law too that year, just as she did her son.

Helen recently told me a story about a long weekend she’d spent with Jen, maybe 10 days before Bobby died. The whole family was vacationing in Cape May. She, Bobby, and Jen were sitting on the beach, staring at the waves, with Bobby in the middle. It was a moment of gentle bliss. Helen turned ever so slightly toward Bobby to run her hand through his hair. But at that exact same moment, that very second, Bobby turned to do the same to Jen.

It was then that Helen realized Bobby wasn’t hers anymore. “I said to myself, You gotta go take a walk and look at the real estate on the beach,” she told me.

In Bobby’s early diaries, the McIlvaine family may show up everywhere. But not in this diary. This diary is primarily about two things. And one of them is Jen.

february 18, 2001: I love her, deeply. We communicate so well. We resolve splits between us so well. And all of this means a lot.

april 11, 2001: I miss Jen. “Big” part of my life, or descriptions of how much she means to me do not suffice.

april 22, 2001 (two days after jen’s mother died): I am so sorry, Jen. So sorry for your hurt. I know it is hard. I’ll be here by your side—here to love you, to listen to you, to hold you when you need to cry.

It’s no wonder Jen didn’t want to part with this diary. Or that she read it every night.

Helen recognized this immediately. I sent her a couple of xeroxed copies after I returned to New York.

“The Jen piece was huge to me,” she says, when we have a chance to talk. “I thought of this in the middle of the night: She loses this guy that she loves—and most importantly, who loves her. Now, where is the proof that he loves her? I mean, okay, the mother gives her the ring. That’s good. But there are these wonderful words: I love her deeply.” She marvels. “I never thought about that. Never. That she needed that, that validation.”

She also recognizes what the diary is missing. “He didn’t say, I love my parents too. He said, I love her deeply.” Bobby was all grown up.

Helen now wonders about her own behavior in those awful months. She tried to show Jen affection. But she’d only had sons. She didn’t speak daughter. And that reserve she was describing to me earlier, the reserve I didn’t believe she had—it was very real. “What happens is, I have intentions sometimes and forget to say the words,” she says. “She had to guess what was in my head.”

At any rate, Helen is now clear on one very important point. “It would have been beyond Jen’s ability, even if she was in a good mood, to say, ‘Okay, here, I’m giving it back.’ I really would have had to give her at least pieces of that, somehow. That wasn’t for me to own. I really mean that.”

For years, Jen had been painted as a villain for holding on to this diary. Yet there never would have been a dispute if she had already been Bobby’s wife, or perhaps even his official fiancée. But Jen was suspended between worlds, without influence or status. “It must have felt horrible,” Helen says.

The final entry in Bobby’s diary is dated September 6, 2001. It fills the whole page. When I first read it, I was disoriented. Then I realized what it was. “I feel completely unprepared. Should I rehearse?” it begins.

It should go something like this: Do you have a few minutes to talk? First, I’d like to say that it has been a pleasure—or maybe a great experience—or do I mention Jen first? Or, I have developed a very strong relationship with Jen, and along the way it has been great to spend time in Michigan … OR … yes—I’ve had the chance to grow close to Jen, and after a lot of very serious thought, and after talking to her too, I felt that it is time to make a commitment to her. OR—after a good deal of serious thought … AND … out of respect for you as head of the family …
What I was reading was a script. Filled with fits and starts, but eventually he got there. Bobby was struggling to find the words to say to Jen’s father, whom he’d see on September 9, to ask for her hand.

At some point, not long after Jen gave me Bobby’s diary, I sent a note to my editor, telling him that I had found, at long last, the elusive Life loves on. I took a photo of the passage and sent it to him.

Amazing, he texted.

But then, three pulsing dots in a bubble. He was still typing.

Except … I think it is (sort of) a misapprehension. Look how he writes his I’s in other words. I think it says “Life **lives** on.” But hard to say for sure …

It wasn’t hard to say. He was right. I went through the whole diary again. On just the page before, Bobby had written, I lived too long without thinking of “the markets” to suddenly care. But it looks like “I loved too long …” His I ’s look like backwards J ’s, which can be mistaken for O’s, while his real O’s stand alone, like baby moons.

I texted Jen the same photograph I sent my editor. At first, she didn’t see it. Then she did. Her initial reaction was the same as mine: anxiety, despair in the form of an expletive. Then:

Still makes me smile
me: What does?
jen: That the people close to him saw and felt what they needed to. And that’s ok. You know?

I did. The phrase certainly sounded like something Bobby could have said. It was very Yoda, and Bobby was definitely very Yoda, spouting his little aphorisms about the drives of the human heart. To me, it was the difference between the spirit of the law and the letter of the law, or maybe what we do when we intensify the color of an image on our iPhone. We’re not trying to create a fake; we’re trying to align the image with the one that already lives in our memory.

We are always inventing and reinventing the dead.

You could make a case, weirdly, that Jen’s withholding of the diary for all these years turned out to be a blessing. If she’d given it to Helen, it’s possible Helen would have tucked it away in her safe for 10 years and barely read it, just as she did the other two diaries. Or maybe she’d have read it, but she wouldn’t have misread it.

Instead, Jen misread it, formed a eulogy around it, and handed the McIlvaine family an organizing motto for their grief for 20 years.

I still debated not telling the McIlvaines. I mean, the bracelet, the tattoo. But in a phone conversation with Helen soon after, I sensed an opening. I mentioned that I wasn’t sure I was going to write about Life loves on. She quickly intuited that something was amiss. “Because it was from somebody else?” she asked.

Kind of, I said. And I explained.

Helen was fine with it. She sees the unlikely beauty of this misunderstanding, even how it was a gift. But she holds out the possibility that the phrase still lurks somewhere. She remembers it as Life truly loves on, for one thing. And it’s possible that I could have missed it in the hundreds of pages of Bobby’s first two diaries. There are probably some missing diaries, too—why did he stop keeping them in 1995, only to resume in 2001?

So really, who’s to say?

Photo of stack of legal pads with wire-bound notebook with diary entry on top
In Bobby’s final diary entry, a few days before 9/11, he was working
out how he would ask Jen’s father for permission to marry her. (Jens Mortensen for The Atlantic)
Life lives on, life loves on—to me, it’s irrelevant. There are far more beautiful observations in the recovered diary than that one, and they’re prescient, eerie—much more germane to the McIlvaines’ story once Bobby was gone.

Because the other thing his diary is about, the second thing, is grief.

In this way, the diary isn’t just a time capsule. It’s a crystal ball. Through an extraordinary twist of fate, Bobby spent his final few months thinking about what it meant to live with loss. He saw, through Jen, that it could render you angry, irritable, skinless. He saw that grief could utterly consume. He wondered what the utility of all this sadness was, all this suffering. Why do we have to hurt so badly? he wrote. Is that the way the person we lost would have wanted it to be?

At one point, he guiltily wished that Jen would just make a choice to seize control of the things she could.

Yet somewhere amid all the passages of exasperation and dread—and many of them are quite detailed—Bobby comes to a much larger realization. It’s an epiphany, I’m guessing, that made it possible for him to stick with his plan to ask Jen’s father for permission to marry her, though he seriously questioned during those months whether she was ready. The date was August 20, 2001.

There are people that need me. And that, in itself, is life. There are people I do not know yet that need me. That is life.

To me, that is the most profound quote from the recovered diary. That is Bobby as Yoda. That is Bobby at his very finest, his most humane, his most mature. He understood that our commitments to one another are what we’re here for—and that, in itself, is life. Even when those commitments are hard. Even when they cause us pain.

One hesitates to say this. But if there was any path forward for the McIlvaine family, it was probably going to be through Jeff. Helen was careful never to burden him with expectations about marriage or kids—“You cannot put anything on the other child,” she tells me—and he appreciated that. But it was thanks to Jeff, I think, that Bob Sr. and Helen started to muddle their way out of the dark. There were people they did not know yet who needed them. Among those people were their four grandbabies. The oldest one is named Bobby.

At 22, Jeff had a profound insight. “I remember thinking on that first day: I can’t let this ruin me. ’Cause then what would Bobby think? Imagine if he knew that my parents and his brother were never able to recover. Imagine how bad that would make him feel.”

He was reflexively answering the very question Bobby had asked as he watched Jen struggle with her grief: Why do we have to hurt so badly? Is that the way the person we lost would have wanted it to be? Jeff had a very clear answer: No. He had too much of his own life left to go. “I knew that if this ruined my life, his whole life was worthless,” he says. “I wanted to work very hard to make sure that I had a good life.”

It was so hard at first. “I remember I felt a responsibility to not die, which is a weird thing,” he tells me. At the same time, he felt guilty for being the child who didn’t die, thinking often of the dream sequence in Stand by Me when the father snarls “It should have been you” to his surviving son. He told no one at his first real job that his brother had died on September 11, because too many people were eager to share their own stupid stories about that day, always with happy endings. This delayed his ability to grieve for years.

But eventually, he built a rich, fulfilling life. He married a woman who could not only subdue his pain but enter an entire grieving ecosystem. He had four kids—four! two boys, two girls—and oh, the relief of not having to focus on himself!

I ask if he would have had that many kids if Bobby hadn’t—

“No. I don’t think I would have.” Jeff lost his only sibling. He never wants any child of his to be in that position, should lightning ever restrike. “When you go through something like this,” he says, “you realize that family—it’s the only thing.”

Those kids are now at the center of the McIlvaines’ lives—even Bob Sr., who has chosen a path of daily suffering. As our conversation was winding down, he said something that stunned me: This 20th-anniversary year—a big one for the people in his world, filled with TV interviews and conferences—may be his last of 9/11 activism.

It’s the damnedest thing: The dead abandon you; then, with the passage of time, you abandon the dead.
I wasn’t sure I believed it. I remain unsure. This has been his life for 20 years. Still: Maybe it’s time for a change. “I’m sick of being angry,” he told me. “That’s the beauty of my life now. I can really separate. I truly can. To be out to lunch with Penelope …”

Penelope is his youngest granddaughter. He and Helen had lunch with her every Wednesday after preschool before the pandemic. Jeff and his wife and children rely so heavily on Bob and Helen that they recently rented an apartment five minutes from Jeff’s house, though they live less than an hour away.

Helen can’t get over having little girls in her life. They have so many opinions! She still gets depressed sometimes. She’ll have a beautiful moment, then realize that Bobby isn’t here to share it. “But then it’ll go away,” she says. “I mean, being needed—not everybody gets four grandkids.”

Yes. Being needed. That is everything.

Bobby would have been 46 this September. Jeff used to have vivid dreams about him, and man, how he loved them. They were brothers again, just talking, resuming their old rhythms and habits. But he seldom has those dreams anymore. “I haven’t seen him in 20 years, you know?”

He says he almost wishes sometimes that he could trade his current well-being for the suffering he felt 20 years ago, because Bobby was so much easier to conjure back then, the sense-memories of him still within reach. “No matter how painful September 11 was,” he explains, “I had just seen him on September 6.”

It’s the damnedest thing: The dead abandon you; then, with the passage of time, you abandon the dead.

It’s really not surprising that Jeff should have this fantasy from time to time, to trade his happiness for just one chance to see Bobby again in a warmer hue. As Bobby wrote in that last diary, suffering, or the prospect of it, is the price we’re willing to pay for the bonds we make.

Helen has found herself in the grip of a similar reverie. Recently, she was out with her limping group, and as she was looking around the table, staring in gratitude at these women who have held her up these past 20 years, a thought occurred to her. “I wondered, What if God said, ‘Okay, look, we gotta rewind here.’ Would we go through all of this again? ”

Would they be willing to relive their same lives, give birth to those same children, fall in love with them and then lose them a second time? “And I know that every single one of them would have said, emphatically, yes.”

For Helen, nothing in this world has rivaled the experience of raising her two boys. One of them, Robert George McIlvaine, died before his life truly began. But what would she have done without him, or he without her? For 26 years, she got to know this boy, to care for him, to love him. It was a privilege. It was a gift. It was a bittersweet sacrifice. And that, in itself, is life.

This article appears in the September 2021 print edition with the headline “Twenty Years Gone.”

Jennifer Senior is a staff writer at The Atlantic.




文化
鲍比-米尔万留下的东西
悲痛、阴谋论以及一个家庭在9/11事件后的20年里对意义的探索

作者：珍妮弗-西尼尔
2021年9月号
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本文于2021年8月9日在线发表。


2001年9月11日，鲍比-米尔万去世时，他在家里的办公桌是一个板块构造学的研究，上面堆满了不断变化的皮制日记本和黄色法律垫。他从十几岁起就开始写日记，上面写满了常见的日记内容--回忆、观察、挫折--而法律便笺上则写满了更多的内容：箴言式的思考、与他有关的引言、小说的刺探。


黄色便笺上似乎有两本不同的小说的认真的开头。但这些日记讲述了一个不同的故事。在外界看来，26岁的鲍比是一个迷人的人，一个努力的人，一个雄心勃勃的人。但在内心深处，这个家伙是一个圣人和一个傻瓜--对失望的哲学思考，天气变化时的忧郁，对女朋友的呻吟。

在他死后不到一周，鲍比的父亲不得不与那张无情的办公桌上的静物抗争。于是他开始分发那些黄色的法律便笺，那些装订完美的日记：给鲍比的朋友；给鲍比的女朋友珍，他正要向她求婚。他告诉他们，也许里面有他们可以用在悼词中的材料。

在那堆东西中，有一件东西比其他所有东西都更有意义。鲍比的最后一本日记。珍看了一眼，很快意识到她的名字都在上面。她能保留它吗？

鲍比的父亲没有思考。他只是说可以。这是一个条件反射，他几乎马上就后悔了。"他的妻子海伦告诉他："这是一个我们应该共同做出的决定。这是最后一次品味鲍比的公司的机会，听到他的声音，可能说一些新的东西。从这个意义上说，这本日记并不像一张复原的照片。它带来了文学复活的前景，无论多么短暂。海伦生气地说，她的丈夫怎么会不想知道鲍比的最后想法--他可能在9月10日晚上就已经写好了？他怎么能不同意她的冲动，把属于鲍比的每一个分子都拿出来重构他呢？

她最近告诉我，"少了一块，""就像没有了一只胳膊"。

她一次又一次地要求仁去看那本最后的日记。海伦有很多机会提起这件事，因为9月11日之后，珍有一段时间和麦克尔韦恩夫妇住在一起，无法忍受她自己公寓的空旷。海伦小心翼翼地解释说，她不需要这个东西本身。她所要求的只是让珍有选择地影印它。

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节选自《美国的土地。揭开世贸中心的面纱
威廉-兰格维什
2001年9月12日的纽约市
9/11时代已经结束
本-罗德斯
一幅插图，一个女人看着一个倒坐在迷宫般的楼梯上的男人。
亲爱的治疗师。当我提起任何严肃的事情，我的男朋友就会崩溃
罗莉-戈特利布（LORI GOTTLIEB
珍妮会说她会考虑。然后就没有下文了。海伦开始恳求。她说，我只想要那些话。如果鲍比描述的是一棵树，就给我描述一下这棵树。珍不同意。

要求升级了，反驳也升级了。他们现在正在争论。珍指出，海伦已经拿到了鲍比的其他物品，其他日记和法律文件。

当她最终永远地离开麦克尔韦恩家时，珍关上了身后的门，上了她的车，并突然哭了起来。不久之后，她给海伦写了一封信，写下了她最后的答案。不，就是不。如果海伦想进一步讨论这个问题，她必须在珍的治疗师面前进行。

海伦和她的丈夫再也没有见过珍。"海伦告诉我，"对我来说，她成了一个不存在的人。今天，她甚至无法回忆起珍的姓氏。

但多年来，海伦一直在想那本日记。她的思想像钉子一样钉在上面；她指责丈夫把它送人；它成了她的 "跛脚小组 "无休止讨论的主题，她称这个小组是由费城郊区六个同样失去孩子的母亲组成的圈子，虽然不是在9月11日。她们开始为她感到愤慨。一些人半开玩笑地提议，他们闯入詹的公寓，把日记本拿出来。"你不会再有任何回忆了，"其中一个女人告诉我。"所以，任何书面的东西，任何视频，任何卡片--你都要紧紧抓住它。那是你一生中唯一能得到的东西。"

McIlvaine夫妇将不得不利用他们已经拥有的东西。最终，他们做到了。鲍比的三个字成为家庭的座右铭：生命不息。没有人能够完全弄清楚这句话出自哪本日记或法律垫，但没有关系。海伦戴着一个刻有这句话的银手镯，她的丈夫在他的上臂上纹上了曲折的字体。

海伦、鲍比和老鲍在毕业典礼上微笑着站在户外帐篷里的照片
波比-麦克尔文，与他的父母海伦和老鲍勃，在1997年普林斯顿大学毕业典礼上。鲍比的尸体在双子塔的残骸中被发现。(丹娜-辛格；原始照片由麦克尔文家族提供)
在此，我应该指出，我了解并热爱麦尔文家族。在我哥哥上大学的第一天，他被分配到一个七人套房，由于他最后一个到达，鲍比成为他的室友。我哥哥经常想，这是一个多么小的奇迹。如果他早到30分钟，这个套间就会变成自己的异体，孩子们都以完全不同的配置洗牌。但是，由于时间上的一个愉快的意外，我哥哥可以和这个奇特的孩子一起度过他的夜晚，他是一个有着敏捷的头脑的老灵魂。

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八年后，几乎就在这一天，一个不同的时间事故将夺走鲍比的生命。他和我弟弟仍然是室友，但这次是在曼哈顿的一个两居室公寓里，试图领略年轻的成年生活。

在鲍比还活着的时候，我偶尔会看到麦尔文夫妇。他们给我的印象可能是这个星球上最善良的人。海伦主要是在一所天主教高中停车场的拖车里，给那些需要额外帮助的孩子教阅读。老鲍勃是一名教师，专门为有问题的青少年服务；十年来，他还拥有一家酒吧。杰夫，鲍比的弟弟，在那些日子里还只是个孩子，但他出现时总是无理取闹的好脾气。

还有鲍比。我的上帝。那孩子是白炽灯。当他笑起来的时候，看起来就像他吞下了月亮。

然后，在2001年9月11日的早上，鲍比去了世界之窗的一个会议，那是一家他很少有理由去的大楼里的餐厅，他在美林证券的一份媒体关系工作，他从7月份才开始做。我哥哥等了又等。鲍比一直没有回家。从那时起，我看到在这一可怕事件的爆炸半径内的每个人都在试图理解它，试图应对。

早期，麦克尔文夫妇与一位治疗师谈过，治疗师警告他们，他们家庭的每个成员都会有不同的悲痛。她告诉他们，想象一下，你们都在山顶上，但你们都有骨折，所以你们不能互相帮助。你们每个人都必须找到自己的下山之路。

这是一个很有帮助的比喻，可能挽救了麦克尔韦恩夫妇的婚姻。但当我向加州大学欧文分校的心理学教授罗克珊-科恩-西尔弗提到这个比喻时，她立即发现了一个问题。她告诉我："这表明每个人都会下山，"她说。"有些人根本就没有下山"。

这是你在近距离研究哀悼时了解到的许多事情之一。它是特异性的、无政府的、多色的。你读到的很多关于悲伤的理论是伟大的，甚至是美丽的，但它们有一种抹杀个人经验的方式。每个哀悼者都有一个非常不同的故事要讲。

然而，那位治疗师在最关键的意义上肯定是正确的。9月11日之后，那些与鲍比关系密切的人都向非常不同的方向发展。海伦压抑着自己的悲痛，避开了她多年来购物的那家超市，这样就不会有人问她怎么样了。杰夫，鲍比唯一的兄弟姐妹，不得不强迫自己度过幸存者内疚的灭顶之灾。老鲍伯把他儿子的死当作未解决的谋杀案来对待，认为这是一个有待揭露的掩饰。9/11事件有蹊跷。

然后是珍。她现在结婚了，有两个很好的孩子，但她有时会想，当她与丈夫争吵或对自己的生活感到气愤时，如果她一直和鲍比在一起会是什么样子。我在四月份找到了她，当然，她和我想象中的那个无情的女恶棍完全不同。那只是我告诉自己的故事，我用来使无意义的事情合理化，使我自己的愤怒成形。就像我说的。我们都需要我们的故事。

不过，当我最终拜访她时，我知道一件事：我想看那本日记。我也想让McIlvaine夫妇看到它。"我不是一个储蓄者，"当我们第一次见面喝鸡尾酒时，她说。我的心一下子僵住了。

但她仍然拥有它，只是让你知道。

在The Experiment播客中聆听Jen Senior讨论这个故事，这是一个关于人们在我们国家的矛盾中航行的节目。苹果播客｜Spotify｜Stitcher｜谷歌播客
告诉我你的儿子。

海伦第一次听到这个邀请时表示欢迎，因为它集中了她的思维，给了她一个宣泄悲伤的渠道。但很快它就使她充满了恐惧，她感到自己被它的重量压得喘不过气来。你怎么可能传达你的长子是谁或者他对你意味着什么？

海伦通常会先告诉人们，鲍比上了普林斯顿大学，但这并不是因为她对地位的固执。这是因为她和老鲍勃没有想到会有一个上了常春藤盟校的孩子。他们都上了宾夕法尼亚州的州立学校，甚至不是特别有名的学校。他们的两个孩子都是运动健将。但在鲍比8岁时，他的三年级老师对他们说--他们都记得她的原话--"开始攒钱吧。" 这个人的教育可能会让你付出代价。

"我弟弟要去普林斯顿大学，必须要做的事情很多，就像天文数字一样，"杰夫说，他是新泽西州萨默代尔市的一名高中生物教师和田径教练。"对我们来说，这就像我们家的人成为总统。"

这就是家族中每个人对鲍比的记忆：作为一个独特的生物，出类拔萃，超凡脱俗，通过篮球架从天而降。

他是一个紧张的学生。他是一个更加激烈的运动员，竞争激烈到了无礼的地步。去年，鲍比的高中老同学迈克-西尔斯基在《费城问询报》上写道，他在篮球场上的表现是 "浑身是骨，棱角分明，肘部坚硬"。这是个令人振奋的故事，他有机会写这个故事是因为他们的另一个同学发现了1992年的36秒视频，在这个视频中，十几岁的鲍比-麦克尔文投出了一个完美的传球，为一个完美的投篮做准备，这个投篮正好飞到了十几岁的......头上。

科比-布莱恩特。

那天，鲍比从科比和他的球队身上得到了16分，此外，他还创造了那个浮球。

当他来到大学时，鲍比保留了一点那种阿尔法狗的气质。他仍然很有竞争力，即使在玩无意识的、捏造的宿舍游戏时。他对嘲笑朋友并不感到羞涩。他高大英俊，对自己的风格感有很高的自信，这可能是有道理的，也可能不是。安德烈-帕里斯说："有些时候你希望他退后一步，不要那么严肃和紧张，"他是鲍比的前室友和最亲密的朋友之一。"但这是他的身份和特点的一部分，也是他认为他必须做的事，以取得进展。"

"出人头地 "对鲍比来说意味着什么很复杂。在他那些年的日记中，到处都是经济上的担忧（坐在这里没有钱，我觉得自己不是一个真正的人，有一条典型的记录）。然而，他对如何才能赚钱感到矛盾，对所有的孩子都走在通往商学院的路上感到困惑。(他问他们，显然是在挑衅。）他想成为一名作家。很明显，这没有任何报酬。

这种冲突一直持续到他短暂的成年时期。他在图书出版业工作了两年，然后意识到这不是谋生的方式，转而从事企业公关。他仍然可以兼职写他的小说。

但是，尽管鲍比的饥饿感和豪迈，他主要散发的是温暖、得体，以及一种开瓶器式的怪癖，即使在他的大学时代。他宠爱女友。他给出了谨慎的建议。大四那年，他参加了一个现代舞课程，因为，为什么不呢？这将是有趣的。而且与众不同。他的最后一个项目是用身体拼出他女朋友的名字。

不过，这只是一个玩笑而已。鲍比真正的知识热情是美国黑人文化和历史。鲍比去世后，麦家收到了托尼-莫里森（Toni Morrison）的慰问信，这不是一封而是两封，他曾和托尼-莫里森上过一堂课。第二封是他为她写的学期论文。她写道："这当然是一篇更有成就和更有见地的论文，""就像他一样"。他的毕业论文获得了非裔美国人研究系主要奖项的荣誉提名。

在他的葬礼上，鲍比最年长的朋友谈到他是他们的榜样。我比鲍比大五岁，这意味着我主要看到他的魅力和可爱，聪明和不可阻挡。

但奇怪的是，我也想给他留下好印象。当我开始在《纽约》杂志工作时，每周在戏剧部分写短篇特写，鲍比对我在每篇特写的结尾都引用一句话的做法表示不满。起初我很恼火，防卫性很强--但事后看来，我竟然如此在乎这个22岁的年轻人的意见，更令人惊讶的是，他竟然认真地阅读我的文章，发现了我的一个初生的小毛病。时至今日，我认为鲍比给我上了宝贵的一课：如果你要把最后一句话的权力让给别人，你最好确定那个人值得拥有。

当你和他说话时，Bob Mcilvaine sr.很容易哭，而且经常哭。家里的每个人都知道这一点，并且已经习惯了--他的悲伤紧贴着表面，偶尔会抬头透气。几个月前，麦克尔韦恩夫妇在火车站接我后的第一次午餐时，他就哭了；当我们两个人单独在一起时，在第一次聊天的几分钟里，他又哭了；最近，他在接受斯派克-李为HBO电视台关于9/11的系列纪录片的采访时，也哭了。

在与老鲍勃的交谈中，我突然意识到一些令人心碎和粗暴的基本情况。9月11日可能是历史上记录最多的灾难之一，但尽管我们看了那么多的灾难录像，我们仍然对个别死者的最后时刻一无所知。当你想到这一点时，很奇怪的是，一个如此公开的事件仍然是这样一个惩罚性的谜团。然而，它确实是，而且很可怕--生者只能坚持下去，让他们的想象力在午夜的畜栏里肆意驰骋。

老鲍勃-麦克尔韦恩坐在办公桌前的木椅上的照片
"我唯一做的事情是9/11事件，"老鲍勃-麦克尔文说。"我的全部基础都围绕着这一天。" (Danna Singer)
对老鲍勃来说，这意味着要想知道混乱开始时鲍比在哪里，他在做什么。多年来，这是他唯一能想到的。鲍比受苦的想法折磨着他。他被焚烧了吗？他是被窒息而死吗？或者更糟糕？"我认为鲍比跳楼了，"有一天他在楼梯上对他妻子喊道。这个想法几乎把海伦逼疯了。

随着时间的推移，很明显，鲍比并没有跳楼。鲍比是在残骸中找到的不到100具平民尸体中的一具。但困扰老鲍勃的是，他从未见过尸体。9月13日，在停尸房，病理学家强烈建议他不要去看尸体。几年后，他终于鼓起勇气去了纽约市的法医办公室，拿到了官方报告。

摘自2002年7月/8月、9月和10月的杂志。William Langewiesche的《美国的土地》节选。揭开世贸中心的面纱

这时，一切都变了。"他告诉我："我的整个论文--我现在所做的一切--都是基于他的伤害。"看着尸体，我得出的结论是，他正走在里面，炸弹爆炸了。"

他的意思是说，是控制性爆破。这就是他认为鲍比那天的死因，也是两座大楼最终倒下的原因：来自于控制下的爆破。这是一个由美国政府策划的内部工作，不是为了证明伊拉克战争的合理性--那是额外的，但实际上，最终是为了摧毁23楼，因为联邦调查局正在那里调查美国在二战期间从日本人那里非法征用的黄金的使用情况，然后利用这些黄金使苏联破产。这些飞机只是作秀而已。

一个人在2001年9月12日醒来时，会相信这样的事情吗？不是的。这种信念是在多年的时间里形成的，很多年。

那第一年，老鲍勃很麻木。他的唯一目标是度过每一天。但他最终参与了一个名为 "9/11家庭和平之路 "的团体，抗议在阿富汗和伊拉克的战争。"它打开了我的生活，"他告诉我。"我变得非常活跃。这就是我悲伤的方式。这很完美。"

在鲍比去普林斯顿大学之前，老鲍对政治漠不关心，有时投票给民主党人，有时投票给共和党人--他认为包括罗纳德-里根。他说："我不是一个善于读书的人，"他说。"我在城里开了一家酒吧。如果我甚至提到进步这个词，我的顾客可能会向我开枪。"

但后来鲍比开始和普林斯顿大学迷人的终身激进主义者一起上课。他开始为学校的《进步评论》写作。他的父亲吞噬了他写的所有东西。很快，他让老鲍勃阅读霍华德-津恩的《美国人民的历史》和Z杂志，即激进主义月刊。从那时起，老鲍勃就对政治感兴趣。"那都是因为鲍比。"

那么这个反战活动呢？这很完美--对他来说是一个自然的出口。

但随着时间的推移，老鲍勃变得不耐烦了。2004年，他去华盛顿听康多莉扎-赖斯在9/11委员会的发言，她的证词--或者说没有证词，他说--让他很生气，他一气之下离开，在国会大厅里大骂。"我想要答案，"他解释说。然而，没有答案。这时他才意识到。政府在隐瞒什么。"他说："我变得很激进。"直到今天，我仍然非常激进。"

老鲍勃是一个满脸皱纹、说话温和的人，身材修长，略微弯腰。但他的影响是有欺骗性的。我们正坐在宾夕法尼亚州奥雷兰德的麦克尔韦恩夫妇三居室的楼上书房里，这也是鲍比和杰夫长大的房子。这间屋子很温馨，很简朴，杂乱地摆放着家庭照片。但这个房间已经变成了一个9/11研究的碉堡，塞满了书籍和按事件、主题、国家精心组织的文件。墙上最大的艺术品是一张世界地图，上面标有每个邀请老鲍勃讲述自己故事的国家的图钉。

"他告诉我："我说得太多了，这个词就这样传开了。"我给你看看意大利。" 他指的是罗马电影节的照片和剪报，因为他出现在纪录片《零点：塞特姆布尔事件》（Zero: Inchiesta sull'11 Settembre）里。他得到了走红地毯的机会。"俄罗斯人过来了。他们在这里呆了两天，想听听我说什么。" 指的是俄罗斯国家新闻机构。他们把自己停在麦克尔文家的后甲板上。"法国人来到这里，在这里呆了几天，想谈谈。" 同样的交易，虽然他不记得是哪个媒体机构。("我爸爸在那个社区几乎是个名人，"杰夫告诉我。)

老鲍勃对 "9-11 "事件的理解是，它是美国政府玩世不恭的诡计，而不是圣战分子利用装满无助平民的商业飞机进行的可怕的恐怖主义行为，这对 "9-11真相建筑师和工程师组织 "的工作至关重要，该组织推广了喷气燃料的燃烧温度不足以将横梁熔化为熔融的钢铁这一观点。不言而喻，这与所有可观察到的事实相悖。

但这个理论是老鲍勃急于为我说明的。他准备了视觉效果，大量的建筑图。我告诉他，我们会成功的；我只是想多问几个关于那些早期的问题。

他很失望。"我一生中所做的一切都基于那几秒钟。" 这是他非常想讨论的事情。

于是我们就讨论起来。他认为，只有预先计划好的引爆才能使那些塔楼倒塌，而只有绣有炸药的大厅才能解释鲍比身上的伤。他有完整的体检报告。


它读起来非常令人不安。鲍比的大部分头--那张美丽的脸--不见了，他的大部分右臂也不见了。细节用一般的图表和病理学的冷静语言呈现出来（"缺失：右上肢，大部分头部"），以及标准检查表上的一对令人不寒而栗的答复。

头发颜色：无。

眼睛的颜色：没有。

但一件微妙的事情让老鲍勃觉得有些不对劲。报告中描述了许多撕裂伤和骨折，但它们几乎都出现在鲍比尸体的正面。除了头部的多处骨折外，他的尸体背面基本上被描述为原始状态。

这些年来，我们告诉自己的故事是，飞机撞击时，鲍比已经离开了大楼。鲍比并不在世贸中心工作；从我们所了解的情况来看，他去世界之窗只是为了帮助一位新同事为一个全天会议的上午演讲做准备，而不是为了参加会议。因此，鲍比做了他的工作，是我们的假设，然后说了他的告别，正在返回附近的美林证券的路上，他突然在街上被飞来的碎片杀死了。

鲍比的每日计划表上杂乱无章地写着各种约会。但9月11日这一天却是空白。无论他在做什么，都没有重要到值得自己去记录的程度。
老鲍勃不相信。如果那是真的--如果鲍比正在远离世贸中心--他难道不会向前跌倒吗？他的背上不是会有伤吗？"如果你在逃跑，那就更像是一种压迫性的东西，"他告诉我。"可能他身上的每根骨头都会断裂。"

我告诉他，我不是病理学家，但在我看来，他听到飞机飞得太低、太快的轰鸣声，或者也许是一架被劫持的飞机撞上北塔本身的声音，然后转身去看发生了什么，却不知道是什么东西撞了他。

他拒绝这种解释。"我的理论是他当时正在走进大楼，因为他在上面开了会议。"

"我以为他的会议在8:30开始？" 我问。第一架飞机是在上午8点46分着陆的，这就意味着鲍比是晚到的。

"我以为是9点开始，"老鲍勃说。

"难道就没有办法知道吗？" 我问。

"你知道，告诉你真相，我从来没有......"

他从来没有查过。

会议的早餐和注册于8点钟开始。开幕词安排在8点半。鲍比的同事被安排在8点40分发言。完整的手册可在9/11纪念馆和博物馆的网站上找到。

当我最终拜访詹--那个被盗日记的女人，那个鲍比即将订婚的女人--她给我看了放在他在美林公司办公桌上的每日计划表。上面杂乱无章地写着各种约会。但9月11日这一天是空白的。无论他在做什么，都没有重大意义，不值得有自己的记录。

阅读。我丈夫不在的一切

我哥哥还告诉我，他还保留着9月13日星期四老鲍勃在他的厨房桌上留给他的纸条。上面说，纽约市警察局的一名调查员乔-加利亚尔迪(Joe Gagliardi)刚刚来过，把他们从鲍比的口袋里掏出来的钱包放下。其中有一句话特别引人注目。他是在外围被发现的。不是在大厅附近。

"他是真的吗？" 当我打电话给老鲍勃，问他关于纸条的事时，他说。他完全忘了是他写的。"如果那是真的，那太好了。" 他想了一会儿。"虽然周边--他仍然可能在10英尺以外。他肯定没有离大楼100英尺。"

然后我告诉他会议的日程安排，实际上这确实留下了他离大楼100英尺的可能性。如果他在他的同事开始发言或开场白之前离开，他可能离他在美林证券的办公室很近，步行5分钟就到了。老鲍勃把这一切都看在眼里。他重复说，他认为鲍比的伤势太极端，太野蛮，不可能是由飞来的碎片造成的。"但你知道吗？"他最后说。"这已经与我无关了。我的全部事情是谁做的，为什么。已经过去20年了，我仍然无法得到任何答案。"


我花了一些时间，但最终我鼓起勇气问老鲍勃一个明显的问题。是什么让他关于世贸中心被毁的说法比唐纳德-特朗普的支持者的说法更可信，比如说，他们说2020年的选举是被盗的？

"我可以相信它是被盗的！"他告诉我。"但我不打算到处宣扬，因为我不知道。因为我在做功课。" 老鲍勃总是在阅读。他最近的一本是艾伦-杜勒斯的传记。"可能99.9%的人，你会发现在那些激进团体中--守誓人，不管是什么--他们真的没有做过任何研究。"

但他随后补充说，他同情特朗普的选民，就像他鄙视特朗普本人一样。"这个国家在这么长的时间里没有为他们做任何事情。所以你不能责怪他们投票给他。"

Bob sr.问我是否想看看Bobby的钱包。我没有意识到他有，但他确实有，塞在一个防毒袋里，本身就被埋在房间里的一个塑料盒子里，这个盒子曾经属于鲍比。他小心翼翼地为我打开它们。

"海伦和杰夫从未见过这个，"他告诉我。


他们没有吗？

"没有。"

钱包里布满了灰尘，静止不动，隐隐约约散发着世贸中心的那种味道，这种味道曾经强大到纽约人的眼睛都能闻到它。他开始掏出一个26岁的人的不多的财产：一个宾夕法尼亚州的驾照，一张Visa卡，某种工作或建筑的身份证，一张图书馆卡。钱包里还有13美元的现金，但钱已经瓦解了，几乎完全腐烂了。

"我唯一做的事情是9/11的东西，"老鲍勃说。"我的全部基础都围绕着这一天。"

应该说，这与海伦的日子所做的事情完全不同。对911事件进行长达20年的调查并不是她退休计划的一部分。在我们最早的一次谈话中，她特别告诉我，为了不发现老鲍勃所了解的一些事情，她会走遍美国。因此，当他和我坐在这里，检查一个她从未见过的钱包时，我问。所有这些搜索，这些审问，对他的婚姻是否有不健康的后果？

他欣然承认，确实如此："我们参加社交活动，她发现我说了些什么，她就会发狂。她会说，'不要谈论9/11'。但后来有人走过来对我说，'我能问你这个问题吗？然后我就开始说。然后她会发现这一点。她会变得很不安。" 他们现在倾向于分开进行社交活动。"他说："我将与我看到的任何人谈论9/11，如果他们想谈论它。"我想这就是我没有多少朋友的原因。他们害怕我会谈论它。"


也许很难想象为什么有人愿意花这么多时间沉浸在他儿子死亡的故事、感觉和法医学中。但对老鲍勃来说，这恰恰是重点：把悲痛紧紧抓住。"我不想远离它，"他告诉我。他想呆在山顶上。这就是他如何在鲍比的公司里消磨时间--通过解决这个犯罪，通过揭露美帝国滥用权力的真相。"做我正在做的事，这真的对我有帮助，因为我每天都在想他。每次我谈话时，我都会谈到鲍比。"

鲍比布满灰尘的钱包放在塑料袋上的照片，其中一个塑料袋上有生物危害的标志，周围有几块岩石
鲍比的钱包仍然布满灰尘，并隐约散发着2001年秋天笼罩纽约的世贸中心的味道。(Danna Singer)
他意识到，还有其他方法可以与鲍比相处，而不会那么令人痛苦。例如，他可以阅读他的日记。直到今天，他还为自己把最后一本日记交给詹而感到可怕。他为此内疚了很久，以至于在2011年的采访中他还在提及此事。一家英国报纸把它称为 "日记集"。


"我只是对日记不那么重视，"他告诉我。"它们对我来说没有那么大的意义。"

那么什么对你最有意义？我问。

"他被谋杀了，"他说。

在9月11日的早晨，海伦，麦克尔文家族中最坚毅的人，是唯一惊慌失措的人。杰夫知道，他的兄弟没有在世贸中心工作。老鲍勃那天在当地医院的青少年心理科教书，他把那座可怕的、燃烧着的塔楼当成了一个新闻事件，和其他人一样，开始看电视上的报道。

然而，海伦看了一眼电视，需要坐下来。她知道这似乎很荒谬，很迷信，但她前一天晚上和鲍比说过话，却忘了像往常那样结束谈话。"要小心。" 后来，当他的棺材被放进坟墓时，她会对他的棺材说这些话。

到了中午，当没有人听到鲍比的消息时，家里的每个人都感觉像海伦一样。是的，曼哈顿下城的手机信号塔坏了，电话只能零星使用，但可以花几个小时与父母通电话的鲍比（你们怎么会有这么多话说？ 他的朋友总是问），肯定会想办法打电话的，而珍却什么也没听到，这真的毫无道理。鲍比两天前刚刚向她父亲请求允许她结婚。


下午时分，他的密友兼老同事安德烈终于联系上了美林证券的一位女士，她尴尬地告诉他，鲍比和一位同事被安排在当天上午参加世界之窗的会议，此后就再也没有他们的消息。安德烈给McIlvaine夫妇打了电话。

杰夫说："第一个晚上可能比我们确定他已经死了之后更糟糕，""因为我们不知道发生了什么。我无法忘却，他就在那里面，你知道吗？"

他们睡在书房里，他们三个人。那晚，珍呆在自己的客厅里，紧盯着电视。

周三早上，杰夫和老鲍勃太激动了，不能再留在奥雷兰德。他们坐火车去了纽约，在该市的分诊中心做了一次无果的巡视。什么都没有。我哥哥在一个失踪人员中心排队；安德烈在他的公寓里管理一个指挥中心，处理电话和他掌握的每一条线索；杰夫检查了他能找到的每一个网站。刷新，刷新，刷新。

仁坐在那里等着。


老鲍勃星期三晚上在我哥哥和鲍比的公寓里，睡在他儿子的床上。

第二天，安德烈接到了纽约警察局的电话，这次是一个严峻的消息。每个人都需要立即去列克星敦大道的军械库。

安德烈又一次不得不告诉麦克尔文夫妇。海伦平静地照办了她被告知的事情。她对待这些指示就像对待一名宇航员一样，如果国际空间站的某个模块着火了，她就做下一步的工作。

军械库是一个充满绝望的地方。数百个家庭在外面排队，拿着印有他们所爱之人面孔的海报。一位牧师护送我的兄弟、珍、安德烈和麦克尔文一家进去。海伦告诉他鲍比的名字。一名警察从房间对面走近她。"你是她的母亲吗？"

接下来的事情大部分都是模糊的。他们被带到一个私人房间，悲痛顾问们来到他们身边。然后，不寻常的事情发生了。鲁迪-朱利安尼走了进来。

市长没有人陪同。没有助手，没有摄像机，什么都没有。他看起来真的松了一口气，在那一刻，有一个家庭可以安慰，有那么多失去亲人的纽约人还在犹豫不决，在灯柱、铁丝网围栏、医院墙壁上张贴着失踪者的照片的传单。

朱利安尼拥抱了所有人。然后他在麦克尔韦恩夫妇对面坐下。他只说了五个字。"告诉我你儿子的情况。"

海伦-麦基尔韦恩坐在楼梯和玻璃窗门前的沙发上的照片。
鲍比去世后，海伦-麦尔文恳求他的女友珍与家人分享他最后的日记，但无济于事。(Danna Singer)
如果说鲍比先生选择喂养他的悲伤，海伦则选择饿死她的悲伤。她与她的一瘸一拐的小组谈论此事，因为他们理解。但她决心不做，正如她所说，"至少我不是海伦"。与不可能的事情一起生活已经很困难了。但是，如果必须就她的不幸安慰别人，或者处理他们的不适，或者最糟糕的是，在他们的怜悯中礼貌地微笑，那就不是她所能承受的了。海伦仍然可以列举出人们所说的所有善意的话语，这些话刺痛了她。

没有父母应该埋葬一个孩子。

你将永远不会是相同的。

我昨晚和我的孩子们在一起，意识到你再也不会有这样的事情了。

难道人们没有意识到，当他们说这些话时，他们是在建造一条护城河，而不是一座桥？他们是在吸引人们对他们所居住的漂亮城堡的注意，他们的墙壁上还挂着运气？

那第一年是残酷的。有一次，当她和一些朋友坐在餐厅里时，其中一位朋友开始不停地谈论她儿子的音乐天赋。"我想尖叫，"海伦说。"我不得不出去。我不能再听别人谈论他们的孩子了。多年来。我不能。"

第二年的情况并没有好多少。她试图和一个朋友去意大利旅游。她说她表现得很冷漠、疏远、奇怪。她惧怕最无害的问题。有孩子吗？

工作有帮助。她的学生需要她，她的同事也很好。"只是我不想要他们的帮助，因为这太快了，"海伦说。"所以后来，几年下来，我看起来好像已经痊愈了。而这并不是真的。我有时想谈论它。但我不得不找到其他方法来做，因为我已经关上了那扇门。"

我无法确定这是否与我所认识的海伦相吻合。也许？

海伦：她很少或没有化妆。她非常好脾气。她总是对你的生活充满了疑问。她是那种能配合任何计划的人，可以在药店里花20分钟和你一起试戴有趣的老花镜。

实际上，几年前我们在佛罗里达一起做了这件事。我们都碰巧去看望我妈妈。

所以她所描述的储备对我来说有点陌生。"我有一个奇怪的个性，"她告诉我。"我可以为一件被我毁在洗衣房里的上衣而哭泣，然后又为一些事情坚忍不拔..." 她话音刚落，但我相信她要找的词是大。

"他们应得的比我能给他们的更多，但他们永远不会要求比我更多，"鲍比在他的日记中写道，关于他的父母。"我非常爱他们。"
但是和鲍比在一起......! 鲍比带出了她更情绪化的自我，因为他是一个如此敏感的孩子。"有一次，在听了他那可怜的女朋友的故事大约半小时后，"她告诉我，"我对他说，'你知道我和爸爸结婚快30年了，我从来没有为他考虑这么多，对吗？ " 但她当然喜欢这一切的每一分钟。

她最后一次见到鲍比是在他去世前的两个晚上。不到一个小时前，他向珍的父亲请求允许娶她；现在两家人正在新泽西州兰伯特维尔的一家餐馆里吃饭，珍在那里有一套公寓。海伦看了一眼她的儿子，看到他的额头上仍然闪烁着汗水。她把手伸到桌子下面，找到他的手。他把他的小指头和她的锁在一起。他们就这样呆着，直到食物到来。

在9月11日十周年前后，海伦意识到她并不完全正确。她失去了一个孩子，所以也许这就是她的新生活注定要发生的事情：不正常。但她并不相信。一路走来，她的强硬，她坚定地拒绝成为一个受害者，这一切都适得其反。"我发现自己变得小气了。和争吵。我发现自己有时太八卦了。"

我从来没有听过海伦说过一句关于任何人的坏话。甚至当我提到我很快就会见到詹时，她的反应是焦虑，而不是痛苦。她不想揭开旧伤疤。他们俩当年都很痛苦；都不是最好的自己。

好吧，但如果她把日记本借给我呢？我问。

"哦，我的上帝。你会嫁给我吗？"

但这是今天的海伦。十年前的海伦决定她不是她想成为的人。她的治疗已经停滞不前。她很难控制自己的愤怒。她在纪念十周年的回忆文章中写道："我的生活感觉是如此惊人的不正常"。

她保留了太多的东西，她在自己的盐水中发酵。

不久之后，她开始看另一位治疗师。这个人是灵性的。这种新的观点改变了一切。"她真的相信，我们并没有看到所有的东西。"

即使在鲍比去世之前，海伦也是自助书籍的忠实粉丝。但在9月11日之后，她一打一打地买下了这些书，囤积了所有关于损失的东西。她发现伊丽莎白-库伯勒-罗斯（Elisabeth Kübler-Ross）是不可或缺的--与其说是她写的关于悲伤的五个阶段，虽然那很好，不如说是她写的关于死后的生活。

库伯勒-罗斯曾经认为对来世的信仰是一种否认的形式。但从20世纪70年代中期开始，她改变了主意，汇编了数千份有濒死经历的人的证词，以表明我们的灵魂比我们长寿。

"我看了死后的书，但它们都太有信仰了，"海伦说。"我想相信我在天主教成长过程中所接受的教育。但我喜欢库伯勒-罗斯的地方是她有科学背景。"

当然，正是因为她是一名科学家，库伯勒-罗斯的医生同事们对她兴趣中的这种奇怪转变感到非常沮丧。他们认为这很怪异，不严谨，是她遗产上的一个污点。我把这些告诉了海伦。她笑了。"我打赌他们没有卖出几百万本书"。

库伯勒-罗斯用一个古怪但直观的比喻来描述身体和灵魂。我们的身体是我们致命的线圈，我们的 "茧"；当我们死亡时，我们抖落它们，我们的灵魂--我们的 "蝴蝶"--被释放到宇宙的荒野。海伦很珍惜这个想法。这是一个可以挽回剧烈的、任性的短暂生命的概念。"有一天，我真的想，如果有一个等级制度，而鲍比是其中的一部分，他只是作为一个人下来了一下，会怎么样？ "

她和老鲍勃开始观看《超自然》和《吸血鬼猎人巴菲》，这是他们以前从未想象过的节目。

在这个世界上，海伦开始明白，把悲伤压在心底是没有用的。在60岁时，她开始跑步，不仅因为跑步感觉很好，而且因为跑步可以让她哭泣。她开始更多地表达自己。有一天她注意到，她在治疗师办公室里释放出来的不满情绪，都是那么微不足道，那么琐碎，那么毫无意义。她为什么会如此激动？

现在她正在做自助书籍中告诉你要做的事情：让事情过去。她告诉我，她的一个朋友，她那高高在上的自我陶醉曾经让她很生气。但是最近，她和她在电话里聊天，决定只享受美好的部分。

哇，我说。是什么让你如此宽容？

"这对我没有好处。"

你知道什么是彻底的接受吗？和一个毕生致力于传播美国故意策划世贸中心倒塌然后阴谋掩盖事实的丈夫一起生活。忘掉所有关于如何在感恩节与你的热爱特朗普的叔叔相处的爽朗建议专栏。在你的儿子去世后，你的配偶每天早上醒来时脸色铁青，像一个开放的伤口，并决心揭露真相，你如何在几十年的婚姻中继续下去？

如果海伦说这没有引起摩擦，那是在撒谎。

她说："有很多时候，我就像，哦，拜托，"。她对老鲍勃说的一些事情完全持开放态度。"但很多都是情绪化的，很多都是我自己无法跟踪发现的，我不是那种上网站的人。我不想通过不断地说：'好吧，你检查了吗，这是一个有效的网站吗？

也许更具挑战性的问题，即婚姻生活中的核心问题，是每天的谈话。老鲍勃的一心一意意味着任何谈话都可能毫无征兆地转入9月11日。她下楼来告诉他，她正在考虑买一件新毛衣；他回答说，她是否知道政府在奥萨马-本-拉登的实际死亡日期上撒了谎。

"那么它有没有妨碍到你？"她问。"是的，很多时候。我们要去某个地方，我会对鲍勃说，'你不能谈论9/11。'而他会说，'嗯，他们问我这个问题。前99次我都上当了，直到我的治疗师说，'这还不够好'。当我们在社交活动中出来时，我们就出来了。我不想总是成为受害者、受害者、受害者。"

我问，如果你感觉到另一个独白即将到来，你现在如何处理？

"现在我说，'鲍勃，你的脸上有一种我不会谈论任何事情的表情，除了9/11之外。我们已经到了一个可以真正拿它开玩笑的地步了。"

海伦希望我理解。老鲍勃痴迷的某些方面，她不仅仅是容忍；她还积极支持他们。两年前，她听了 "建筑师和工程师支持9/11真相 "的演讲，觉得很有说服力。他的叙述中的其他部分，不断演变，让她无所适从。"她说："如果我是他，我就会坚持讲那些建筑物。我问她是否了解他最新的理论，涉及日本黄金。她摇摇头。"她说："我甚至没有听到。"我在为这个人辩护，而不是为这个观点辩护。"

很久以前，海伦就意识到，"9/11真相"，正如老鲍勃喜欢称呼它的那样，已经把它的钩子沉入了她丈夫的体内，而她从不认为自己有资格去撬开它们。"我非常保护他，"她说。"如果他决定在老人院做一个男脱衣舞者，我也无所谓。他必须成为他必须成为的人，因为该死的，这发生了，你知道吗？如果这能给他带来安慰--"

她打断了自己，露出一个尴尬的笑容。"把那个可视化的东西从你的脑子里拿出来。"

海伦做梦也想不到会抛弃这个亲爱的人。他是鲍比的小联盟教练。当孩子们还小的时候，是他在房子周围组织比赛，用一块胶带做终点线。老鲍勃是她唯一的追求者，他曾建议他们一起运动--其他人认为那完全是为了男人。

而现在，他是世界上唯一一个理解养育了鲍比-麦克尔文又失去他的感觉的人。

她带我走到墙上，墙上有一张巨大的有框海报，是她五年前为她丈夫定制的。这是一张老鲍勃的周期表，基本上是他的几十张照片，都整齐地排列在一个网格中。老鲍勃与罗西-奥唐纳谈话。老鲍勃在法国电视台接受采访。老鲍勃在一个关于9/11委员会报告的论坛上发言，在C-SPAN上拍摄。"她说："我在他70岁生日时给了他这个。她上网，把他的名字输入谷歌，然后就看到了。一个英雄的画廊。"我喜欢看它。" 奇怪的是，他已经成为超级明星，而他的儿子却没有机会成为。

老鲍勃的讨伐行动在外界看来可能是疯狂的。海伦认为这是爱的行为。"她告诉我："他几乎是在为他的儿子打仗。"他在以他知道的最好的方式做一个父亲。我怎么能不允许这样呢？"

大多数悲伤的理论，特别是涉及阶段的理论，更多的是文学性的，而不是文字性的。人们不会按顺序哀悼，他们当然也不会按逻辑哀悼。但是，每当我想到麦克尔文夫妇时，这些模式中的一个方面我一直在回想。这是悲伤的 "渴望和寻找 "阶段，由英国精神病学家科林-默里-帕克斯和约翰-鲍尔比在60年代首次描述。"帕克斯写道："在寻找时，"失去亲人的人的感觉和行为就好像失去的人是可以恢复的，尽管他在理智上知道不是这样。

老鲍勃如何寻找是显而易见的。但我在与海伦交谈后想到，也许她多年来对鲍比最后日记的关注相当于老鲍的痴迷。"是的！"当我试探性地提出这种可能性时，她说。"是的，是的。这是'如果我不能拥有这个，那我就拥有那个'。 "

然而，这里有一个令人好奇的问题。海伦有鲍比的两本早期日记。她还有一叠他写的法律文件，其中有许多类似日记的条目。但她几乎没有翻阅过这些日记。

一个原因是实际情况：它们很难破译。鲍比的笔迹很整齐，但很小，而且有点奇怪。另一个原因是本能的。长期以来，海伦担心阅读它们会违反神圣的界限，"就像不敲门就进入他的房间"。然而，另一个是它给她带来多大的痛苦。"我今天又试了一次，"她在鲍比去世十周年的另一篇回忆文章中写道。"我想，'如果我不在死前解决这些问题，谁会呢？ " 她坚持了10分钟。老鲍比根本就没有看过这些东西。

"但在某处我确实找到了《生命的爱》这几个字，"海伦告诉我。

我一直想问她这个问题，因为我现在正在阅读鲍比的日记和法律文件，我在任何地方都找不到这句话。她还不知道这句话是怎么来的吗？

她不知道。她以为他是为一个去世的亲密的家庭朋友写的，但她错了。我告诉她我会继续寻找。

那天晚上我把两本日记中的一本带回了我的旅馆。在阅读过程中，我意识到，海伦从未深入研究这两本日记可能还有另一个原因。这两本日记是他大学一年级和二年级的时候写的，当时他还是一个原始人，本质上还是一个孩子。当他在其中一些法律文件上涂鸦时，他显然已经长大了，但它们是混乱的，没有日期。只有日记感觉是可控的和按时间顺序的，它们读起来就像一个十几岁的男孩的思索--丰富的，有感情的，有点糊涂。他听起来完全不像是2001年9月11日的鲍比，他当时已经快27岁了。


然而，我仍然从他们身上得到乐趣，还有那些混乱的法律文件，特别是关于写作的部分。即使在19岁时，鲍比也在努力寻找自己的声音，有时从第一人称转向第三人称，看看他是否更喜欢（然后在空白处这样说--第三人称的实验！）。它们充满了对自己的劝告和提醒。我需要忠实于我的声音，不管它是什么。我用别人的声音写出可怕的东西。还有我最喜欢的。希望甚至比天赋更重要。

还有大量关于他的家庭的美丽内容。这可能是最让我吃惊的地方，因为鲍比正处于青春期晚期，在这个时期，大多数孩子都会变成无情的家庭活体解剖者。然而，他用一页又一页的篇幅讲述了他对海伦、老鲍勃和杰夫的爱和敬佩。例如，在1995年5月，他写到发现老鲍勃的父亲是个酒鬼。鲍比对此毫无察觉。鲍比在谈到自己的父亲时说，他确保不给我胡扯。

他确保我有更好的东西，只要求我尽我所能。这就是他所要求的。这也是我妈妈要求的一切。我非常想让他们感到自豪，甚至比他们已经感到的更自豪。他们值得骄傲。他们应得的比我能给他们的更多，但他们永远不会要求比我更多。我太爱他们了。
你很难责怪海伦，因为她想听听他成为一个年轻人后有什么话要说。

珍-米德尔顿坐在窗边沙发背上的左臂的照片
詹-米德尔顿，鲍比去世时即将成为他的未婚妻，已经有近20年没有和麦克尔韦恩夫妇说过话。(Danna Singer)
现在的詹-科布，现在的米德尔顿，留着长发，而不是以前的小精灵发型，但她的风格和气质依然如故。她依然活泼，依然亲切，依然美丽动人；当我走到她在华盛顿特区的门口时，她用一个长长的拥抱迎接我。这里有救援犬，有阳光充足的房间，有直接来自南希-迈尔斯电影的厨房。(我半信半疑地期待着梅丽尔-斯特里普端着一盘未出炉的羊角面包滑翔而来）。


珍为自己创造了一个从外表上看是可爱的生活。但她必须一砖一瓦地组装这种生活，而且她努力工作，以防止接头处破裂。

当我与海伦简短地谈起珍时，她做了一个敏锐的观察。珍来自一个有很多钱但没有爱的家庭，而麦克尔文夫妇有很多爱但没有钱。珍说，是的，这有一部分是真的，尽管她的母亲是一个充满爱的灵魂；她只是没有看够珍的生活。苏珊-E-科布于2001年4月20日去世，比鲍比早了不到五个月，死于一种先慢后快的癌症。

这就是说。9月11日，珍已经是一具空壳了。

珍的父亲，她剩下的父母，非常成功，但只是狭隘的理性，是一个恶霸和一个尖叫者。这在她的浪漫生活中产生了可预见的后果。珍总是要求完全控制。她已经受够了被人指手画脚。

然后，鲍比出现了，他要求更多的脆弱性和在他们两个人的生活中的共同发言权。不知为什么，她信任他。他们第一次见面是在几年前，在博雅公关公司，在办公室里，他被称为是让每个人都感到重要的好人。他是个不折不扣的浪漫主义者，他让她觉得自己很重要，一个接一个地问她的家庭情况，毫无理由地给她写情书。2000年12月6日，在她27岁生日的时候，他让我哥哥去做手术，重新布置他们公寓的家具，把它变成一个餐厅，他在那里给她做了三道菜。

"感觉就像她在说我的悲伤不如她的重要，"珍说。"我记得我在想，她怎么知道我会好起来的？"
珍后来才知道，这顿饭是为了求婚而进行的一次演习。她把费城的丽思卡尔顿酒店定在2002年10月20日。


当她的母亲去世时，珍几乎无法正常工作。她的母亲是那个保护她免受她父亲暴怒的人；她是那个在珍与女友们度过了一个喧闹的夜晚之后，在深夜与她聊天的人。然而，鲍比仍然坚定地站在她身边，使不可容忍的事情看起来可以生存。他将与她一起走过每一步。她仍然会被爱。

然后鲍比死了。世界变成了一个卑鄙的、不值得信任的地方。"没有一件事我可以控制，"她说。"根本没有一件事"。

珍在她的车库上面的阁楼里放了一个装着鲍比东西的蒸笼。为了迎接我的到来，她把他的东西装在一个绿松石的帆布袋里拿下来。她开始翻阅这些东西。"这是那本日记，"她指着说。"就是那本引起所有麻烦的东西。"

鲍比的另外两本日记有几百页长。这本，我很快就会发现，只有17页的条目。所有这些大惊小怪的东西几乎都是一本小册子。

话说回来，它们是密密麻麻的17页。

珍不记得从老鲍勃那里得到了这本日记，但她确实记得她立即贪婪地阅读了这本日记，并夜夜回味着它。她也记得，海伦要求把日记还给她，尽管紧张关系并没有立即开始。起初，一切都很好。海伦甚至把鲍比为她买的订婚戒指给了她。这很尴尬，也很不礼貌--"他肯定希望你拥有这个"--但珍很感激，几个月来她到处都戴着它。


不过，在某些时候，海伦开始对那本日记有了更多的意见。"事后看来，我不知道我的问题是什么，"珍说。"我可能很痛苦，也在抓紧时间控制，想要他的东西，而其他人没有。现在看来这有点可笑。这只是我当时的感觉，它是我的，我希望它是我的，我不想让其他人拥有它。我可能觉得这是我剩下的一切。

上面的照片。2001年的珍和鲍比；下图：镜面上的订婚戒指
2001年的珍和鲍比；鲍比计划向珍求婚的戒指。(丹娜-辛格；原始照片由珍-米德尔顿提供)
珍说，我必须理解那些可怕的、铅制的日子，她不仅仅是抑郁。她很痛苦--"双重悲伤"，正如她所说的，为她的母亲和她未来的丈夫。当她的母亲和鲍比相继去世时，她陷入了深深的抑郁之中，尽管她竭力掩饰。时至今日，她仍有焦虑症发作。"她说："当有什么事让我不高兴时，就会迅速走下坡路"。


这一切都很有道理，我说。我唯一不能理解的是，为什么她拒绝为海伦抄写鲍比日记中的非个人部分。这不是一个抑郁的人或一个悲伤的人的行为。那是一个生气的人的行为。她一定是因为某些原因对海伦不满，不是吗？

说到这里，珍停顿了一下。然后她开始衡量她的话。"这根本不是在敲打海伦，"她说。"我是如此超越它。但当时我记得很反感她说：'你会好起来的，因为你还年轻。 " 珍认识到他们两个人的损失之间是有区别的。"但感觉她在说我的悲伤不如她的重要。我知道那是来自一个极端痛苦的地方，但我记得我在想，她怎么知道我会好起来？如果我不好呢？如果我有一种不同的 "不好 "呢？ "

珍告诉我，有一件事你不能对一个正在哀悼的人说，他们会好起来的。她可能会补充说：你也不要对一个抑郁症患者说这些话。抑郁症就是这样--让你相信你永远不会好起来。

"现在我明白了，"她说。因为海伦当然是对的。珍确实再次找到了爱情。但在当时，她确信她不会。她考虑过冷冻她的卵子。有一次，在一个近乎幻觉的恐慌时刻，她想知道她是否可以用鲍比留在梳子里的几缕头发的DNA来受孕。

"如果她能说：'这对你来说真的很糟糕。我很抱歉。机会是，你会遇到别人。我想只是有一个更好的说法，"她说。"无论她怎么说，都让我很生气。只是因为我个人的狗屎。"

我问是否有可能海伦确实说了那些话，尽管她可能也说了一些没有艺术性的话。也许珍错过了这些话，或者听到了不一定是这样的侮辱，因为她是在一个需要额外的威胁探测器的房子里长大的，因为她的父亲很不稳定。

"百分之百，"她说。"这可能是我倒退到一个小，你知道，发脾气的孩子。我对这个世界很生气。当然，她并不打算伤害我。她是最好的人。"

她和海伦的相似之处比她们任何一个人意识到的都要多。像海伦一样，珍当时相信，要隐藏她的悲伤。像海伦一样，她今天在鲍比的灵魂在某个地方摇摆不定的想法中得到了庇护。她说："我在这里真的表现出了我胡思乱想的一面，""但我认为他会回来的，我也会回来的，我们会完成我们未完成的事业。"

和海伦一样，她已经学会让很多事情过去。这是创伤教给你的最无情的课程之一。你并不负责任。你所能控制的是你对痴呆的宇宙在你的道路上滚动的任何手榴弹的反应。从你是否下床开始。她说："这就是我一天的开始，真的，"她说。多年来。

今天，珍选择在我走出门外，返回纽约时，把鲍比的日记交给我。她对此毫无保留。她说她想拿回原件，但不着急；麦克尔韦恩夫妇可以自由地阅读所有的日记，可以自由地复印他们想要的东西。

"我几年前就会这样做，"她告诉我。"我一直都在想他们。"

在我离开之前，我问她是否记得 "生命之爱 "这句话是怎么来的。她茫然地看着我。"我甚至不记得他说过这句话。是在他喜欢的一本书里还是什么？" 我说，我试过了。搜索了谷歌图书。没有。"或者是一首赞美诗？" 赞美诗不是我的强项，但我不认为是。我告诉她，麦克尔韦恩夫妇肯定是鲍比在什么地方写的，但不要紧，这不是她的问题。我会继续寻找。

对创伤性经历的记忆是一件很奇怪的事情。有些是生动的；有些是苍白的；几乎所有的记忆都以某种方式被修改过，或大或小。我们的卷轴似乎没有韵律或理由。我们记住了琐碎的事情，却忘记了特殊的事情。我们的大脑真的有自己的思想。

例如，杰夫记得，鲍比去世后，珍在他父母家住了半年，而海伦说是一个星期，珍认为可能是两个月。

或者这里还有一个。珍记得在她和他们住在一起的时候，杰夫殷勤地睡在鲍比小时候的卧室里，这样她就不用因为醒来时看到鲍比的所有东西而受到创伤，而杰夫则记得她睡在鲍比的卧室里，每天勇敢地醒来时看到鲍比的所有东西。

Jeff McIlvaine坐在楼梯上，坐在栏杆后面
"我知道，如果这毁了我的生活，他的整个生活就毫无价值，"杰夫-麦克尔韦恩说。"我想非常努力地工作，确保我有一个好的生活。" (Danna Singer)
而最奇怪的是。虽然没有人记得 "生命之爱 "是从哪里来的，但每个人--我是说每个人（珍、杰夫、老鲍勃和海伦）--都曾经知道。

这是詹的悼词。她根据鲍比的日记写的。她保留了20年的那本。

"在过去的一周里，我一直在寻找某种安慰，让我度过失去我生命中的爱人的打击，"她在和平皇后教堂对哀悼者说。"我看到了鲍勃的一本日记，当我打开它时，我对自己说，'请让这里有一些东西可以安慰我。 "然后她描述了发现的这段话，这是鲍比在她母亲临终时写的。她大声朗读了这段话。

人死是可以的。它很痛，是一种深深的损失，但它是可以的。生命在继续。不要为那些即将死去的人担心。要善待他们。并关心他们。

她对众人重复说："生命在继续，"。"在我读完这段话后，我在那一瞬间发誓要在我的生活中继续爱下去，就像我对我妈妈承诺永远不要让她被遗忘一样。这是我可以延长被缩短的生命的一种方式。"

我知道这些的唯一原因是我哥哥找到了一份珍的悼词副本。仁已经把她的扔掉了。正如她所说，她不是一个节约主义者。

不知为何，她完全忘记了这些话，以及它们的出处。而麦克尔韦恩夫妇也忘记了它们的出处，尽管海伦把它们戴在一个刻有字的手镯里，老鲍勃也把它们供奉在他的皮肤上。

然后我想起了海伦告诉我的关于珍的事：她对我来说成了一个非人。她保留了这些话。但珍不是。那年她也埋葬了她未来的儿媳妇，就像她埋葬她儿子一样。

海伦最近给我讲了一个故事，说她和珍一起度过了一个长周末，也许是在鲍比去世前的10天。全家人都在梅角度假。她、鲍比和珍坐在海滩上，凝视着海浪，鲍比坐在中间。那是一个温柔的幸福时刻。海伦稍稍转向鲍比，用手捋了捋他的头发。但就在同一时刻，就在那一秒钟，鲍比转过身来对珍做同样的事情。

就在那时，海伦意识到鲍比不再是她的了。"我对自己说，你得去走走，看看海滩上的房地产，"她告诉我。

在鲍比的早期日记中，麦尔文家族可能到处出现。但在这本日记中没有。这本日记主要是关于两件事。而其中之一就是珍。

2001年2月18日：我爱她，深深地爱。我们沟通得很好。我们很好地解决了我们之间的分歧。所有这些都意味着很多。

2001年4月11日：我想念珍。我生命中的 "重要 "部分，或对她对我的意义的描述是不够的。

2001年4月22日（Jen的母亲去世两天后）。我很抱歉，珍。对你的伤害感到非常抱歉。我知道这很难。我会在你身边，在这里爱你，听你说话，在你需要哭的时候抱着你。

难怪珍不想和这本日记分开。也难怪她每天晚上都读它。

海伦立即意识到这一点。在我回到纽约后，我给她寄了几份复印件。

当我们有机会交谈时，她说："《珍》这篇文章对我来说是巨大的，"。"我在半夜里想到了这个。她失去了这个她爱的人--最重要的是，这个人爱她。现在，他爱她的证据在哪里呢？我的意思是，好吧，母亲给她的戒指。这很好。但有这些美妙的话语。我深爱着她。" 她惊叹不已。"我从来没有想过这个问题。从来没有。她需要这个，这个验证。"

她也认识到日记中缺少什么。"他没有说，我也爱我的父母。他说，我深爱着她。" 鲍比都已经长大了。

海伦现在想知道她自己在那可怕的几个月里的行为。她试图向珍展示亲情。但她只生过儿子。她没有说过女儿。而她之前对我描述的那种矜持，我不相信她有的那种矜持--它是非常真实的。她说："发生的情况是，我有时有意图，但忘了说出来，"她说。"她不得不猜测我脑子里想的是什么。"

无论如何，海伦现在对一个非常重要的问题很清楚。"这将超出仁的能力，即使她心情很好，也会说，'好吧，在这里，我把它还给你'。我真的不得不以某种方式至少给她一些东西。那不是我可以拥有的。我真的是这个意思。"

多年来，珍一直被描绘成一个持有这本日记的恶棍。然而，如果她已经是鲍比的妻子，甚至可能是他的正式未婚妻，就不会有争议了。但是，珍被悬挂在两个世界之间，没有影响力或地位。"海伦说："那感觉一定很可怕。

鲍比日记中的最后一条是2001年9月6日的。它占满了整个页面。当我第一次读到它时，我很迷茫。然后我意识到它是什么。"我觉得完全没有准备好。我应该排练吗？"它的开头。

它的内容应该是这样的。你有几分钟的时间来谈谈吗？首先，我想说的是，我很高兴--或者也许是一个很好的经历--或者我先提到仁？或者，我与珍建立了非常牢固的关系，一路走来，能在密歇根州呆上一段时间是非常好的......或者......是的，我有机会与珍走得很近，经过很多非常认真的思考，也与她谈过之后，我觉得是时候对她做出承诺了。或者--经过大量的认真思考......而且......出于对你作为一家之主的尊重......。
我所读到的是一个剧本。充满了配合和开始，但最终他还是达到了目的。鲍比正在努力寻找话语，以便对珍的父亲说，他将在9月9日见到她，向她求婚。

在某一时刻，在珍给我鲍比的日记后不久，我给我的编辑发了一张纸条，告诉他我终于找到了难以捉摸的《生命之爱》。我拍了一张这段文字的照片，然后发给他。

他发来短信说，太神奇了。

但随后，在一个气泡中出现了三个脉动的小点。他还在打字。

除了......我想这是（某种程度上）一种误解。看看他是如何在其他字里行间写下他的I的。我认为它说的是 "生命**不息"。但是很难说清楚......。

这并不难说。他是对的。我再次翻阅了整个日记。就在之前的那一页，鲍比写道，我活得太久了，没有想到 "市场 "会突然关心。但它看起来像 "我爱得太久了......" 他的 "I "看起来像倒过来的 "J"，会被误认为是 "O"，而他真正的 "O "却独立存在，像婴儿的月亮。

我把发给编辑的那张照片也发给了詹。起初，她没有看到。然后她看到了。她最初的反应和我一样：焦虑，绝望，以骂人的形式。然后。

仍然让我微笑
我。什么会？
珍。他身边的人看到并感受到了他们需要的东西。这很好。你知道吗？

我知道。这句话听起来确实像鲍比可能说的话。这句话很像尤达，而鲍比绝对是非常尤达的，他对人心的驱动力大谈特谈他的小箴言。对我来说，这是法律的精神和法律条文之间的区别，也可能是我们在iPhone上强化图片颜色时的做法。我们不是要创造一个假的；我们是要把这个图像与已经存在于我们记忆中的那个图像对齐。

我们一直在发明和重塑死者。

你可以提出一个理由，奇怪的是，珍隐瞒日记这么多年，原来是一种祝福。如果她把日记给了海伦，海伦可能会把它藏在她的保险箱里10年，几乎不看，就像她对另外两本日记一样。或者她会读它，但她不会误读它。

相反，珍误读了它，围绕着它形成了一篇悼词，并给麦克尔文家族提供了一个组织悲伤的格言，长达20年。

我仍在犹豫是否要告诉麦尔文一家。我是说，那个手镯，那个纹身。但在不久后与海伦的电话交谈中，我感觉到了一个缺口。我提到我不确定我是否要写《生活的爱》。她很快就直觉到有些不对劲。"她问："因为那是别人写的？

有一点，我说。我解释说。

海伦对此没有异议。她看到了这种误解的不可能的美，甚至看到了这是一个礼物。但她坚持认为，这句话仍然潜伏在某个地方。她记住了这句话，因为生活是真正的爱，这是其一。而我有可能在鲍比前两本日记的数百页中错过了它。可能也有一些遗漏的日记--为什么他在1995年停止记日记，到2001年才恢复？

所以说真的，谁说得准呢？

一堆法律垫的照片，上面有装订的笔记本，上面有日记条目
在鲍比的最后一篇日记中，在9/11之前的几天，他正在想办法
他正在考虑如何向珍的父亲请求允许他娶她。(Jens Mortensen for The Atlantic)
生命在延续，生命在热爱，对我来说，这无关紧要。在恢复的日记中，有比这本日记更美丽的观察，而且它们是有先见之明的，阴森森的--一旦鲍比走了，对麦克尔韦恩夫妇的故事更有意义。

因为他的日记所涉及的另一件事，第二件事，就是悲伤。

在这种情况下，日记不仅仅是一个时间胶囊。它是一个水晶球。通过一个非同寻常的命运转折，鲍比在他最后的几个月里思考了在损失中生活意味着什么。他通过珍看到，它可以使你愤怒、烦躁、没有皮肤。他看到悲痛可以完全吞噬。他想知道所有这些悲伤的效用是什么，所有这些痛苦。他写道："为什么我们要伤得这么重？这是我们失去的那个人希望的方式吗？

有一次，他内疚地希望珍能做出选择，抓住她能控制的东西。

然而，在所有气愤和恐惧的段落中的某个地方--其中许多段落相当详细--鲍比得出了一个更大的认识。我猜想，这是一种顿悟，使他有可能坚持他的计划，向珍的父亲请求允许与她结婚，尽管他在那几个月里严重质疑她是否准备好了。这一天是2001年8月20日。

有的人需要我。而这，本身就是生活。还有一些我还不认识的人需要我。这就是生活。

对我来说，这是恢复的日记中最深刻的一句话。这是鲍比扮演的尤达。这是鲍比最优秀的一面，是他最有人情味的一面，是他最成熟的一面。他明白，我们对彼此的承诺是我们在这里的目的，而这本身就是生活。即使这些承诺是困难的。即使它们给我们带来痛苦。

人们对这样说感到犹豫。但是，如果McIlvaine家族有任何前进的道路，它可能要通过Jeff。海伦很小心，从来没有给他带来关于婚姻或孩子的期望--"你不能把任何东西放在另一个孩子身上，"她告诉我，他很感激。但我认为，正是因为有了杰夫，老鲍勃和海伦才开始浑浑噩噩地走出黑暗。有一些他们还不认识的人需要他们。这些人中有他们的四个孙子。最大的一个叫鲍比。

22岁时，杰夫有一个深刻的见解。"我记得第一天就在想。我不能让它毁了我。'因为那样的话，鲍比会怎么想？想象一下，如果他知道我的父母和他的兄弟永远无法恢复。想象一下，那会让他感觉多么糟糕。"

当他看着珍在悲伤中挣扎时，他反射性地回答了鲍比问过的那个问题。为什么我们要伤得这么重？这就是我们失去的人希望的方式吗？杰夫有一个非常明确的答案。不，他有太多自己的生活要走。"我知道，如果这毁了我的生活，他的整个生命就毫无价值，"他说。"我想非常努力地工作，确保我有一个好的生活。"

起初是如此艰难。"我记得我感到有责任不死，这是一件奇怪的事情，"他告诉我。同时，他为自己是没有死的孩子而感到内疚，经常想到《伴我同行》中父亲对他幸存的儿子咆哮 "应该是你 "的梦境情节。在他的第一份真正的工作中，他没有告诉任何人他的兄弟在9月11日死亡，因为太多的人急于分享他们自己关于那一天的愚蠢的故事，总是以快乐的结局。这使他延迟了多年的悲伤能力。

但最终，他建立了一个丰富、充实的生活。他娶了一个女人，这个女人不仅可以制服他的痛苦，而且可以进入整个悲伤的生态系统。他有四个孩子--四个！两个男孩，两个女孩--哦，不用再关注自己了，这让他松了一口气！他有了四个孩子。

我问，如果鲍比不在，他是否会有那么多孩子--"不。

"不，我不认为我会有。" 杰夫失去了他唯一的兄弟姐妹。他绝不希望他的任何孩子处于这种境地，如果闪电复发的话。"当你经历这样的事情时，"他说，"你意识到家庭--它是唯一的东西。"

这些孩子现在是麦克尔文夫妇生活的中心--即使是老鲍勃，他也选择了一条每日受苦的道路。在我们的谈话即将结束的时候，他说了一句话，让我惊呆了。这个20周年纪念年--对他的世界里的人来说是一个大年，充满了电视采访和会议--可能是他最后一次参加9/11活动。

这是最可恶的事情：死者抛弃了你；然后，随着时间的推移，你也抛弃了死者。
我不确定我是否相信它。我仍然不确定。这已经是他20年的生活了。尽管如此：也许是时候做出改变了。"我已经厌倦了愤怒，"他告诉我。"这是我现在生活的魅力所在。我真的可以分开。我真的可以。和佩内洛普一起出去吃午饭......"

佩内洛普是他最小的孙女。在大流行病之前，他和海伦每周三在学前班结束后与她共进午餐。杰夫和他的妻子和孩子们非常依赖鲍勃和海伦，以至于他们最近在离杰夫家五分钟的地方租了一套公寓，尽管他们住在不到一个小时的地方。

海伦对生活中出现的小女孩无法释怀。她们有那么多的意见! 她有时还是会感到沮丧。她会有一个美丽的时刻，然后意识到鲍比不在这里分享它。"但随后它就会消失，"她说。"我是说，被需要--不是每个人都能得到四个孙子。"

是的，被需要。这就是一切。

鲍比今年9月就46岁了。杰夫过去经常做关于他的生动的梦，而且，他多么喜欢这些梦。他们又是兄弟，只是聊天，恢复了他们的旧节奏和习惯。但他现在很少做这些梦了。"我已经20年没见过他了，你知道吗？"

他说，他有时几乎希望能用他现在的幸福来换取20年前的痛苦，因为那时鲍比是那么容易被唤起，关于他的感觉-记忆仍然触手可及。"不管9月11日有多痛苦，"他解释说，"我在9月6日刚看到他。"

这是最可恶的事情：死者抛弃了你；然后，随着时间的流逝，你抛弃了死者。

杰夫时不时地有这种幻想，用他的幸福来换取再次见到鲍比的温暖的机会，这真的不足为奇。正如鲍比在最后那本日记中所写的那样，痛苦，或者痛苦的前景，是我们愿意为我们建立的纽带付出的代价。

海伦发现自己陷入了类似的遐想之中。最近，她和她的一瘸一拐的小组一起出去，当她环顾桌子，感激地盯着这些在过去20年里支撑着她的女人时，她突然想到了一个问题。"我在想，如果上帝说，'好吧，听着，我们得在这里倒回去'。我们会再次经历这一切吗？ "

他们是否愿意重温他们同样的生活，生下那些同样的孩子，爱上他们，然后第二次失去他们？"我知道，他们中的每一个人都会强调说，是的。"

对海伦来说，这个世界上没有什么能与抚养她的两个儿子的经历相媲美。其中一个男孩，罗伯特-乔治-麦克尔文，在他的生命真正开始之前就已经死去。但是，如果没有他，或者他没有她，她会怎么做？26年来，她认识了这个男孩，照顾他，爱他。这是一种特权。这是一份礼物。这也是一种苦乐参半的牺牲。而这，本身就是生活。

这篇文章出现在2021年9月的印刷版上，标题是 "二十年过去了"。

珍妮弗-西尼尔是《大西洋》杂志的工作人员。