10/26/2022 0 Comments Pocket planes level 26Bobby’s body was found in the wreckage of the Twin Towers. Helen wears a silver bracelet engraved with this phrase, and her husband got it tattooed in curlicue script on his upper arm.īobby McIlvaine, with his parents, Helen and Bob Sr., at his Princeton graduation in 1997. No one could quite figure out which diary or legal pad it came from, but no matter. Three words of Bobby’s became the family motto: Life loves on. The McIlvaines would have to make do with what they already had. That’s all you’re going to get for life.” “So anything written, any video, any card-you cling to that. “You don’t get any more memories,” one of the women told me. A number proposed, only half jokingly, that they break into Jen’s apartment and liberate the 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. Today, she can’t so much as recall Jen’s last name.īut for years, Helen thought about that diary. “She became a nonperson to me,” Helen told me. Helen and her husband never saw Jen again. If Helen wanted to discuss this matter any further, she’d have to do so in the presence of Jen’s therapist. Shortly after, she wrote Helen a letter with her final answer: No, just no. When she finally left the McIlvaines’ house for good, Jen slammed the door behind her, got into her car, and burst into tears. Helen, Jen pointed out, already had Bobby’s other belongings, other diaries, the legal pads. The requests escalated, as did the rebuffs. If Bobby’s describing a tree, just give me the description of the tree. All she asked was that Jen selectively photocopy it. Helen was careful to explain that she didn’t need the object itself. 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. Over and over, she asked Jen to see that final diary. “One missing piece,” she told me recently, “was like not having an arm.” 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? It raised the prospect, however brief, of literary resurrection. In that sense, the diary wasn’t like a recovered photograph. Here was an opportunity to savor Bobby’s company one last time, to hear his voice, likely saying something new. “This was a decision we were supposed to make together,” his wife, Helen, told him. It was a reflex that he almost instantly came to regret. Could she keep it?īobby’s father didn’t think. Jen took one look and quickly realized that her name was all over it. One object in that pile glowed with more meaning than all the others: Bobby’s very last diary. Maybe, he told them, there was material in there that they could use in their eulogies. 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. Less than a week after his death, Bobby’s father had to contend with that pitiless still life of a desk. But inside, the guy was a sage and a sap-philosophical about disappointments, melancholy when the weather changed, moony over girlfriends. To the outside world, Bobby, 26, was a charmer, a striver, a furnace of ambition. But the diaries told a different kind of story. The yellow pads appeared to have the earnest beginnings of two different novels. 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. W hen 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. This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. This article was published online on August 9, 2021.
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