What Bobby McIlvaine left behind

This was the best passage for me:

> Early on, the McIlvaines spoke to a therapist who warned them that each member of their family would grieve differently. Imagine that you’re all at the top of a mountain, she told them, but you all have broken bones, so you can’t help each other. You each have to find your own way down.

> It was a helpful metaphor, one that may have saved the McIlvaines’ marriage. But when I mentioned it to Roxane Cohen Silver, a psychology professor at UC Irvine who’s spent a lifetime studying the effects of sudden, traumatic loss, she immediately spotted a problem with it: “That suggests everyone will make it down,” she told me. “Some people never get down the mountain at all.”

It's not clear if all the family members in the story made it down.

I appreciate when the Atlantic publishes these early releases of next month's content. It seems Bobby got lucky in death to have a friend of his eventually become a writer at a periodical of note and memorialize him like this. It's a fascinating study of how grief affects people very differently and it makes me think of all the friends I had who died young and are forever lost to the memory of just about everyone.

My girlfriend back then had a roommate named Sarah Potter who worked for Merrill Lynch in the World Trade Center. She happened to be sick that day and didn't go in. It's not likely that it made a difference since the vast majority of Merrill Lynch employees survived, and given the sheer number, I doubt she knew this guy. She did have pretty serious survivor guilt, though.

It's interesting the weight we place on some deaths compared to others based on how they happened. I eventually joined the Army after this, and it was always an interesting factoid that Texas highways were consistently about 8-10 times as deadly as combat. We lost way more soldiers to traffic accidents than we did to the enemy. There was a counter at the front gate to Fort Hood showing days since the last person had died on the road, and that counter never went past 7 for four years once.

Yet we memorialized the heck out of the combat deaths, drank to them, put pictures of them in the headquarters, reserved empty tables for them at unit events. Nothing for the vehicular deaths. They were just slowly forgotten.

How many bad things have killed 10s, 100s, 1000s more than 9/11, yet no one cares and the people just quietly fade from memory, whereas this triggered a drastic and probably permanent shift in law enforcement, intelligence collection, and defense strategies, started a war we just ended a few weeks ago, and has become the greatest source of spilled ink for an entire generation of writers?

It may be one of the greater expressions ever of what activists were complaining about last year with respect to policing and laws valuing property more than people. Massive numbers of deaths can become a meaningless statistic, but the loss of a national landmark scars the country forever. But I think they are quite wrong to pin that kind of thing on capitalism. It seems to be a much more fundamental aspect of human group psychology. Symbols really matter to us.

tl;dr - after guy dies in 9/11, family and girlfriend grieve in different ways over the last 20 years.