On Jennifer Senior's “What Bobby McIlvaine Left Behind”

An idea worth drawing for.

This visual essay is a tribute to Jennifer Senior. It’s part of an ongoing series called Ideas Worth Drawing For, in which I make hand-drawn images to honor the excellence of essayists I admire.

As my daughter touched the bronze inscription of Bobby McIlvaine’s name in the 9/11 Memorial, I asked myself if it would be so bad to share one bathroom with three teenagers someday, instead of two.  We could get chamber pots…

Jennifer Senior’s 2021 Atlantic feature about “Grief, conspiracy theories, and one family’s search for meaning in the two decades since 9/11,” scared me into wanting a third child, despite raising my toddler and infant in a tiny, one bedroom apartment in Manhattan.  This passage about the McIlvaine family’s emotional fallout contorted my face with ugly tears:

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.”

Reading this, I thought, lightning could strike my children, too.  I’ve been preoccupied with mortality ever since an SUV nearly took off my left leg, an accident that could have taken my life if this or that had happened a little differently.  Poems about death arrest me, like these lines from Dylan Thomas:

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Bobby McIlvaine was only 26, and he wanted to be a novelist.  Though he had not the chance, the words in his journals electrified his family after he was killed.  They became Bobby’s ghost, haunting those he left behind with a final opportunity for intimacy.

Senior’s essay summons Bobby’s ghost to haunt strangers like me who are sensitive to the vagaries of fate.  Her 2022 Pulitzer Prize for “What Bobby McIlvaine Left Behind” is no empty accolade.  When Jennifer Senior is at her end, she should know that her words have forked lightning.

Indeed, few essays can make a reader wonder whether she should bring another human being into existence.  So though this story will wound your heart, I hope you read it for this September 11 anniversary.