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 published online on August 9, 2021.

Min hero tower of sage