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?
This story is from the September 2021 edition of The Atlantic.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber ? Sign In
This story is from the September 2021 edition of The Atlantic.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber? Sign In
After the Miracle
Cystic fibrosis once guaranteed an early deathbut a medical breakthrough has given many patients a chance to live decades longer than expected. What do they do now?
WILLIAM WHITWORTH 1937-2024
WILLIAM WHITWORTH, the editor of The Atlantic from 1980 to 1999, had a soft voice and an Arkansas accent that decades of living in New York and New England never much eroded.
Christine Blasey Ford Testifies Again
Her new memoir doubles as a modern-day horror story.
Is Theo Von the Next Joe Rogan?
Or is he something else entirely?
Orwell's Escape
Why the author repaired to the remote Isle of Jura to write his masterpiece, 1984
What's So Bad About Asking Where Humans Came From?
Human origin stories have often been used for nefarious purposes. That doesn't mean they are worthless.
Miranda's Last Gift
When our daughter died suddenly, she left us with grief, memories and Ringo.
BEFORE FACEBOOK, THERE WAS Black Planet
An alternative history of the social web
CLASH OF THE PATRIARCHS
A hard-line Russian bishop backed by the political might of the Kremlin could split the Orthodox Church in two.
THE MAN WHO DIED FOR THE LIBERAL ARTS
Chugging through Pacific waters in February 1942, the USS Crescent City was ferrying construction equipment and Navy personnel to Pearl Harbor, dispatched there to assist in repairing the severely damaged naval base after the Japanese attack.