On Grief

A Pulitzer Prize–winning portrait of one family’s search for meaning in the face of unspeakable loss. An Atlantic Edition, featuring long-form journalism by Atlantic writers, drawn from contemporary articles or classic storytelling from the magazine’s 165-year archive.

In this Pulitzer Prize–winning work, Jennifer Senior explores the contours of grief through one family’s twenty-year reckoning with the loss of their son, Bobby McIlvaine Jr., on September 11, 2001. Devastating and expansive, Senior’s portrait examines her own relationship with the McIlvaine family alongside intimate scenes of both mourning and recovery experienced by Bobby’s mother, father, younger brother, and soon-to-be fiancée. On Grief generously asks us what it means to consider grief, both personal and national, as an ongoing project.