Ivan Maisel, one of America's top sportswriters, takes on tougher topics: grief, fragility

Grief is love.

That is perhaps the central lesson of Ivan Maisel's "I Keep Trying to Catch His Eye," but it is not the only lesson to be gleaned from this heartbreaking and wise book.

In 2015, Maisel's son, Max, died at the age of 21. His body surfaced two months later at Lake Ontario, N.Y., where his vehicle was parked. Maisel believes he walked onto the icy lake to end his life.

Sportswriters don't always handle reality well. Maisel and I both chose to write about the pageantry of games and the vibrancy of athletes instead of the darkness of the real world.

Our careers intersected briefly at the Dallas Morning News in the 1980s. I envied his prose, followed his career and long have considered him one of the best people in journalism.

Maisel went on to become a legendary college football writer, working for Newsday, Sports Illustrated and ESPN.com, among other outlets. He is a great American writer regardless of genre, and he employed his skills to produce what is much more than a memoir.

"I Keep Trying To Catch His Eye" is a guidebook for dealing with a particularly devastating form of grief.

In explaining and probing his grief, Maisel bluntly analyzes his own actions and inactions as a father, in a way that will make every Type-A careerist flinch.

He's being too hard on himself, but as Maisel reveals, when you lose a child, you question everything.

"In the wake of the death of my son, I understand how the idea that we have control over our lives is a story that we tell ourselves to get through the day," Maisel wrote. "To put a finer point on it. There is so much of our lives that we don't control.

"There are so many calamities that could befall us. We make smart choices. We exercise appropriate caution. We floss. We think that is enough to keep us on life's road without potholes, and we get a call from a sheriff saying our vehicle is sitting in the Charlotte Park lot and Max is nowhere to be found. All those smart choices and all that caution didn't stop all that pain and all those lonely hours."

Maisel's book arrives at another intersection of sadness. Nearly a million Americans have died of COVID. We are watching Russians bomb apartment buildings, hospitals and kindergartens in Ukraine. Murders in the Twin Cities have spiked. Deshaun Hill Jr., a Minneapolis North student and football player, was shot and killed while walking on a sidewalk just three weeks ago.

Suicide remains a leading cause of death in the United States, and we seem only now to be recognizing the universality of mental health problems and the ever-present danger of suicidal thoughts.

As he explains and explores what for most of us an unimaginable loss, Maisel lights candles along a dark path.

The first chapter is titled "Demystifying Grief." Maisel teaches us how to confront and live with grief, how to speak to someone who is suffering, how avoidance of reality does no one any good.

I cried while reading the first few chapters, and again toward the end of the book, and somewhere in the middle I realized that I wish I had known Max.

"The epidemic of suicide that has broadsided this generation has meant that there is a greater push against it than has ever been known,'' Maisel wrote. "The more we push against it, the faster it comes at us."

Of Max's death, Maisel wrote, "You want the world to stop spinning. You want the world to stop making memories. The person you love is gone. You get no more. But the world keeps going. You bring of him or her what you can carry. You have no choice but to leave the rest behind."

"I Keep Trying to Catch His Eye" is a brave and generous work that explicates grief in a way that could help just about everyone.