The book that no one wants to write

Ivan Maisel, of Fairfield, is a nationally prominent sportswriter and columnist, with long stints at Sports Illustrated and ESPN and awards too numerous to mention. He is in an elite fraternity.

Now, at age 61, he has written a book. But this book is not about sports, lest wrestling with grief qualifies.

Maisel’s book, “I Keep Trying to Catch His Eye: A Memoir of Loss, Grief and Love,” is a father’s scaldingly honest story about coping with the suicide of a son.

In February 2015, a phone call from the sheriff’s office in Monroe County, N.Y., home to the Rochester Institute of Technology, where his son, Max, was a 21-yearold junior, was the first step in initiation to “The Club No One Wants to Join,” as Maisel describes it. Max’s car had been found parked on the shore of Lake Ontario and the young man was missing.

Unbeknown to his parents, Max had become lost in the darkness of depression and mental illness. Always a somewhat solitary figure, he had walked out on the ice of Lake Ontario until it would hold him no more. It would be two months before a fisherman came upon the body.

And it was not solely the father, of course, leveled by the concussion of the event, it was a family: Meg Murray, Max’s mother and Maisel’s wife, and Max’s sisters, Sarah and Elizabeth, and the extensions on both sides.

Once the father reached a state of equilibrium — it took close to six years — in January 2020, Maisel began to write what by my assessment is “The Book No One Wants to Write.”

Parts of the narrative are hard to read: the torment — and torrent — of regrets, anger, guilt and remorse over missed signs that in retrospect were so painfully clear. And at day’s end — at every day’s end — most searing of all, a lost son.

But it is also a tale of deep love and resilience — the safety harness of a family — and survival. The book is dedicated to daughters Sarah and Elizabeth. On the dedication page, the father describes them as “Lighthouses on my shore.”

“Writing it was not difficult,” Maisel said the other day as we sat in his backyard on a warm autumn afternoon, “because I know how to write. Living through it was the hill.”

Maisel’s baritone voice is rich with the traces of his native Alabama.

The body punches in this book are heavy. Any reader will feel them. Fathers, I think, will feel them even more. What father wouldn’t kill for the chance to do something over with a child, or to protect one?

The Max that emerges on the pages is a shy boy who always had trouble connecting with others. He never was diagnosed as being somewhere on the autism spectrum. He functioned well enough to graduate from Fairfield Warde High School in Fairfield, and pursue his interest in photography at RIT.

How could anyone know that Max was spiraling so perilously downward?

For instance, Max was home for the holidays in 2014, Maisel recalled, and the young man Max was his usual solitary self. For instance, Maisel said, “At one point, Meg and I and the girls were standing in the kitchen and Max was in the den. Meg said ‘Max, why don’t you come in here and talk with us?’ And he said ‘No, I’m good.’ ”

Maisel continued, “The misreading part was, Max was always emotionally young. He was almost 21 and a junior in college, and he was finally doing the independence thing, as most teenagers do. That’s how I took it and that’s how Meg took it,” he said.

One of several long pauses that occurred during this interview ensued.

“It was a whiff,” Maisel said.

After Max’s death, the Maisels continued to look for clues. On Max’s laptop, for instance, Maisel found this reflection by Max: “I wish I could see in me the things my friends do. I wish I could see my own worth. But I can’t. And I’m so buried in negativity and cynicism that I doubt I ever will.”

“Reading that,” Maisel wrote, “may have been my lowest point.”

How did the title come about? Maisel shifted his 6-foot-3-inch frame in his chair and pulled from a pocket his cellphone. “The phrase came from staring at this one day,” he said as he showed me the phone’s wallpaper. It is a photo taken at his daughter Sarah’s graduation from Stanford — Maisel’s alma mater — in 2014. The graduate is flanked by

Max on her right and sister Elizabeth at her left.

The sisters smile and engage with the lens. Max, though, his left arm draped over the new graduate’s shoulder, is looking up and to the right. If only he’d look right this way.

Maisel in no way presents himself as an expert on mental health. “I’m an expert on one case,” he said and paused again. “It didn’t go very well,” he said.

“He really wanted to connect with people,” Maisel said, “but he just wasn’t very well equipped to do it. He wore armor, in part because he didn’t process emotions the way other people do.” Pause. “He was a sweet guy.”

The book will be published on Oct. 26, and Maisel will embark on a promotional tour, some stops virtual, some in person, including an Oct. 25 appearance on ABC’s “Good Morning America.”

Of the book, he said, “This is what I know how to do. And the best way I can process it. And maybe it’ll help somebody.”

On my way out, Maisel showed me in their kitchen what I at first thought was a painting, an idyllic lake scene. Lily pads in the foreground gave the image a slight Monet-at-Giverny feel.

“Is that a painting? I asked. “No,” he replied. “It’s a photo. That’s Charleston Lake in Ontario, about 20 minutes north of the border.”

“Beautiful,” I said. Another pause. “Max took that photo,” he said.

Thoughts of his son conjure — and forever will — a swarm of emotions in Maisel. Pride is among them.