01 OC Mag 01-24

Auggie’s death. Until that point, Bob had fallen
into situational depression.
“We did our best to take care of ourselves.
We saw therapists, but with it being COVID,
none of it was in person, so we didn’t do support
groups,” Bob said. “One therapist, a cognitive
psychologist, said the brain slows down
when you’re in depression. It literally stops
working as well. That happened to me. I felt
like a droid. Just doing one movement after
the other.”
By the time summer came, Bob and his
wife, April, spent about three and a half weeks
in Bob’s hometown of Minot, ND, for April to
direct summer theatre at Bob’s undergraduate
alma mater, Minot State University.
“I had a lot of time on my hands,” Bob said.
“I swam laps; I went to coffee shops. While I
was in a coffee shop, I read a wonderful novel
called ‘Hamnet’ by Maggie O’Farrell. It was the
first book I was able to read. It makes the case
that Shakespeare had a son named Hamnet,
but in Elizabethan spelling it would have been
Hamlet and that Shakespeare wrote his greatest
tragedy trying to replicate the personality
of his son. When I finished, the idea of writing
an homage analogy to Auggie hit me.”
As a person always interested in story ideas,
he carries journals with him.
“I opened up a journal and thought of three
sections, and I jotted down eight, nine, 10 onesentence
vignettes in each,” he said.
Then he left the material alone until that
fall.
“It was serendipitous that I had a sabbatical
planned for that fall even before Auggie died,”
Bob said, noting his work in Nassau, Bahamas,
was reduced due to COVID-19 restrictions in
place in the Caribbean nation. “I had to have
A father’s reflection on love and
grief in the wake of suicide
SPRING 2024 | OC MAGAZINE 7