Ivan Maisel loves his son, even though losing him still chokes him up.
Max Maisel, Ivan’s son, died at 21 years old. He took his own life and sent his father and family members into states of grief and sadness.
This is not a one-and-done situation with grief for Ivan Maisel, whose name has graced college football bylines for more than three decades. Maisel took his grief and worked through it as only a writer can do…by the power of words.
It led him to publish “I Keep Trying to Catch His Eye: A Memoir of Loss, Grief, and Love” (Hachette Books). Maisel, who works as VP Editorial/Senior Writer for On3.com, has expertly put down words and emotions that carry a lot of weight.
Max Maisel is gone but his name remains alive. This is due to his loving father, his sisters Sarah and Elizabeth, and other family members and friends, too.
Let’s take a minute and let the voice of Max speak through his own words. The following was a poem he wrote as a seventh-grader.
“I understand that I may never be truly happy.
I say that sometimes the only way to win is to
clear the board completely.
I dream that I will be free from my nightmares.
I try to be a peacemaker between friends.
I hope that I will eventually become truly happy.
I am an isolator from everyone and a silent speaker.”
This book, which was read before interviewing Maisel for The Good Men Project, takes a reader on a journey through the tidal waves of grief.
It is through this prism that readers are given a seat at the front row of searing pain.
Ivan Maisel Moves Forward But It Is Not Always Easy
Yes, Ivan Maisel does go on with his life but that doesn’t mean it is not painful.
Max Maisel killed himself at 21 after having many moments of torment within his own mind.
For the past two-plus months, Ivan Maisel has talked about this tender, loving relationship between father and son.
“I think more and I have thought a lot about it, and my remarks have evolved over two months,” Maisel says. “I think the biggest reason that I became more open is that I didn’t want anyone to interpret my silence as shame that Max ended his life.
“This sort of compelled me to be open as well as this idea [that] once we decided to tell our family members, we either had to be open or not,” Maisel says. “If we weren’t going to be open, then we end up dividing people into categories of security clearances, like we are CIA operatives. ‘You’re a second cousin, so we tell you only this much.’ We didn’t want to have to keep track.”
Through the narrative of his memoir, Ivan lets readers into the areas that might have been closed before Max’s death.
Max’s Desire For Loneliness Did Catch Ivan’s Eye
One thing Ivan did notice about Max was his predisposition to being alone.
“I noticed his aloneness early on,” Maisel says. “He didn’t have a lot of friends. Maybe 1-2 friends. But Max was not out in the yard playing. I have a memory of hearing from his pre-K and elementary school teachers that Max was having trouble connecting.”
As Ivan writes in the book:
It wasn’t by choice. In elementary school, and again in middle school, Max would make a friend, be utterly devoted to that friend, and when that boy would move along, Max would be devastated. He didn’t have it in him to do what the other child had done – make another friend.
A little further down in the same paragraph, Ivan offers this additional glimpse into Max’s mindset.
He had so little confidence in himself, and so little belief that anything good would happen to him, that when he did suffer a setback, he reacted as if he had expected it to happen.
Their journey with Max did include getting as much help as possible for him.
“We did everything that we were told or we considered it,” Maisel says. “One person wanted us to send pre-adolescent Max to a mental health facility for seriously depressed children. We discussed it and chose instead to stick with talk therapy and medication.
“This prognosis was so far afield of what we had ever been told,” Maisel says. “It seemed too big of a leap. We were open to whatever we could do.”
And Ivan and Meg, his wife, certainly did all that they could do.
He writes this in the book:
Throughout his teens, I continued to believe that Max would outgrow his doom and gloom, outmaneuver it, just learn to live with it. I still don’t know how much was wishful thinking, and how much a blind eye toward what would become a fatal mental illness. I’m not sure I want to see that final scorecard.
Max Maisel went missing on Feb. 22, 2015. His body was discovered in Lake Ontario on April 17, 2015.
A Father’s Willingness To Speak About His Son
Ivan speaks point-blank about his willingness to talk about Max.
“There were not a lot of things that I said no comment to,” Maisel says. “Meg’s brother has been a corporate spokesperson for the last 30 years and he helped a lot when it came to helping us check out statements that we wanted to make but asked him to review.”
Even in chatting with Maisel, his honesty and deep heart were evident in our conversation.
What do you do in those times when memories, both good and bad, come flooding into a parent’s mind? Ivan Maisel offers this piece of well-worn wisdom.
“A temporal moment of pain,” he says. “You catch yourself having a good moment, hours, or day. Then the pain comes. Don’t fight it. You can go on.”
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