Related story: From a man who lost so much to terrorism, a lesson in love, grace

By John E. Mulligan
Journal Staff Writer

This column was a real struggle, starting with the question (since I knew the family involved) of whether to attempt such an intrusion in the first place. The pure gall of that.

There was also the matter of how to present the story of yet another tragic loss, many weeks into a terrible season of them. What would be the point?

Actually, Howard Kavaler's experience didn't occur to me as something to write about for most of those weeks since the Sept. 11 terror attacks, much as it had been on my mind. But when I learned of the sentencing of the terrorist bombers in Nairobi who killed his wife in 1998, I began to agonize about whether I should presume on his grief.

My wife helped me get over that quandary. What is it that you think you people do for a living, she said. Ask Howard. He'll let you know whether it's right.

So I asked. As he began to speak about his loss, I began to see that what I most wanted to know was how a man pulls on his shoes every morning after such a thing, and then puts one foot in front of the other.

The exploration of that dilemma seemed to be point enough for a column. And since he had just returned from the sentencing in Manhattan, near Ground Zero in the Sept. 11 attacks, the pictures that Howard Kavaler painted in a couple of phone conversations over the next day or two were most vivid.

It also turned out that he had formed deeply-felt views of the issues that terrorism presents to us as citizens, not to mention the timeless puzzle of how to bear the unbearable.

In other words, Kavaler had a lot of hard practice at this business that still had the rest of us in shock. This was against the context of large world events -- and, on top of it all, the weight of his children's pain. It would make any normal person want to cry.

I wrote enough for several messy columns before it became clear that this was a variation on one of the oldest stories there is: Man goes to hell. Man comes back. Man tells us about it.

Plus, the all-important epilogue: What we learn from his experience.

That framework let me approach a daunting column as a series of technical problems that I could manage.

First was to get the character on stage and quickly show who he was. I started by painting the backdrop, to hint at who he was not: Not the rest of Washington, groping for a response to the latest wave of terror. Then I let him begin tell the story within the story.

After that came a "nut" section that was really, I guess, an instruction to myself and the reader, sort of a "Listen my children and you shall hear...'' Listen to the wisdom of ordinary people who have learned through hardship.

I did many drafts of this first section, stripping extras and trying to make every word count. Example: I took detail off the backdrop -- illness at Post Office, shutdown of Capitol, confusion of Cabinet. The reader could supply the necessary specifics on anthrax and terrorism.

I cut much exposition of Kavaler's long stint as a witness and attendant at the terrorists' trial. I wanted instead to establish him as a veteran of this war by having tell the story-within-a-story, as I wrote, yet "again.''

Another point: I knew that Kavaler's decision to shelve his career, the better to raise his daughters, had the weight to anchor the close of the column. Looking toward the tag, I previewed it near the top. I also tried to play against cliche by showing here that he had a higher vocation than his role in the great world of events: his girls.

That left two writing tasks. The easier was assembling the pieces of Kavaler's experience -- and his beliefs. This was mostly a matter of trial-and-error selection, plus more boiling down, with the general idea of building toward his most moving (to me) observations.

The other job -- the basic challenge of the column, really -- was the proper use of emotion, my own and the reader's.

I kept thinking of a scene in The Secret Agent, which you might call Alfred Hitchcock's terrorism movie. At the climax, Big Ben keeps ticking off the moments until the bomb-carrying anarchist does the evil deed. Just before the explosion (which we don't see), we get a glimpse of a dog and a little boy (I think; it's been a long time) who are doomed. Some would call this a crass manipulation by the director. But I think he enlists the innocents in a decent cause: To cut deeply to the horror of the crime.

My choice, to be blunt, was what to do with Kavaler's daughters. For reasons unclear to me, it seemed that the use of my personal connection would strengthen the story. Maybe by hinting at my reactions, I could tap the power of the readers' reactions -- and their associations with the children in their own lives.

It seemed simplest to bring myself in at the end of the introductory section. I tried to signal my own emotions without using a brass band.

Finally, it seemed that Tara Kavaler's heart-rending letter to the judge was the emotional climax of the story. It belonged near the end, setting up her father's final thought about how to go on living.

I finished my work by giving it to Howard, prepared to kill the story if he found it in any way off-key or unseemly.

He asked me for copies of the paper for Tara's and Maya's scrapbooks. It's the best writing prize I've ever gotten.