The Day That Went Missing: A Family’s Story, by Richard Beard

In The Day That Went Missing: A Family’s Story (2017), novelist Richard Beard tries to recover the memory and the reality of his younger brother Nicky, who drowned in 1977. Beard was in the water with Nicky when he drowned. This book is an exploration both of his efforts to recover his brother’s memory and to understand why his family suppressed the boy’s memory for four decades. The Beard family itself is an emblem of what Beard sees as the repressive British character: Don't show emotion. Keep a stiff upper lip. Always forge ahead.

Beard blames himself for suppressing his brother’s memory and feels deep guilt for his failure to save him. The author was 11 years old at the time, and he couldn't swim well enough to save the boy, who was 9. He watched his brother struggle, called to him, but after his head went under the surface of the water he turned back to the shore to save himself and ran to tell his parents. Beard constantly revisits the memory of this moment, only fragments of which he can recall when he forces himself to think about it.  His efforts to recover evidence of his brother's short life gradually fill in the gaps in his recollections.

This is a good book, but it isn't pleasant to read. Beard blames himself and his whole family for losing the drowned boy. In particular he blames his father for his failure to enter the water and rescue the boy (even though his father had cancer). He goes through his father's papers, notebooks, letters, looking for some sign of grief or sorrow over Nicky's death, but he finds nothing. Even as his father lies dying many years later, the author is unable to get him to say anything about the death. He blames his father's repressive, mechanical attitude and the way he goes about his life afterwards as if nothing has happened. Yet his mother insists that Nicky’s death affected his father deeply.  In general Beard resents his father’s cold and distant nature.  He rubs his face in the guilt he feels, in his resentment of his family, his parents, his brothers. He barely concedes that his parents did the best they could given the circumstances.  Nicky’s death was a tragedy (a term he mocks because people use it as a cliché in their letters of sympathy), maybe it could have been avoided if the parents had paid more attention, if the author had gone deeper into the water, if the family had visited another beach, if they'd arrived at the beach before the tide started coming in.

Beard is angry that his brother is gone. He is almost lost to time, faded from memory, life has moved on. That cruel realization drives much of Beard’s anger.

The Day That Went Missing is about Beard's efforts to uncover the facts of his brother's death and life. Different family members have different recollections of the boy and of the day he disappeared. He tries to reconcile these differences by going to the spot on the beach where the drowning occurred, by interviewing the lifeguard who pulled the body out of the water, the coroner, the police, teachers, headmasters, anyone else he can locate who might have some knowledge of the boy and his death. He interviews his brothers and most especially his mother. He often seems to blame her for not remembering Nicky as he does, and for her behavior following his death. He finds it unsettling that the family, after a week of mourning and grief and the funeral, return to the beach house for another week to continue the vacation. His mother explains that there was one week remaining on the beach house lease. The parents must have thought this was a way of grieving, of restoring normalcy. But Beard finds it highly disturbing.

In the beginning of the book he describes himself as someone who has difficulty feeling and expressing emotions. He connects this problem back to his brother's death and to the way that his family repressed that death over the years. In the process of researching his brother’s life and death, at times he becomes highly emotional. In the final pages of the book, he revisits on the fortieth anniversary of his death the site on the drowning. Using maps and tidal tables he tries to calculate the exact minute.  He reimagines and even reenacts events that followed. There is a pathetic quality to his obsession with his brother. It becomes a way of displacing problems in his own life, in his own marriage which he says might be failing, in his inability to express emotion. An uninvolved reader can wallow in someone else's grief only for so long. It's difficult to separate private grief from public understanding. As a reader who felt deep sympathy for the writer and his family, I grew tired of the constant wallowing in misery, grief, guilt. Of course, had if been me, I too would've wallowed. If it had been my child, I hardly think I could have survived. It's a wonder Beard's parents did as well as they did in the days and weeks following the death.

This is also a book about memories—how they are created, preserved, lost, and altered.  Beard has studied scientific theories about memory, and he brings them to bear in his recollections.  In the beginning he can barely bring himself to think about his brother’s death, and he has lost many details.  By the end, through his research and interviews he has learned enough to recover the moment and confront it. The narrative moves in a fluid way back and forth in time, always returning in direct and glancing ways to the drowning, always driving forward to the final scene.