losing a child is an unimaginable grief. when it happens it seems to be against the very rules of the game. we are supposed to be survived by our children. that’s just the way the world works, isn’t it? the things that parents do to come to terms with such a loss are as varied as the ways in which death can take us. for bob, a family practice physician, he tried to cope with his son’s death by getting on a bicycle.

in july of 2009 eric okerblom was riding his bike down a straight, quiet road east of santa maria. a sophomore at berkeley, he was training for the school’s cycling team. a car driven by a young woman who happened to be a former high school classmate of eric’s hit and killed him. the accident was avoidable. it was during the day. the road was straight. there was no traffic. eric was not riding haphazardly. there were no obstructions. subpoenas of the girl’s phone records indicate that she had been sending and receiving text messages shortly before the accident, though she never officially admitted to being distracted while driving. she pled guilty to vehicular manslaughter – a misdemeanor. three years probation and one hundred hours of community service.

it is our nature, in the face of inexplicable awfulness, to try to find a reason for things. pure randomness is sometimes more terrible than even the smallest explanations. faced with losing themselves wholly in grief, bob and his wife, eilene, went on a crusade to bring awareness to the issue of distracted driving. they started a foundation, named after their son. they petitioned lawmakers to enact tougher laws prohibiting texting while driving. of course, setting up a foundation and writing letters will only get you so far. at the end of the day, eric was still gone, and the feelings of loss and powerlessness still had to be dealt with.

not satisfied simply with the activities of his foundation, bob thought he must do something more, something to bring his message to more people, something to possibly help save the lives of others. he decided to take a two month long bike ride, alone, across the country. he started in san diego in february, and finished 54 days later in st. augustine, florida. along the way he did many interviews, met with legislators, gathered supporters, and kept a daily blog. he said the trip is something eric would’ve wanted him to do, something he hoped would make his son proud of him.

at the beginning of the trip bob wrote:

The spirituality, harmony, values, and structure of my former life have been swept away by the killing of my 19 year old son, Eric. I am left adrift on a sea of dark currents and noxious winds. Without direction or destination, I wander the outer circles of hell. Although surrounded by loving family, friends, and community, I am alone in a lonely place. As I begin this journey to honor my son, I hope to also find some way to emerge from this abyss. So from now until the finish, I will pedal for the dead.

meeting bob just a few days before he left on his trip i was struck by how determined he was, by how tough he must be. i doubted the effectiveness of the endeavor he was about to undertake, but i also realized that this was never really about the bike ride. it might not really have been about raising awareness of distracted driving, either. it was about a father feeling like simply doing something must be better than doing nothing. when no other glue will work some men hold themselves together with action. using purpose to provide (promote?) healing.

i dare say we have all made dangers of ourselves on the road in one way or another. we’re more and more connected to our gadgets, moment to moment than ever before – certainly i am no exception to this. have i texted while driving? i surely have. i am as addicted to the beeps and chimes and buzzes of my iphone as anyone could be. now, though, perhaps more than before, if something urgently commands my attention i try to pull over to the side of the road. when i get a text and the red light doesn’t last quite long enough, i think of bob, and eilene, and eric. my pulling over won’t bring eric back, or give any peace to bob’s life, but i think he would be happy to know that his efforts and experiences have had an effect, no matter how small.

if you stop to think about it there are a million little coincidences every day that serve to either keep us safe or put us at risk. i have been involved with death far more in my capacity as a photographer than in my own personal life away from the camera. in this, i suppose, i count myself lucky. still, i find it difficult to photograph someone and not feel some tie to their life, especially to the people for whom i get to visit repeatedly and get to know quite closely. the delineation of making pictures blurs more than slightly after a while.

when i left bob and eilene i worried that his cross country ride would simply be a band-aid on his grief. something to distract him for a while. i worried about what would happen when the ride was done, when he was back home, when the momentum of activism and energy had subsided. i worried for eilene, home alone while bob attempted to pedal his grief away.

on april 22nd bob wrote on his blog:

I conclude this travel unrestored. My God has remained silent and elusive. Completing good works will not adjudicate Eric’s killing. There can be no happy ending to this story. As the many hundreds of roadside memorials stand testament, there can never be harmony after the loss of a child.

Some injuries heal completely without residual or scar. Others heal without residual, but leave a disfiguring scar as a reminder. A few injuries aren’t fatal, but linger and smolder,never to resolve completely. One must learn to live with them and not to be dominated by them. My challenge is to learn to live with this injury, but not become the injury.

usually on this site i post photos of people with an accompanying caption. something describing in a few words who they are and what they do. i struggled over this with bob. it’s easy to label him as a grieving father, but that does him no service going into the future. in the end, whether it’s his grief that makes him get up in the morning, day after day, that makes him care for the families of others, for his surviving children and his wife, or not, it doesn’t matter. i’m not a parent – not yet -  but i have the notion that once you become a father you are a father in every way, every manner and every aspect of your life. that feeling supersedes everything else. you may also be a doctor, or a husband, but you are a father first and foremost. and if your son is taken from you you no more stop being a father than they stop being your son.

thursday is the first birthday of my niece, willa. somehow she’s turned from a small, helpless little thing into a giant, nearly 30 pound crawling, running, laughing machine. it’s amazing to see, and i couldn’t be a prouder or happier uncle. happy birthday, guppy.

we photographed claire at home for the cedars-sinai medical center’s research magazine. suffering from an inherited autoimmune disease, claire was involved with new genetic testing and therapies offered at the hospital.

one of the benefits of living and working in southern california is that you can occasionally stumble into these incredible locations. claire is on the swim team at her school and the editors were set on having her photographed in the pool. usually i dread those kind of things, being the sort of guy who gets a sunburn in two minutes flat, but claire had this beautiful indoor pool and we couldn’t resist using it. click play below for behind the scenes footage.

behind the scenes shoot with claire from Max S. Gerber on Vimeo.

wendy mogel is a psychologist who focuses on issues of parenting and families. ten years ago she wrote a book called “the blessing of a skinned knee”, which dealt with raising kids to be responsible, self-reliant, aware of the world and capable. the book is framed with teachings from jewish law, the talmud and the torah. wendy believes that talmudic ideas can inform modern parenting in a way that could help parents navigate tricky issues like discipline, responsibility and the dangers of coddling.

i am not a parent (though i am an uncle), and most days i feel quite far away from being a parent. still, it’s fairly easy to see the ways in which parenting has changed even in the course of my lifetime. when we used to ride bikes as kids nobody ever wore a helmet. my brother and i, as children, seemed to have far more unscheduled free time than i see kids having nowadays. that isn’t to say we weren’t busy, or weren’t occupied in important things, it’s just that they were our important things. there was less pressure to achieve, or to do everything you could think of all at once. the funny thing was, though, that even with less pressure placed upon us to achieve we didn’t seem to achieve less. sometimes when you leave kids to their own devices they come up with some pretty amazing things – and also take responsibility and accountability for them.  i’d say my generation has done fairly well, all things considered. especially those of us who didn’t turn out to be photographers.

wendy mogel advocates letting your children be what they are, and encouraging them for it. seems like sound advice. i would only caution (based on limited, anecdotal experience as a non-parent) that i do sometimes see parents pushing their children towards doing what they’re good at, even if they’re not too interested in those things. children will stumble through things, they will fall down, they will hurt themselves, they will make mistakes, they will develop regrets. they will. there’s not much a parent can do to prevent that, and often i’d imagine a disservice is being done when such attempts at prevention are made. then again, adults do the same things. is it too cliche to say that our character is often defined by our failures? yeah, somewhat cliche. still. . .

this month sees the magazine cover debut of my adorable and chubby niece, willamina. i got an assignment to photograph harvey karp, a pediatrician and author of the “happiest baby” series of books and DVDs. it’s all about the five S’s, people. (swaddling, side/stomach positioning, shushing, swinging and sucking) harvey teaches parents how to calm crying babies, which in turn calms frazzled parents.

we wanted a baby for the shoot, but harvey’s own son was 27 years old. that wasn’t exactly the right visual, obviously. luckily having recently become an uncle i was able to provide a baby, and spend some quality time with my niece as well. my sister-in-law (see below) got a free instructional DVD, too.

many years ago when i was working for greg heisler i remember seeing a time magazine cover up on the wall of the studio. he had photographed his own daughter for it and that always struck me as a really great thing. this isn’t quite the same, but it’s a start. hopefully there will be many more in the future.

below are the layouts used in the magazine (i tease my brother that willa looks like kuato from total recall in that cover picture, all scrunched up and wrinkled!) as a bonus there’s willa with her mother in a test shot, and with her charming and talented uncle, as well (thanks to paul). as an extra special bonus, a short video of corporal bennett singing a cowboy lullaby about pooping. you’re welcome, internet.

this week i’m headed off to orlando to the cardiology 2010 conference. i’ll be speaking and signing books there saturday night (2.13.10) at the disney contemporary resort. if you’re in the neighborhood please stop by and say hello!

as part of my presentation to the conference i made this short film. this conference is mostly a medical one, with 26 of us (out of 900 attendees) being classified as “miscellaneous.” a long while ago i met a CHD researcher who told me that one thing doctors and scientists often miss out on is information on the emotional lives of their patients. given that, i wanted to show how some of the subjects from the book are doing now, as young adults out in the world. they’re dealing with the same things we all have to contend with – school, the future, family, love, fear. and they’re all a whole lot more interesting than listening to me speak!

my recommendation: watch it HERE, full screen, in HD for best results.

on september 23rd at 12:36pm my niece, willamina, was born. so i’m now officially the coolest uncle in the room. (okay, the only uncle in the room.) here are pictures from her first day of life – 7 lbs, 13 oz, chubby and healthy and beautiful! happy birthday, guppy!

congratulations to my brother, james, and my sister-in-law, emiko!

my brother and his wife are having a baby daughter in september. my father, who lives in new york, has not seen them since before emiko got pregnant, so i thought it’d be nice to make a video for him for father’s day. also, i figure it serves to mark my brother’s first “official” father’s day – or is that a pre-father’s day? either way, i’m to be an uncle soon and as such it’s my right to subject everyone to time in front of the camera. at the moment, the leading contender for baby names falls to “willamina”. so here’s my brother james and emiko and willa – t-minus three months.

of course, my brother approaches impending fatherhood with his usual humility.

and just in case it’s unclear, that phrase he says at the very end is “chocolate cake and fred segal’s.”

click the play button below.

for the past few days i’ve been chasing a 6 week old kitten around the floor of my office, trying not to get my feet clawed and bitten. i’ve had to move fast and be vigilant. still, sometimes the little guy catches me, even though i’m watching him out of the corner of my eye at all times, even though my reflexes are pretty good for my advanced age. for all the many things wrong with me (and there are many) i’m still able to move about the world fairly well. i take this for granted every single day. so, i suspect, do most of you. if i couldn’t get out of the way in time my socks and pant legs would be shredded by now. but what if i couldn’t even hold myself up in bed? i’d be kitten fodder for sure.

lilly grossman has mitchondrial disease. if you remember from high school biology, the mitochondria are the parts of the cells that create energy. the energy to sit up in bed, the energy to regulate your body temperature, the energy to walk down the hall, the energy to dance or talk or write or chase a kitten around a room. this disease is very rare and takes many different forms. in lilly it seems to affect her muscles, primarily. she has trouble holding herself up. she uses a walker, and sometimes still falls over, lacking the strength even to lean on it. because it takes so many complex muscle movements to do so, lilly even has trouble talking clearly at times.

lilly is also eleven years old. she loves high school musical, the color pink and hannah montana. she laughs at the things her parents do, and generally seems to be having a great time, no matter where she is.

as someone who has spent a lot of time around sick children – and, more importantly, as someone who has spent a lot of time as a sick child – i can confidently say that i could not begin to imagine the incredible patience it must take to be lilly grossman. lilly is whip smart. she’s watching and listening to everything. she’s laughing at everything. she just can’t move very well. she has a lot to say. she just has trouble putting the words together and getting them out right. when that’s your whole life you get used to it. you can get used to anything. but just being used to something doesn’t make it less frustrating, especially not when you’re seeing everyone else float so effortlessly through the things that cause you to struggle every moment of every day. now to be fair, this is me talking – i’m not pretending to speak for lilly here. it’s quite possible that lilly doesn’t have a care in the world and she’s perfectly happy, even being a bit incapacitated. in fact, i’m sure of it. but the whole of a life and the breadth of any single person’s experience is never so simple, never so easily summed up in one pat and tidy way.

when i was a kid i was always shocked and a little annoyed when people referred to me as frail or fragile. sure, my heart didn’t work very well, but i was used to it. i didn’t think of myself as fragile, and it pissed me off that other people did. even though they might have been right, and even though there wasn’t anything i could do about it, and even though what they thought didn’t really matter. but i had my happy days and my not so happy days. my cynical attitude, of course, has a lot more to do with the family i grew up in than with any illness i was born into. my point, inarticulate though it might be, is that when i meet these kids i try very hard never to assume that their lives are all bad or all sunshine and roses. the fact of the matter is that their lives are like anyone else’s, full of good days and bad days. it’s just that you have to try a little harder for the good days, that’s all.

lilly’s parents, steve and gay, try hard for the good days. they’ve built their lives around making sure the good days outnumber the bad. they moved to san diego from cleveland, to a climate that was much more stable and much more gentle on lilly’s system. gay was telling me about how so many of her old friends have become the kind of women who say they don’t need a man for anything. convincing themselves, perhaps, if no one else. but gay insists that she’d be lost without steve to back her up. i’ve seen too many families tear themselves apart over the stress of a child’s illness, but sometimes you see one come together heroically, put unnecessary things aside and make their lives work for them. watching steve and gay care for lilly even in the short time i visited with them, it was very clear that in doing so they’re caring for each other just as much.

last night was the opening of the starlight foundation’s “indomitable spirit” show at the ACE gallery in los angeles. several months ago i was asked to donate a print from the hearts book to this show, along with about 75 other photographers. the starlight foundation is a charity that benefits seriously ill children, and if you have to give your money to some organization that doesn’t directly benefit me, i recommend taking a look at them.

there were some really great photos in the show, and some really amazing photographers. i got to briefly meet douglas kirkland, who organized the show. thanks to aline smithson for recommending me.

you can see a gallery of the photos in the show at their flickr site here.