A Death in the Family (1958): Running Cowboy, Revisited – Same Old Lang Syne

I was out to dinner a couple of weeks ago with my friend Maxie, who recently moved back to the Bay Area from Georgia. It wasn’t technically a holiday meal, but we are in that in-between stretch late in the year when the calendar quietly insists you take stock of things, whether you’re ready to or not. We were catching up the way you do with people you like and admire but don’t see all that often, when at some point in the conversation she said, “Remember that book you wrote about in your blog post about your brother?”

I did.

For those new to Pulitzer Schmulitzer, or those with understandably short memories, I wrote an essay about my brother Scott in January 2024, the day after he died. Near the end of that post, I told a small story about a book report I found that Scott had written when he was seven years old about a book called Roger Staubach – Running Cowboy. I also mentioned that I tried to find a copy of the book on Amazon but had no luck. At the time, that struck me as a little odd, but not odd enough to warrant more than a few minutes of curiosity. It didn’t feel urgent. Or maybe it felt safely non-urgent.

Well, Maxie, it turns out, did not feel the same way.

After reading the post, she went looking for the book herself. Like me, she initially came up empty. But instead of stopping there, she kept going. The name of the author was also included in Scott’s report, so she followed that thread and learned that he had written a number of sports books for Scholastic in the 1960s and 70s. One of those books it just so happens was called Great Quarterbacks of Pro Football. And sure enough, tucked inside that volume, she discovered, was a chapter titled “Roger Staubach – Running Cowboy.”

It wasn’t a book after all. It was a chapter.

And if I wasn’t already dumbfounded by this story, Maxie then reached down, pulled a manila envelope out of her bag, and handed it to me.

Inside was the book. Not a new copy. Not anything that had been reprinted or lovingly restored. A paperback from 1978. Slightly yellowed. Ordinary. The kind of book that would normally disappear without anyone noticing.

We drank a toast to innocence

Dan Fogelberg, Same Old Lang Syne

It was an unnecessary act in the best sense of the word. Maxie and I are friends, but this gesture didn’t come from shared history or obligation. She’d never met my brother, and I don’t think we’d ever had a conversation about him. There was nothing tying her to this story except that she read it, remembered it, and thought it might matter. It felt like the kind of gesture the holidays briefly give us permission to make, when curiosity and kindness outweigh efficiency, and doing something thoughtful doesn’t require a reason beyond this might matter to him.

Needless to say, I was emotional, even if I couldn’t quite name what the feeling was. My brother died just after New Year’s in 2024, close enough to the turn of the calendar that the season still carries an echo. The holidays don’t feel bad, but they do feel altered, like certain dates now carry more meaning than they used to, even if nothing outwardly marks the difference. And the emotion I felt wasn’t grief exactly, and it wasn’t closure either. It was something quieter. A reminder that loss doesn’t disappear, but that occasionally, through the unexpected care of other people, it softens just enough to let something back in.

People talking without speaking.

Simon & Garfunkel, The Sound of Silence

All of which brings us to James Agee’s A Death in the Family, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1958, and is a deeply autobiographical novel about the sudden death of a husband and father and the quiet devastation that follows. Set in Knoxville, Tennessee, the book centers on the Follet family and unfolds largely through the perspective of Rufus, a six-year-old boy whose understanding of the world is irrevocably altered when his father, Jay, dies in a car accident. Agee moves fluidly between Rufus, his mother Mary, his younger sister, and various relatives, allowing the reader to experience grief not as a single event but as something refracted through different minds, temperaments, and beliefs.

What makes A Death in the Family so affecting is not the tragedy itself but the way Agee lingers in the aftermath. The novel spends most of its time in the hours and days following Jay’s death, when time resumes awkwardly and people begin to move around inside the space loss has opened up. Phone calls arrive too late. Relatives show up unsure of what to say. Children struggle to understand what “never coming back” actually means. Religion is present but offers little clarity, and explanations are given but fail to satisfy. Instead, Agee focuses on small moments. A walk. A song. A gift bought on a whim. People sitting together in rooms because there is nowhere else to be. Neighbors appear. Conversations stall. Small gestures take on outsized weight. No one fixes anything, but somehow the world doesn’t collapse either. The book resists resolution, choosing instead to show how grief travels quietly through rooms and routines, absorbed slowly, awkwardly, and imperfectly, through human presence rather than understanding.

What stayed with me most was how little interest Agee has in resolution. There is no lesson, no redemption arc, no moment where grief is conquered or explained. Instead, there are people who sit longer than is comfortable, who offer what they can even when they know it won’t be enough. The kindness in the book isn’t grand or efficient. It’s tentative, imperfect, and deeply human.

That same restraint, however, is also why A Death in the Family tends to land lower in my Pulitzer countdown than some of the more celebrated winners. The novel is almost aggressively uninterested in narrative momentum, and its refusal to offer emotional payoff can feel less like discipline and more like withholding. Agee lingers where other writers would move on, and depending on the reader, that patience can read as quiet profundity or quiet frustration. The book asks for attention without expectation, presence without resolution, and that’s a demanding trade. Not everyone will feel it’s worth the cost.

And yet, sitting there at dinner with the book Maxie had handed me, I wasn’t thinking about Agee’s restraint or where A Death in the Family landed in my rankings. I was thinking about how this other book had traveled. Not just from an author to a publisher, but from a seven-year-old boy’s book report, through decades and different hands, until it found its way back to me in the form of an unnecessary kindness.

There is also something fitting about the object itself. Not a pristine artifact rescued intact from the past, but a well-worn book that survived mostly by chance. Scott’s original book report was the same way. Asked to explain what the book was about, he quoted a passage he liked. Asked whether he enjoyed it and why, he answered, “Yes” and “I like football.” Literal. Unadorned. Perfectly himself. What mattered wasn’t a full understanding of Roger Staubach’s career, but that something in that chapter resonated with him enough to stick.

A long December and there’s reason to believe / Maybe this year will be better than the last

Counting Crows, Long December

The holidays have a way of sharpening these moments. They don’t fix grief. They don’t offer clean resets. What they do is slow us down just enough to notice who shows up, and how. They make space for gestures that would feel impractical or indulgent in March. A card sent late. A call returned without an agenda. A manila envelope slid across a table at dinner.

I’ve come to think this is how most of what matters survives. Not through systems, or archives, or algorithms, but through people paying attention. Through someone reading carefully. Through someone deciding that a small, forgotten thing is worth the trouble. Grief doesn’t end, but it does change shape, and sometimes it’s other people who help reshape it for us, whether they know they’re doing it or not.

The book is sitting in front of me as I write this and it reminds me of two things at once: who my brother was, and how unexpectedly generous the world can be if you’re lucky enough to cross paths with the right people at the right moment. Especially near the end of the year, when kindness feels both unnecessary and essential at the same time.