He was the youngest of ten children, born into a loud, intellectual, deeply Catholic household where debate was encouraged and curiosity was never punished. But when he was just ten years old, that world collapsed in a single morning.In 1974, his father—a respected doctor and academic—and two of his brothers were killed in a plane crash while traveling to enroll the boys at a boarding school. The flight never reached its destination. It went down just miles from the runway, leaving only a handful of survivors and tearing the heart out of one family.

For the boy left behind, grief didn’t explode loudly. It settled quietly.He later described how his childhood ended overnight. The house grew still. The noise of siblings disappeared. Ordinary worries vanished, replaced by something heavier and harder to name. He and his mother—who had already endured more loss than most people face in a lifetime—learned how to exist together in a new, muted reality.