One weekend….

In October of 1995, while working at a small New Hampshire daily paper, I was given my first “weekend duty.” This meant that anything that happened between Friday and Sunday night, for all of the Lakes Region, was mine to cover. I was given a pager (it was 1995, after all), a police scanner, and a list of events and meetings to cover.

As the weekend began, I covered some very serious incidents – a fatal car crash, fires, flooding – but none of those events hit me like what I had to cover that Saturday night.

I was settling down with a book and a cup of tea when my police scanner rang out the distinct set of tones for Lakes Region fire and rescue. They dispatched fire and police, announcing a shooting at a local campground. Immediately, my phone rang and the paper’s editor gave me directions on where to go. (I was a new employee and was still learning my way around.)

I grabbed a jacket, a notebook, and drove off. The campground wasn’t too far away and, as I drove, I found myself getting a little scared. My first “shooting” to report: A serious crime that had to be treated as such. I always saw my job as a very delicate balancing act. I had to report the news, but I also needed to stay on relatively good terms with the townspeople and its officials. Sometimes it almost felt like diplomacy. I figured the only way to fulfill my responsibility was to be as fair as possible, and I tried my best. But believe me, I wasn’t always successful.

Arriving at the Scene

When I arrived on the scene, I spoke to the local police officer who shook his head and said he knew nothing. Obviously, he knew something, but what he did know he certainly wasn’t authorized to discuss – especially with a reporter. So I said I understood, moved away from the police line and began to wait. Reporters do a lot of that.

Waiting with me was a kid even younger than I. He was a local guy who had details I didn’t. He claimed he had heard about the whole thing over the scanner. As payment for his info, I gave him a smoke and he told me what he knew. It wasn’t a “shooting,” he said, it was a suicide.

“You sure?” I asked him.

“Yeah, man,” he said. “A woman shot herself.”

For me that automatically changed the situation from a “crime” to a “private tragedy” that I wanted nothing to do with. My feelings just grew stronger the more I asked around and the more details emerged. As it turned out, a man and his wife had been on vacation and, on the one-year anniversary of their daughter’s accidental drowning, the mother shot herself.

In my wanderings, I somehow found myself behind the police lines. I was politely asked to go and, as I did, I saw a man sitting in the back of a police cruiser just starting into space. The husband. I now know that he was most likely in shock, but back then, I wondered what was going through the poor man’s mind, if anything. In a year, he had lost his daughter and his wife. I couldn’t imagine what he was thinking.

I refused to write about it, which got me in some trouble with my editor. I thought it was shameful to write about someone’s private tragedy, and we had been warned to be careful with our language when reporting about a suicide. The fear was that if someone who committed suicide got too much attention, it might inspire someone else to do the same.

For days afterwards, I thought of that man and his facial expression. How would he ever move on? How would he find his “new normal”? Was that even possible?

And Now it’s My Turn

Seventeen years later, in 2012, I found myself asking the same questions of myself. My younger son had just died. I was fighting cancer. How would I find my “new normal?”

To be honest, I’m still searching, but this website is part of my quest. I decided I needed to tell my story, but the more time I spent in support groups or at Dana Farber or the Children’s Room, the more I heard stories of ordinary people such as you and I who, either by choice or by necessity, have done amazing things. I decided that, if I am to tell my story, I had to tell their stories as well. I sought to interview those who had struggles to overcome, a crisis to endure, or goals to achieve. Some of these stories are happy, others sad, but they are all about ordinary folks who just happened to do extraordinary things.

This blog is not meant to focus only on tragedy, but also on triumph. It is meant to, remind people that we all have something from which we are healing. Something that we’re learning to carry.

It made me think of Tim O’Brien’s amazing short story, “The Things They Carried,” about the physical and emotional baggage American soldiers lugged around in the jungles of Vietnam and how, when they came home, there were things they had to carry for the rest of their lives. Not that you’d know it by looking at them.

We have many, many more veterans now who served in Iraq and Afghanistan who are carrying things. And regular people like me who are learning to carry something around. Again, not that you’d know it by looking at us

Society doesn’t always treat traumatized people well. Many embrace and support trauma survivors, but my personal experience has been that plenty of others want us to just “get over it.” I am convinced that the harsher attitude is based on a simple lack of understanding about how trauma can affect a person.

Through these interviews and articles, my intention is to shine some light on what people experience, the good, the bad, and the supremely ugly. My hope is that the result will be more empathy and compassion for others.

I hope you enjoy what you read, and, if you’re someone who’s learning how to carry something, I hope this helps.

Thank you,
Matthew Mallio