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The New Me
March 6, 2019
I miss my son. I miss his face. I miss his bright blue eyes. I miss his gentle manner. I miss the way he would crawl around the house. I miss his smile. And I miss his laugh. God, I miss his laugh. And, I must say, I miss me. Carrying more weight Before Aidan […]
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A Newborn and a New Hope
April 24, 2018
Arianna Frances Mallio wasn’t even a day old, and so very small. A tiny newborn child, I could hold in the crook of my arm with room to spare. I could cradle her head in the palm of my hand. She was swaddled in blankets, with a little pink hat on her head. Her eyes, […]
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The Day Everything Changed
June 15, 2017
Author’s Note: I always intended for this website to be a vehicle for me telling my own story, but I was concerned about how I would do it. I am not the first person to suffer tragedy, nor will I be the last. I didn’t want it all to be about me and I didn’t […]
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Notes from the Road: Blood Brothers
March 16, 2017
Bloodwork to Blood Brothers
On Wednesday, August 1st 2012 I learned I had two blood brothers in the truest medical sense. It was the usual hot and muggy New England summer day. My father came to get me in Littleton and drove me to Lahey Hospital for the next part of my Chemotherapy treatment: Lumbar punctures -- spinal shots to deliver medicine to my brain to keep the Leukemia from spreading there. I reported immediately to the blood lab. There they would draw a sample of my blood to make sure it would clot before they went ahead and stuck a needle in my back. Read More
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Notes from the Road: Chemo Mix
March 9, 2017
Fight Songs I was, again, going through the journal that I kept while being treated for Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia and I found notes I had made on what songs I wanted to put on a Chemo Mix. These were songs to keep me in an “fight-like-hell” frame of mind while I endured drugs, radiation, and […]
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Notes from the Road: Leukemia Journal
March 5, 2017
The Journal While undergoing treatment for Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL), I kept a “leukemia journal” for a few months. I wish I had been more diligent and detailed about writing in it, but at the time, it wasn’t just ALL I was dealing with. About two weeks after my diagnosis, my younger son would die […]
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Back to School, Part 2: Jeanne’s Story
February 2, 2017
CHELMSFORD, MA — Jeanne Marie Engels, the mother of a lifelong friend, sits in a Starbuck’s in Chelmsford, Massachusetts and explains how, many years ago, she found herself thinking about going back to school. At the age of 37, her marriage had ended. She and her four children left Germany where they had lived on […]
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Society and Trauma: Or Why I’m Doing This
January 17, 2017
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 […]
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“Everything Doesn’t Happen for a Reason” Commentary on the Tim Lawrence Essay
January 16, 2017
A Tempting Thought Everything happens for a reason, some will say. God, it can be a tempting thought, can it not? Some terrible thing just comes from out of nowhere, rips you out of your current life and slams you into a new one where everything is recognizable but nothing is what it once was. […]
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