A street sign shows the way

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A street sign shows the way

The intellect arches its eyebrows, denies it, demeans it. The intellect says, What? Are you serious? The dead do not speak. The dead are dead.

But the intellect is wrong.

I am driving to Bridgewater State University, a sprawling Massachusetts school, which was a small college when I went there. I am meeting my bonus grandson, my youngest daughter’s partner’s son, who is a sophomore majoring in criminal justice. The last time I saw Matt in person, at Christmas, he offered to show me around the now sprawling campus. We made plans to meet at two o’clock in the parking lot near his dorm on the last Friday in January. The morning of our meeting, he texted, “Message me when you get here.”

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Like a warm coat, memories hug us like those we have lost

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Like a warm coat, memories hug us like those we have lost

I told her I loved her coat, which was an almost-to-the-floor black and gray wool that seemed to be embracing the woman who was standing before me. That’s the feeling I had, that the coat was hugging her.

We were leaving a Christmas party, my husband and I, saying our goodbyes and there was Harriet, leaving, too. And I said, “Your coat is so pretty,” and she smiled and stroked the soft wool near the collar. “It was my daughter’s,” she said, and there it was, out in the open, something we seldom talk about, something we back away from every day: death.

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How many people could say they lived the life they dreamed?

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How many people could say they lived the life they dreamed?

He was a boy when I knew him, a friend of my son’s, 14 or 15 the first time he knocked on our door. I don’t remember the day or even the season, the days and seasons so much the same back then, teens in different shapes and sizes always at the door, knocking or ringing the bell. I can picture him clearly, though, as if it weren’t 40 years ago that he came calling, as if the boy he used to be had stood in my kitchen just yesterday.

He had a mop of dark, shiny curls. Big brown eyes with a shine of their of own. A shy, sweet grin. And a solidness, a compactness that made him seem sturdy, even older at times. Mike Ippolito. He was funny and shy and polite and indiscriminately kind. For me, he is frozen this way in time.

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The sobering reality: We must get off this road of destruction

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The sobering reality: We must get off this road of destruction

It’s easy to dismiss statistics. Statistics are numbers. Not people.

But the numbers are jaw dropping.

An estimated 42,915 people around the country died in motor vehicle traffic crashes in 2021, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. That’s nearly 43,000 ordinary people driving to work or home, to school, to a store, to a friend’s.

Think about this: In the nearly 20 years the United States was fighting in Vietnam, fewer Americans were killed in action (40,934) than were killed on our roads last year.

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How a practical book on death turned into a passing fancy

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How a practical book on death turned into a passing fancy

I bought the book “I’M DEAD. NOW WHAT?” the summer before COVID-19. I was in a general store in Bristol, Maine, and there it was, an 8-x-12 behemoth in the self-help section. It spoke to me. As if the eye-catching title were not enough, the subtitle, “Important Information about My Belongings, Business Affairs, and Wishes,” sealed the deal.

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Our entire country has become a war zone

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Our entire country has become a war zone

I cannot pronounce Luhansk and Lysychansk, because I have stopped watching television news. And because I no longer hear these names spoken, I don’t know how to say them.

I stopped watching the news every night because it is all calamity and conjecture interrupted by ads paid for by pharmaceutical companies, which would go bankrupt if, tomorrow morning, we all woke up well. And because the nightly news teaches me nothing I can’t learn by reading, I switched to print months ago.

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By telling their stories, we remember those we have lost

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By telling their stories, we remember those we have lost

I saved his letters, 301 typewritten pages, all single spaced, all caps. “SHAME ON YOU!” the first began. “YOU MADE ME CRY. I’M EIGHTY YEARS OLD AND YOU MADE ME CRY.” Ray Redican wrote this to me on Dec. 24, 1993. On Dec. 26, when it arrived in my mail, I picked up the phone and called him. This is the way our friendship began and the way it endured. He wrote and I called.

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Looking for a silver lining in a tragedy

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I keep looking for the silver lining in the long, slow dying of a friend who should not be dying. He's too good a person for the world to lose. But this is how life works. Good people die every day. Now it's Kyle Gendron, a good man in the middle of his life, who has a wife and three young children he would give anything not to leave.

Kyle Gendron and his wife, Kerry, and their children.

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Rewinding to a friendship a lifetime ago

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I can't attend his funeral. I'll be out of town, 3,000 miles away. It doesn't matter, I suppose. The truth is, I hardly knew him.

And yet I knew him once. We were children together. We lived in the same Randolph neighborhood, went to the same church, waited at the same bus stop every morning and sat under the same roof, though not always in the same classroom, for four long years, because the years are long when you're 7 and 8 and 9 and 10.

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Every family loss is a part of yourself

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Every family loss is a part of yourself

My Uncle Frank died last week. He was 82, but he looked 70. He had thick gray hair and not a wrinkle on his face and he stood straight and he smelled good and he was solid and sturdy, inside and out, and I felt that strength every time I hugged him. I believed, I hoped, he would live forever. Decades ago, when he was in his 40s, doctors gave him six months to live. They told my Aunt Lorraine and she told her children and me. But she never told him.

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On this day, life's circle without end

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On this day, life's circle without end

Amazing things have happened in the 2,000 years since Jesus Christ lived. But none compares with what Christianity celebrates today.

Eternal life. That's what Easter is about. Not fancy hats or frilly dresses or Cadbury eggs or lilies or bunnies or patent leather shoes or Easter egg hunts or even family get-togethers.

Easter is about all that cannot be seen.

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Bullock should have condemned drunken driving

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Bullock should have condemned drunken driving

I've listened to their stories - the painful tales of loss that parents, daughters, husbands, and wives tell. I've looked through thick photo albums they've placed in my hands and at pictures on mantels and walls. I've followed their slouched shoulders down narrow halls, or up a few stairs into bedrooms, where memories live. These rooms are full of intimate things - sweaters hung in closets, banners tacked over beds, books, tapes, magazines, stuffed animals, trophies, a football jacket tossed on a chair, a guitar in its case, a child's flannel pajamas, sneakers in the middle of the floor as if the wearer has just stepped out of them and will be back to claim them sometime soon.

But the wearer will never be back.

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She was no saint, but she looked like one

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A woman lives and dies out of the spotlight, 88 years on earth; and who, besides her family and friends, knows the mountains she's climbed, the fears she's faced, the impossible things she's accomplished? Without headlines or a song or a book or paparazzi to record the story, what happens to the story?

In words, Louise Nolan's story would describe a saint - selfless, loving, faithful, kind. But she wasn't a saint. Saints are stoic. Saints endure, carry on, play the hand life deals. Saints sacrifice.

Louise didn't sacrifice. She loved.

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Time doesn't heal, but it helps you cope

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Time doesn't heal, but it helps you cope

There's a Willie Nelson song that keeps playing in my head. "I've been feeling a little bad, 'cause I've been feeling a little better without you."

My aunt Lorraine died 10 years ago and the song, I suppose, is a reminder that not only have I survived, but that I have grown, too, and despaired and rejoiced and wept and failed and laughed and succeeded, all without this woman I was certain I could not live without.

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