Some Things We Survive But Never Heal From

How We Keep Living Anyway

In 1997, I placed a small, anonymous callout in the Boston Globe’s Confidential Chat column, asking readers to send me their stories of resilience for a book I aspired to write.

Within days, hundreds of letters arrived — raw, hopeful, heartbreaking.

Strangers trusted me with their hardest truths.

Their deep wounds — and their faith in me — overwhelmed me.

I wasn’t ready to carry all of them.

But I never forgot.

I made myself a quiet promise: One day, when I was ready, I would come back to these stories.

In 2022, I began fulfilling that promise, a mission that continues today through this newsletter, a LinkedIn leadership version of the newsletter, and the memoir I’m writing.

That year, I began initiating interviews with individuals who had faced profound loss and trauma, listening to how they survived the unthinkable.

One of the first people I had the privilege of interviewing was Mike Rizzo.

Mike’s son, Jonathan Rizzo, was murdered in 2001 during the brutal killing spree of Gary Sampson that claimed three lives across Massachusetts and New Hampshire.

Jonathan was just nineteen.

A helper by nature.

The kind of young man who couldn’t drive past a stranger in need.

Jonathan attended Boston College High School, a Jesuit school whose mission is to form “men for others.”

Mike told me that Jonathan epitomized that spirit — always looking out for anyone who needed help, always making space at the table for one more.

The story of Gary Sampson has haunted me for decades.

In 2001, at the beginning of his killing spree, my husband and I crossed paths with Sampson — unknowingly — while driving in Marshfield, Massachusetts.

We were in a convertible, top down, completely exposed.

We were on our way to an appointment and drove down our idyllic street to the end, where a stop sign forces you to turn right. In a small wooded area near the intersection, we saw him standing near a gold van, staring — unsettling, chilling.

We debated whether to park and walk over to him, whether he needed help. Something deep inside told us: keep moving.

Later that night, while we were out at dinner with my husband’s company in Boston, a news alert flashed across the screen.

We realized we had been staring into the eyes of a killer just hours earlier.

If we had gotten any closer, he could have ended our lives in an instant.

That collision of fate — how close we were to a different ending — has never left me.

Perhaps that’s why, when I began interviewing survivors for my memoir, Mike Rizzo’s story called to me so strongly.

I understood, in a small but visceral way, how trauma ripples through a community, through a lifetime.

Despite his unimaginable grief, Mike refuses to regret raising a son who lived by goodness.

“If you live your life afraid of that,” Mike told me, “you lose something even more important.”

When I asked how he survived the aftermath, Mike didn’t talk about anger or vengeance.

He talked about compartmentalization.

He still had two other children who needed a father.

He still had a demanding job managing hundreds across cities and continents.

He still had a community to care for, and a foundation to build in Jonathan’s name.

After visiting Boston’s Garden of Peace — a memorial for victims of homicide — Mike and his family were inspired to create a smaller Garden of Peace in Kingston, Massachusetts.

They built a quiet space near the local ballfields, paved with memorial bricks, where families could honor children lost too soon.

Mike’s family maintains the garden even today — a space where grief and hope coexist.

“You don’t heal from something like this,” he said. “You find a place for it in your mind. You live around it. You survive.”

The Jonathan Rizzo Foundation continues to honor Jonathan’s life.

(Learn more about his legacy here: Jonathan Rizzo Foundation.)

Unfortunately, two decades later, the Rizzo family was pulled back into the aftermath. When Gary Sampson died in 2021, his legal team attempted to overturn his convictions posthumously — forcing federal prosecutors to fight to preserve the verdicts and retraumatizing the victims’ families yet again. (You can read more about that here.)

Survival, Mike reminds us, isn’t a one-time event. It’s an ongoing choice — to keep living, even as old wounds are reopened.

Mike’s story reminds me that some pain never fully heals.

But we can build lives large enough to carry it.

Stories like Mike’s — and the quiet strength he embodies — will be part of the final act of my memoir. These are the kinds of stories I am honored to collect: not stories of perfect endings, but stories of survival, humanity, and the choice to keep living with open hearts, even after unimaginable loss.

That same truth echoes in my own life today.

Since the beginning of 2024, my life has felt like a series of crashing waves:

• The slow, brutal unraveling of a marriage that was never what I believed it to be.
  

• A contentious divorce, complete with public smear campaigns, passive/aggressive memes, and fictional narratives that stand in stark contrast to the black-and-white facts of court documents, videos, and more.
  

• The quiet grief of losing two beloved dogs.
  

• A diagnosis of skin cancer, and facial surgery.
  

• Watching my mother slip into Alzheimer’s and then losing her, suddenly, before I could fully say goodbye.
  

• Becoming an empty nester as my two grown sons launched into their own lives.
  

• The quiet ache of abandonment by a longtime friend — someone who chose to align with the very toxicity she admitted seeing. (Even as my circle of true friends deepened and my decade-long friendships strengthened, her unexpected choice - and witnessing her betrayal when she didn’t know I could see it - left a sting I am still learning to live with.)
  

• Canceling two much-needed retreats due to unforeseen circumstances.
  

• Contracting COVID just as I was meant to host my widowed father for a farewell visit before his two-month “grieving trip” to Europe — and thus missing the chance to hug him goodbye. (He’s 82, so I’m nervous about his solo journey, but also in awe.)

Some years, life shatters all at once.

Some years, it breaks you open slowly, piece by painful piece, only to rebuild you: better, stronger, healed, and more aware.

I am surviving both kinds of years.

Right now, my divorce grinds slowly toward a two-year mark, trapping my assets and stalling my ability to move freely into the next chapter of my life.

The system requires me to keep fighting for everything I built and owned long before this marriage even began.

And yet, life demands that I move forward anyway, now.

Survival, healing, and rebuilding — especially while still fighting — demand ruthless compartmentalization.

As trauma expert Dr. Frank Ochberg says:

“The ability to ‘partition’ grief or fear is not denial — it is a survival tactic that often precedes genuine emotional processing.”

We don’t erase what hurts us.

We place it carefully into mental rooms, so we can keep living while we heal.

Before we can survive it, trauma forces us to compartmentalize not just one moment, but many layers of loss and betrayal.

Every grief hits differently.

Every heartbreak demands its own quiet room inside us, just so we can keep moving forward.

Surviving isn’t just about enduring the events themselves.

It’s about carrying the heartbreaks — layer by layer — in ways that don’t drown us.

That’s what I’m doing now:

• Compartmentalizing grief over a love that wasn’t real — but rather a calculated plan. A betrayal wrapped in red flags I didn’t yet know how to see.

• Compartmentalizing the deeper heartbreak of realizing that trusting the wrong person cost more than the loss of “love” itself — and living with the quiet ache of accepting that those I once loved as daughters now see me through a version of the story shaped more by emotional narratives than by the evidentiary truth I know and hold.

• Compartmentalizing the evidentiary work required for a trial that should have never had to happen.

• Compartmentalizing the bittersweet shift of motherhood, watching my sons sail into their own lives while I rebuild my own.

• Compartmentalizing the sting of friendship lost to betrayal, even as stronger ones rose around me.

• Compartmentalizing fear while reclaiming the life that was always mine to build and rising quietly toward a future that no one can take from me.
  

We survive.

We rebuild.

Sometimes at the very same time.

Here’s what I know now:

Some things, we survive but never heal from.

Some grief lives with us forever.

But we can live lives large enough to hold it.

We can raise children.

We can build gardens.

We can create new companies.

We can tell new stories.

We can fall in love again.

We can trust again.

We can live in a way that honors the depth of what we’ve endured.

And yes, some days, you will do nothing but survive.

You will cry.

You will lie still.

You will feel the heavy pull of everything you are carrying.

Let that be okay.

Some days are meant for mourning.

Others are meant for building.

Both are survival.

Both are resilience.

And the next day?

You rise.

You build a little more.

You breathe a little deeper.

You choose yourself again.

Not because you forgot what happened.

But because you know you deserve a life after it.

You are not broken. You are human.

And to be human means to suffer.

But also to rise in spirit - to be resilient.

You are carrying the proof that survival — even messy, aching survival — is still possible.

And that, too, is a victory.

If you’re wondering how to keep moving when life feels too heavy, here are a few small ways to begin:

• Create “containers” for your grief: Give yourself sacred times to process it and sacred times to rest from it.
  

• Prioritize fiercely: Focus only on the essentials. Survival seasons demand ruthless simplicity.
  

• Find small wins daily: Tiny steps forward build momentum. Even breathing deeper counts. Write them down and put them in a jar to read later.
  

• Honor the bad days: Some days, survival itself is enough. Rest is not weakness, it’s wisdom. (I’ll admit for me, easier said than done!)
  

• Keep something growing: A garden, a business, a friendship, a dream. Life still blooms.

If you’re carrying layered grief and still finding ways to move forward — even inch by inch — you are not alone.

I would be honored to hear your story.

This space was always meant to hold not just my story — but all of ours.

If this resonated with you, I’d be honored if you shared “I’ll Take It From Here” with someone who might need it too.