Tuesday, October 6, 2009

Nie Nie Dialogues


Some red baloons
Originally uploaded by Gijlmar
Techno-pundits are forever telling us that the internet connects us and for tons of reasons, I have always thought that this was a load of crap. That was until this summer, when I started my blog after being inspired by another.

The Nie Nie Dialogues is a blog written by a lovely, creative mom in Salt Lake City, Utah and for a few weeks at the beginning of the summer, I started reading it after seeing her posts. Even though we had very little in common - she was a Mormon, a vegetarian and lived several thousand miles away- I loved how she was able to bring such joy and beauty to documenting the every day moments of her life and I decided that I might make an effort to do the same - except I would try to bring on the funny.

Then a terrible thing happened. The entries stopped for a time and then a posting: Nie and her husband - who she referred to affectionately in her postings as Mr. Nielsen - had suffered a terrible plan crash. Mr. Nielsen, with 30 percent of his body badly burned in the crash, dragged his wife from the wreckage. She was in a coma for more than 3 months and when she awoke, a good deal of her body had been burned. Her prognosis for recovery was grim.

When I read this, I was devastated and cried as if I had known her my whole life. I had come to love her and her family beyond measure and wanted more than anything for her to be okay. I wanted her to get back to her beautiful family and the life that she had so lovingly chronicled.

All of this because of the Internet.

There is a happy ending here, though. Nie has made a very strong recovery, is back with her family and is blogging again with the same enthusiasm that she did in her early days. For this I am grateful.

You can check her site out at http://thenieniedialogues.blogspot.com

Or today on The Oprah Winfrey Show. You heard it here first.

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