Margaret Sullivan: A Grandmother on Sex, Contraception and Religious Freedom

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"Smile ? Your Mother Chose Life"

The yellow bumper sticker makes me smile. Not for its indirect meaning but because of my own story. I have always known I was conceived by my missionary parents in love and as the result of a mindful decision that the time was right for them to stop using contraception and have a baby. A choice -- to quote the bumper sticker literally but not its overtone of 'instead of abortion' -- made with premeditation and joy.

For my parents, birth control was integral to a deeply moral and religious worldview of individual responsibility for life that they lived and modeled. Their story, our family's story, serves as a much-needed counterpoint to the current hullabaloo: Denominational institutions and individually led private companies (think Liberty University and Hobby Lobby) demanding the right, in the name of "religious freedom," to impose their anti-contraception beliefs by not covering birth control under employee health plans despite the Obamacare-mandate. Never mind that this keeps their staff-members from exercising their own rights (perhaps also religiously based) to access insurance-covered birth control. Conservative politicians aid and abet them by passing laws limiting access to contraception both directly and by closing women's health clinics (think North Carolina, Virginia and Texas for starters).

Times were hard in 1931, the Depression deep. Before my parents -- people of abiding faith who met at a Student Christian Movement meeting -- were married that June, they traveled to the Margaret Sanger clinic in Chicago for contraceptives, still controversial and not widely used. Much in love, they wanted an active physical life together within marriage. But it was not a responsible time for them to have babies. Dad was a doctoral candidate. Mother had a low-paying job at the YWCA.

By 1933, degree conferred, they were sent to China as Presbyterian missionaries; Dad would teach public health and parasitology in a university. Before going, they wrote a booklet on marriage, sex and birth control for other missionaries. Their blueprint for a faithful marriage was joyful, loving, responsible sex and parenting and, in a wider moral and religious context, on teaching by example, learning from those around them and respecting all people, even those with whom they disagreed.

Unlike many Americans, they had work and an income -- not a lot, but enough. They decided it was time. I arrived the following July. Second Sister, equally planned, arrived two years later. Third Sister -- intended as the first of another pair -- was on the way in 1940 when Mother, Sister and I were evacuated in anticipation of World War II. Our brother is the circumstance -- delayed, much wanted post war child.

Physicality and, as we got older, responsible sex were simply part of unembarrassed family conversation, as much religious and moral upbringing as biology: Body parts had accurate names. Real words (not slang or innuendo) described functions. Sex, for any loving couple, was the ultimate expression of intimacy. Between a man and a woman, (the only kind talked about then, although my parents would welcome the DOMA and Prop 8 decisions if they were alive) it also was endowed with the awesome capacity of creating life. Wait, they told us, ideally for marriage, but always use contraception to avoid unplanned pregnancy.

In 1954, I was engaged to a man who shared my upbringing. My parents gave us Van de Velde's Ideal Marriage (the sex manual before Masters and Johnson and The Joy of Sex). Mother and I went to her gynecologist for me to be fitted with and get a prescription for a diaphragm. Fortunately, we lived in Virginia, not Connecticut where contraception in any form was illegal until Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965.

Nearly 59 years later, we have four children and three young adult grandchildren, all raised with the same moral framework our parents provided us. Our current mantra: we want to be great-grandparents -- but not yet. Meanwhile, safe, responsible sex is the watchword.

Along the way, we learned that contraception can fail -- our kids, we joke, were pre-pill -- and, in the heat of the moment, that sound lessons don't always lead to sound practice. We were fortunate to be healthy, stably married, able to handle the unexpected. Not every one is. When I was carrying our third child, accidental but joyfully anticipated, I was helping in a clinic in Malaya and spoke with a woman my age, bulbous with her ninth pregnancy. She had nearly died giving birth to her eighth child and wanted to make the babies stop coming. But I was prohibited from giving her information on contraception; to do so was illegal there then.

Life has no easy, one-size-fits-all solutions. So I am grateful for Griswold, Roe v. Wade, Planned Parenthood and Obamacare. My grandmotherly wisdom is that encouraging postponement, fostering accurate, responsible sex education at home and in schools across the country, and ensuring as well as insuring access to a wide range of contraception for everyone who wants it are vital so that unwanted babies are few and the decision to have a safe, legal abortion is rare.

In our plural society, Americans hold differing religious and moral views on these matters. I respect that and others' right to act on theirs and to preach them in churches and elsewhere. Nothing in current law prevents that. No one is required to use contraception or have an abortion.

But I expect others to respect my deeply held beliefs and right to practice and preach mine as well.

That's the rub. In too much current political posturing, the few threaten to force their vision of religious morality on all. And believe they have that right. People who glorify individual effort and demand limiting government intrusion in large aspects of national life would impose laws that allow the government and employers to make intrusive decisions in the most private, deeply personal aspects of our lives for me, my husband, our children and grandchildren. For everyone. Although women are most directly impacted, (closing abortion clinics also limits easy access to the contraception they also provide that would limit abortions) this is not just a women's issue, but also a family and societal one.

At bedrock, these groups and politicians do not respect Americans' multiple religious beliefs. Nor trust us to make responsible, moral decisions for ourselves. And why, seeing the yellow bumper sticker, I smile and cite our family's hardly unique religiously based conviction.

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Margaret Anderson: Science, Cures and All the Stuff In Between

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The outlook for science has never been brighter -- we know more today than ever before about the molecular basis for thousands of diseases that impact millions of patients -- but the outlook for funding has also never been bleaker. With the National Institutes of Health losing a billion and a half dollars to the sequester, traditional investors retreating from early-stage life sciences, industry pipelines shrinking, and philanthropy unable to fill the gap, we are poised to leave a huge scientific opportunity on the table, namely our ability to get important new medicines out of the lab and to patients more quickly. And with millions of lives hanging in the balance, it's just not something Americans can afford to do.

FasterCures hosted over 100 congressional staffers, patient advocates, academics and drug developers at a Capitol Hill briefing about the importance of federal support for translational research, the phase of medical R&D between the birth of a basic scientific discovery made in the lab and when a pharmaceutical company tests out a potential new therapy with patients -- or, more plainly put, "the stuff in between" microscope and marketplace.

"If there is anything I believe can bring this nation together for a cause, it is finding cures for disease," said House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in his opening remarks. "We ought to be about research regardless of political leaning, because it is an investment that yields tangible returns for our country." In an environment where Congress is laser-focused on coming up with ways to spend dollars more wisely, his advice to advocates was to emphasize the following message to policymakers:

It is good to be about cures. Disease touches us all, and as compassionate humans we should all care about improving and saving lives.It is good for the economy to invest in research. This leads to job creation and global competitiveness.It is a good way to bend the cost curve of health care. We have mounting deficits and debts, and we should prioritize the allocation of funds to areas like this that have the greatest impact.

"This is really an engineering problem," said NIH Director Francis Collins. "It's about taking a pipeline that is too long and too leaky and fixing it." With each new therapy that comes to market taking up to 15 years to develop and costing over $1 billion, it's more challenging than one might think to successfully navigate the translational stage. There is great momentum in science, and we are poised to start solving several of these problems, particularly with the existence of the new National Center for Advancing Translational Science (NCATS) at NIH, but if we don't continue to invest, we risk losing not only time and lives but a significant driver of economic health.

"NCATS is a unique new entity, purpose-built to solve this central paradox: that we know more than ever before about how the body works and what goes wrong in disease but lack the equivalent ability to fix it," said NCATS director Chris Austin. "We're designed to be perpendicular to how the rest of NIH works, and to focus not on what's different about disease but what is common." He went on to describe the institute as a biomedical equivalent to the Internet, focusing not on creating companies or products but on allowing people with ideas to share them in a more productive way, and de-risking investment by other sectors in this translational space.

Both Collins and Austin said that there is no better time to pursue translational research. Today, we know the molecular causes behind 4,500 diseases, yet there are drugs available to treat just 250 of them.

"We are operating on hope, not hype," said Sharon Terry of the Genetic Alliance. "The network solutions that have overtaken other industries and streamlined them are finally starting to hit the biomedical research space, and we can't afford to lose momentum." She specifically referenced networked programs such as the Clinical and Translational Science Awards at NIH that are significantly advancing systems improvement in the translational phase and are primed, with the proper support, to foster more integrated research across communities. A new report released this week by the Institute of Medicine goes into more detail.

"Industry can't do it alone. ... Companies depend on basic science coming from the NIH," Simeon Taylor of Bristol-Myers Squibb said. He described how Big Pharma relies on the basic science discoveries made early on in the lab to develop drugs for patients who need them so desperately. Just last week, BMS, along with eight other companies, provided 58 compounds for an NCATS pilot program called Discovering New Therapeutic Uses for Existing Molecules, designed to develop partnerships between pharmaceutical companies and the biomedical research community to advance the development of therapeutics.

I had the privilege of moderating this discussion. The message that rose the top was clear: Getting a therapy from discovery to patients requires partnership and collaboration across all sectors in the medical research ecosystem: scientists, regulators, industry, investors, and, most importantly, the patients themselves. An effective R&D system is an efficient one, but reengineering the system in the way we know is possible requires support, and with funding at critically low levels, the ripple effects could be devastating. If we are to improve our odds for success for our patients and for our economy, there is no time to waste.

Follow Margaret Anderson on Twitter: www.twitter.com/fastercures

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Margaret Sullivan: A Grandmother on Sex, Contraception and Religious Freedom

AppId is over the quota
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"Smile ? Your Mother Chose Life"

The yellow bumper sticker makes me smile. Not for its indirect meaning but because of my own story. I have always known I was conceived by my missionary parents in love and as the result of a mindful decision that the time was right for them to stop using contraception and have a baby. A choice -- to quote the bumper sticker literally but not its overtone of 'instead of abortion' -- made with premeditation and joy.

For my parents, birth control was integral to a deeply moral and religious worldview of individual responsibility for life that they lived and modeled. Their story, our family's story, serves as a much-needed counterpoint to the current hullabaloo: Denominational institutions and individually led private companies (think Liberty University and Hobby Lobby) demanding the right, in the name of "religious freedom," to impose their anti-contraception beliefs by not covering birth control under employee health plans despite the Obamacare-mandate. Never mind that this keeps their staff-members from exercising their own rights (perhaps also religiously based) to access insurance-covered birth control. Conservative politicians aid and abet them by passing laws limiting access to contraception both directly and by closing women's health clinics (think North Carolina, Virginia and Texas for starters).

Times were hard in 1931, the Depression deep. Before my parents -- people of abiding faith who met at a Student Christian Movement meeting -- were married that June, they traveled to the Margaret Sanger clinic in Chicago for contraceptives, still controversial and not widely used. Much in love, they wanted an active physical life together within marriage. But it was not a responsible time for them to have babies. Dad was a doctoral candidate. Mother had a low-paying job at the YWCA.

By 1933, degree conferred, they were sent to China as Presbyterian missionaries; Dad would teach public health and parasitology in a university. Before going, they wrote a booklet on marriage, sex and birth control for other missionaries. Their blueprint for a faithful marriage was joyful, loving, responsible sex and parenting and, in a wider moral and religious context, on teaching by example, learning from those around them and respecting all people, even those with whom they disagreed.

Unlike many Americans, they had work and an income -- not a lot, but enough. They decided it was time. I arrived the following July. Second Sister, equally planned, arrived two years later. Third Sister -- intended as the first of another pair -- was on the way in 1940 when Mother, Sister and I were evacuated in anticipation of World War II. Our brother is the circumstance -- delayed, much wanted post war child.

Physicality and, as we got older, responsible sex were simply part of unembarrassed family conversation, as much religious and moral upbringing as biology: Body parts had accurate names. Real words (not slang or innuendo) described functions. Sex, for any loving couple, was the ultimate expression of intimacy. Between a man and a woman, (the only kind talked about then, although my parents would welcome the DOMA and Prop 8 decisions if they were alive) it also was endowed with the awesome capacity of creating life. Wait, they told us, ideally for marriage, but always use contraception to avoid unplanned pregnancy.

In 1954, I was engaged to a man who shared my upbringing. My parents gave us Van de Velde's Ideal Marriage (the sex manual before Masters and Johnson and The Joy of Sex). Mother and I went to her gynecologist for me to be fitted with and get a prescription for a diaphragm. Fortunately, we lived in Virginia, not Connecticut where contraception in any form was illegal until Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965.

Nearly 59 years later, we have four children and three young adult grandchildren, all raised with the same moral framework our parents provided us. Our current mantra: we want to be great-grandparents -- but not yet. Meanwhile, safe, responsible sex is the watchword.

Along the way, we learned that contraception can fail -- our kids, we joke, were pre-pill -- and, in the heat of the moment, that sound lessons don't always lead to sound practice. We were fortunate to be healthy, stably married, able to handle the unexpected. Not every one is. When I was carrying our third child, accidental but joyfully anticipated, I was helping in a clinic in Malaya and spoke with a woman my age, bulbous with her ninth pregnancy. She had nearly died giving birth to her eighth child and wanted to make the babies stop coming. But I was prohibited from giving her information on contraception; to do so was illegal there then.

Life has no easy, one-size-fits-all solutions. So I am grateful for Griswold, Roe v. Wade, Planned Parenthood and Obamacare. My grandmotherly wisdom is that encouraging postponement, fostering accurate, responsible sex education at home and in schools across the country, and ensuring as well as insuring access to a wide range of contraception for everyone who wants it are vital so that unwanted babies are few and the decision to have a safe, legal abortion is rare.

In our plural society, Americans hold differing religious and moral views on these matters. I respect that and others' right to act on theirs and to preach them in churches and elsewhere. Nothing in current law prevents that. No one is required to use contraception or have an abortion.

But I expect others to respect my deeply held beliefs and right to practice and preach mine as well.

That's the rub. In too much current political posturing, the few threaten to force their vision of religious morality on all. And believe they have that right. People who glorify individual effort and demand limiting government intrusion in large aspects of national life would impose laws that allow the government and employers to make intrusive decisions in the most private, deeply personal aspects of our lives for me, my husband, our children and grandchildren. For everyone. Although women are most directly impacted, (closing abortion clinics also limits easy access to the contraception they also provide that would limit abortions) this is not just a women's issue, but also a family and societal one.

At bedrock, these groups and politicians do not respect Americans' multiple religious beliefs. Nor trust us to make responsible, moral decisions for ourselves. And why, seeing the yellow bumper sticker, I smile and cite our family's hardly unique religiously based conviction.

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Margaret Wheeler Johnson: barbecue

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"Is that what I think it is?"

This wasn't the way I intended to begin our engagement. Ali put so much into the proposal. Hours planning the trip to Mexico that she'd surprised me with that morning. The stress of bringing a concealed diamond through two airports (no one has ever watched the TSA so closely). She had booked a hotel on the coast, and after we'd eaten fish tacos by the ocean and gone back to a room that had its own hammock, she gave me a ring she'd designed herself that couldn't have been more perfect for me.

And all I could come up with in a moment I had looked forward to for months was a response about as grateful and enthusiastic as, "Cool. Did you bring sunscreen?"

Ali thinks, wrongly, that I was unimpressed. The truth is that I didn't know what to do in a situation that felt so scripted by romantic comedies and YouTube proposal videos that it was hard to summon a response that felt authentic but also good enough. TV writer Sarah Heyward recently tweeted, "I won't say yes unless Nancy Meyers writes and directs my future marriage proposal." Because Nancy hadn't written mine, I didn't know what to say.

My underwhelming answer didn't set us back too much. Ali passed out almost immediately in exhaustion, we spent the rest of that late January weekend drinking margaritas on the beach, and we were getting married, which was the point.

We hurtled forward into an engagement that we decided only needed to be five months long. We wanted It to happen in June, didn't like the idea of waiting a year and a half, and, in true type-A fashion, saw no reason this wedding-planning thing everyone gets so worked up about couldn't be executed efficiently and without fanfare.

Very soon I realized that an engagement was not what I thought it was.

Ali and I are very different. I worry about things I can control, she worries about things she can't. I am loud when I am happy, she yells when she is mad. Ali has always been cool. I got only one detention ever and asked permission to use the hour to get ahead on homework. I am given to grand gestures and swooping affection, Ali to dry humor, skillful negotiation and quietly slipping her hand into mine.

These differences serve us well when it comes time to face the world each day. They were not so useful when it came to planning how we would get hitched.

Unsurprisingly, Ali would have preferred to elope. Her appetite for social tableaux is about a minute long. For the first month of our engagement, she referred to our wedding as The Barbecue, and she planned to wear jeans.

I didn't want a cathedral train or a reception at the Pierre -- once upon a time I was a New Orleans debutante, and five white ball gowns, weighed down with everything they represented, were enough to last me a lifetime.

But I wanted a something. An intimate, beautiful something. We have a lot to celebrate. Ali says she thought she'd never like anyone enough to marry them. I thought I might marry someone but possibly wouldn't like them much.

The only recurring childhood dream I can recall is one I had when I was 7 or 8. In the nightmare it was always 10 minutes before my wedding, and I knew I was marrying the wrong guy, but everything was already paid for so I felt I had to go through with it.

I think we can all tell what that dream was about.

Our real wedding is, for me, in part, a celebration of that dream not in any way coming true. I am marrying a woman I adore in front of the people who know me best, and it all feels deeply right.

So Ali granted me a "something." Figuring out what exactly was the challenge.

Yes, a few decisions were easy. No bouquets, no wedding party, no band, very few guests. Her parents' backyard on the Long Island Sound. One of Ali's best friends as the officiant.

The rest was hard, at least at first. Why did I cry on the subway over the Sunday brunch we're not having? I have never understood the logic of seeing everyone all over again the next morning when you're hungover and look considerably less attractive than you did the night before. And why did I insist for several weeks that Ali shouldn't see my dress -- or me -- before the wedding? Weddings, I discovered, are excellent at temporarily suspending your ability to think for yourself.

In a moment of unprecedented cultural acceptance of gay marriage, I also failed to realize that certain customs are just trickier for two girls to execute. How would we walk into the ceremony? How could we do our first dance in a non-awkward way? What would Ali wear that wasn't a dress -- not her thing -- but didn't make her look like a dude, which is also not her thing? What would I wear?

Which brings me to the dress.

A lot of the things we didn't agree on I could handle. Sure, it's a startling moment when you realize that because you are marrying your equal, you cannot foist your tastes upon her. It was a surprise when we didn't gravitate toward the same china pattern, and when she thought the flowers I liked were fussy, except for peonies, my favorite, which she admitted she finds boring. I think I took all of that remarkably in stride.

But nothing prepared me for the moment when the woman I love said to me, "Don't you think you should wear a short dress?"

"So not a wedding dress," one of my best friends said when I reported this development.

"Right," I said.

"Oh, I don't think so," said my friend, bless her.

I wanted long. I knew that, somehow, feeling beautiful on that day depended on it. Beyond that, though, I couldn't see it.

I modeled wedding gowns for my friends on several pedestals across New York City, including one dress that I swear was the most flattering thing I will ever put on my body. They oohed and aahed and were generally wonderful, but I just couldn't get into it.

I felt like I'd seen all of those dresses before on other brides at other weddings, and also that most of them made too much of a statement. I hated the idea of The Bride as the star of the show. Not only was I one of two brides, I wanted whatever I wore to fit not a teenager making a curtsey but an adult making a vow.

I found my dress by accident, I think in March. We were in a department store. Ali was trying on the pair of white scuba pants she is wearing down the aisle, and I was meandering in the racks. The dress I happened upon wasn't a wedding gown, but it was white and it was ... interesting. It looked like something I could wear on a Saturday night near the water in June.

As I was trying it on, Ali texted me asking for my opinion on a top she'd found. I texted back that I wanted her thoughts on a dress. She came around barefoot from the other fitting room in a garment since known as "The Pocahontas Shirt," opened the door and said, "Oh. Wow." I bought it.

So not all of this engagement's surprises were distressing. Some were actually funny, at least in retrospect. April was hilarious. I didn't expect it to take me three hair appointments to realize that The Taylor Swift wasn't me. I didn't expect the makeup artist to ask me in front of my fiancée and future mother-in-law what I plan to do about my eyebrow "situation." (I'll say it again: I am blond and own tweezers. I have no situation.) I didn't expect that when our parents met for the first time in New Orleans, the water pressure would go out in my entire hometown right before everyone needed to get ready for lunch.

The more challenging surprises were tough in part because I took their difficulty to mean that I was a defective engaged person. When finding secular wedding readings that aren't maudlin proved nearly impossible, I decided I was a fraudulent and failed English major. When we moved into a new apartment a month before the wedding -- it was May, and we are now confirmed masochists -- I thought I should have been more organized. In spite of an Internet full of articles on the money issues, family issues, body-image issues and general stress weddings bring up for everyone, I was convinced that I should be doing it all better.

The hard parts also caught me off guard because the most important part of all of this felt so impossibly easy. My unromantic answer to Ali's proposal reflected most of all how unreasonably certain I have been since I met her that this was it.

That unreasonable certainty is evident in an article I published soon after we met, in which I outlined what a good relationship entails. I wrote it quickly, almost urgently, with a sense of authority that a veteran of not too many relationships had no business having, much less expressing, exactly one month into this one. And yet, weeks into dating Ali, I wrote, "You just know."

The certainty, which Ali evidently shared, carried us through our early aisle-or-no-aisle discussion, the fun but also delicate process of becoming part of one another's families and my recent seating-chart meltdown. It also got us through some significant curveballs that our life outside the wedding -- we did somehow manage to maintain one -- threw at us along the way. As a result, when one of our guests asked me two weeks ago if I'm nervous, I realized I'm not. Not even a little.

Being so certain has a couple of significant hazards, though. In addition to making me think everything was going to go more smoothly than it possibly could, it threatened to obscure one of the best parts of being engaged.

I realized this last weekend when we were in the car on the way home from Ali's parents' house. I was thinking about how we're almost there. My dress is ready. I finally figured out my hair. (I should have known The Naomi Watts was it all along.) I've purchased what I believe to be the appropriate underwear, and my top-secret, possibly misguided wedding-gift plan for Ali is under way. Flowers are ordered, menu tasted, Ali's meticulously curated playlist complete. My family descends on New York next week.

I looked at her driving, at that profile I now know so well, and suddenly felt all over again how intensely I wanted to keep her. That's when I realized that I've been so certain of this, of us, and so focused on the event that will legally bind us that I haven't spent enough time letting myself be reasonably giddy about what is happening.

I found a person whose integrity and intelligence floor me just about every day, who works hard, makes superior friends, tells me the truth, lets me know where she is and cares where I am, who makes me laugh and hears me out and IMs me things like, "I'm extra into you today," who agreed to our Intimate, Beautiful Something Barbecue. I fell hard for a woman who will always be slightly better than me, and she loves me back.

Ali, what I meant to say is "Yes."

Follow Margaret Wheeler Johnson on Twitter: www.twitter.com/mwjohnso

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Margaret McLean: Bulger Victim's Wife: "This Is Why I Stay and Fight"

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Co-authored by Jon Leiberman and Margaret McLean - authors of the upcoming book "The Gavel Strikes" on the trial of James "Whitey Bulger"

"This is why I stay and fight--I want to show that my husband Michael was an innocent person and that he wasn't involved with anything having to do with Whitey."

Those poignant words came during our wide-ranging conversation with Patricia Donahue several days ago. People may not know Patricia's name - yet. But - they are about to.

On the eve of jury selection in the James "Whitey" Bulger trial - Patricia has a message. She will not let her husband die in vain.

Patricia has been waiting to be heard in a court of law since 1982. That was the year when James "Whitey" Bulger along with members of his criminal enterprise allegedly gunned down Michael when he gave an acquaintance a ride home from a popular Boston restaurant. Unbeknownst to Michael, the acquaintance happened to be an FBI informant against Bulger in another murder investigation. The FBI leaked the information and the informant instantly became a target. Thus, it was simply Michael Donahue's bad luck that he drove to the South Boston waterfront that day to buy bait and supplies for a fishing trip he had planned for his eight year old son, Tommy. It was bad luck that Michael stopped by the restaurant on his way home, and decided to be a good Samaritan offering to give someone he knew a ride. A tragic example of being in the right place at the wrong time. Michael is one of 19 victims listed in the sweeping criminal complaint against Whitey Bulger. Patricia says she will do everything she can to make sure her husband doesn't just become a number - but rather a loud of voice for justice.

So much time has elapsed since Michael's death, yet Patricia still remembers the day. "What kind of system do we have that my husband was killed at 6:00 o'clock. I saw a bulletin flash across my television screen that there was a gangland slaying. When I watched the news, I saw my father-in-law's car, and knew Michael was driving it. No one would give me any information. I knew one man had died and the other was in the hospital. I called the police and every hospital in the Boston area, and no one would give me information. What kind of system do we have?"

Indeed- it is a system that took close to 3 decades to arrest the man police say stole the love of Patricia's life. Now, she and her sons, Tommy, Michael and Shawn, will enter a Boston courtroom and look Mr. Bulger right in the eyes as he finally stands trial. It will be a moment they have longed for and will never forget.

Patricia: "I don't think you know how big this case is really going to be until you step in that courtroom on June 10th. I'm looking forward to hearing a lot of the testimony because it's going to fill in a lot of the empty blanks for me...I have mixed emotions because I've never been involved in any type of trial like this. I'm worried about how my children are going to handle all this."

The Donahue family has attended every pretrial hearing since Bulger's arraignment on federal murder and racketeering charges in July of 2011.

Please join us for all of our thoughts on the victims, their families, and jury selection in a special Wild About Trial Spreecast at 9pm Eastern on Tuesday night. You can also submit your questions.

Follow Margaret McLean on Twitter: www.twitter.com/MargaretMclean_

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