Lynn family bands together in the wake of another tragedy

LYNN – Michelle Conlon would have had every justification if she had looked up to the sky and asked, “why me?”But, says her family, that was not her way.”Never,” said her mother, Diane, Friday in the family living room in Lynn. “I never once heard her say that. And we haven’t either.”Conlon, the 38-year-old assistant swimming coach for Lynn English, died Thursday after a battle with cancer that lasted just under a year. But the story of Conlon, and how she fought through a myriad of life’s inequities, goes back much further than last March, when she was diagnosed with the lymphoma that would take her life. It began 14 years ago when her younger brother, Michael, died in an auto accident while he and his sister were returning from a weekend in Vermont.”When he died,” Diane Conlon recalled softly, “his head was in her lap.”The accident triggered an auto-immune deficiency that plagued her for the rest of her life and indirectly led to her death.”When she was diagnosed last March,” her father, Bart, said, “we were told that if you were going to get cancer, that was one of the better types to get. But not with her condition.”Similarly, five years ago, she developed a serious bacterial infection that spread through her body that – again – would have been much more easily contained had it not been for her condition.”We thought we were going to lose her then,” her father said.Yet through all of her health issues, “she never complained,” her mother said. “You would never have known she was sick. She kept working (as a financial adviser for UBS) and her clients wouldn’t have known that she was sick.”She went through a lot,” her mother said. “But she kept going and kept smiling.”The Conlons are an athletic family. Bart Conlon, the former director at Lynn Tech, was once the school’s baseball coach and was a founder of the Nipper Clancy Tournament. After he retired from coaching, he became a much-sought-after football referee.The Conlons – all four of them (Melissa, Michelle, Michael and Marianne) were swimmers and soccer players, and much later, the three girls took turns coaching at English (where Marianne is still the head coach).And it was swimming, says Marianne Duncan, that kept her older sister focused – and motivated – as she fought to stay alive for as long as possible after the diagnosis.”It kept her going,” she said. “It was like for one or two hours a day she could get her mind off of the fact that she was sick and think about coaching, and the awesome kids we had this year.”The Lynn swimming coaches ? we were her other family,” Duncan said. “The swimming community and the English team ? that’s what kept her going.”This past September, Michelle received the news that the cancer was terminal and that she had “a month ? maybe six weeks ? left to live,” Diane Conlon said.”We put together a bucket list,” she said, “and as we accomplished each of her goals, we checked them off.”The whole family – sisters, husbands and grandchildren – went to Myrtle Beach “and we thought it would be the last time we would be able to do something like this.”It was Michelle’s fondest wish to wring everything out of life she could before she died, her family said.”She accepted it,” her mother said. “But she was never bitter about it. And we can’t be bitter about it. We have to keep going. There was a certain peace about it. She wasn’t afraid to die. The only thing that bothered her was how it would affect us.But, she says, “it would be a disservice to the lives our son and our daughter had to be bitter,” she said.”We have tremendous friends and family, and a wonderful support system,” Bart Conlon said, noting that Father Joseph Rossi from St. Pius V Parish has been particularly supportive through the ordeal.One of the last things Michelle Conlon did was help coach her team at the Lynn City Swim Meet a week ago last Saturday.”She so wanted to be there,” Duncan said. “Our kids dedicated every event they swam to her and we came in ahead of Classical, which