When my husband retired last fall, we discovered that our new reduced income left us unable to afford newspaper subscriptions. Bad timing. With the upcoming elections, we wanted to remain as deeply informed as possible on national news and politics, wh… Continue reading
Christmas Day 2018 was one of the worst days of my life. Just over a month before, my husband of 32 years, Dale, died two days before Thanksgiving of a sudden massive heart attack. He was only 57 and we had been together since we were teenagers. To say… Continue reading
The food was great, the wine was flowing and your friends gave you great gifts for your birthday. You were expecting a wonderful evening. But at the end of the night, you felt let down. And the sad part is — this isn’t the first time it’s happened. You… Continue reading
As a teenager, I saw the Barbra Streisand/Robert Redford movie The Way We Were and cried. As the theater lights went up, my mother looked at my tear-streaked face and commented dryly, “You really don’t know true sadness yet, do you?” In that moment, I … Continue reading
In 1994, Mary Pipher wrote Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls, a groundbreaking, bestselling book examining the complicated lives of teenage girls. It was the result of her work as a clinical psychologist with this age group. And i… Continue reading
For one long semester in 1974, my heart was a tomb. I didn’t know a soul on the campus of George Mason University — then, strictly a commuter college in Fairfax, Va. Despite 5,000 students milling around me, I felt like the only person on Earth. Howeve… Continue reading
Paula Durlofsky may be a psychologist, but that hardly made her immune last fall to the emotional wallop of her second daughter heading off to college, leaving Durlofsky and her husband Larry, of Bryn Mawr, Pa., living in what felt like an extremely em… Continue reading
After less than a year as a widower, my then 72-year-old father Al decided, on occasion, to change the radio station to something other than 24-hour news, to close the bedroom window (at least halfway) on chilly nights and to sometimes, without protest… Continue reading
“Someday, some little girl who’s probably not even born yet is going to steal you away from me, and I hate her already.” No, I didn’t say it and I don’t remember even thinking it when my son was born, although when I met my daughter-in law to be, somet… Continue reading
In the next few months, thousands of northerners — so-called “snowbirds” — will escape their snowy, cold climates to spend the winter in warm, sunny spots in the southern or western part of the United States. My wife and I will be among them. We’ve bee… Continue reading