`It's Janet’s birthday," I tell the person who answers the phone, expecting her to say, "It is? I'm so glad you mentioned this." Or "I know. We're having a little party this afternoon." But she says, "Oh." She says it flat, without inflection, in a way that means "I don't care. What difference does it make? Why are you telling me?"
Read MoreHer history is hospitals. They're where she lived, where she grew up and where parts of her died. They were the best hospitals, the Ivy Leagues of psychiatric care. Her father, a heart surgeon, trusted these places, with their names that overshadowed their failures. They had big reputations and bigger price tags. He took her to one after another. But his daughter slipped deeper into herself and further away from him. He wouldn't give up. He refused to accept the "We're sorry, but there's nothing more we can do" he kept hearing. "If you try something four times and it doesn't work, then you try it again," says Dr. Frank Spencer, now in his 80s.
Read MoreShe died on a Monday in September between a weekend when my son was home and a Tuesday night pizza party. The sun didn't blink; the world didn't pause. Nothing happened - there was no presentiment of change, not even a flicker of feelings to make me think of her, my long ago friend, a woman I loved, a woman who was good to me, passing through and by and on. Flo Grossman died on Sept. 25 and I didn't know until Dec. 19. How can this be? The world should have felt different that Monday - slighter, duller, because the space filled by a vibrant life was suddenly left vacant.
Read MoreTerry Orcutt spends her days on the phone and most evenings, too, listening, taking notes, asking questions. "Where do you live? What do you need? How many children do you have?" Her concern is real. Her love for people she doesn't know is real, too. It's what drives her and what sustains her, call after call. "Love one another as I love you." This is Christianity's number one rule. Terry Orcutt lives this rule. She loves without question. She sees God in all people. So does her husband, Jim.
Read MoreA long time ago, when my daughter was 14, she had a homework assignment: Choose six people, dead or alive, real or fictional, with whom you would want to be stuck on a deserted island.I assumed I'd be one of them. Her brother was, and her godfather, and Mary Poppins and Matafu, a resourceful young boy in a book she was reading, and Doogie Howser, a TV doctor.
Read MoreYou try to teach them the eternals, that life is good, and people are kind, and nothing is so bad that you can't get through it. And most days you believe this. But then you replay history, or you watch the news, or you pick up a paper and see the face of yet another person maimed, killed, robbed, blown up, beaten, kidnapped, raped, sick and dying, and you think you're selling your kids a pack of lies.
Read MoreMy father was not overtly, nor even subtly, religious . He hardly ever went to church and I didn't have a sense that he prayed, though at the end of his life he told me that St. Jude was his good buddy. I imagine, though, that he talked to St. Jude in the way he talked to me, not often couching his requests with "please" and "if possible," but stating them directly and firmly as in, "I need you to do this for me." At the end of his life he handed me a crucifix, which he said he carried with him throughout the Second World War.
Read MoreWith the puppy, it was simply a matter of carrying her outside, plunking her on the grass, and letting her do her thing. She was 6 weeks old when we got her and was house-trained in a few weeks. No "how-to" books. No "Ten steps to housebreaking your pooch." And absolutely no guilt that she was too young to introduce to the backyard, or that our approach might cause her irreparable psychological harm.
Read MoreI will tell him tomorrow. I will pick up the phone and call his office and talk to his receptionist and say, "I have to cancel my appointment." And she will say, "When would you like to reschedule?" And I will say . . .
What will I say?
Read MoreI am on the phone with Rosemary, my best friend since second grade. I used to talk to her on the old black phone in the kitchen of the house I grew up in. And she used to talk to me on the old black phone that sat on a table to the left of her front door.
"Want to come over?"
"I'll ask my mother."
Fifty-two years. At least a million conversations. This one is hard. They've all been hard since her son, Mark, left for Iraq.
Read MoreThis is the first day of Mr. and Mrs. Peter Bigelow Sahlin Jr.'s officially blessed life together. Yesterday they were married. Today they are married. Already, one night is gone. Already the world has changed, and my friend's son and his new bride have changed, too, in obvious and in imperceptible ways.
Read MoreShe has a face like a torn scone. That's what my mother-in-law would have said. And then she would have let it go. She was not the type of woman who would have spent even a minute of her time trying to get a permanently dour someone to smile. So why can't I let it go? Why do I think that if I work hard enough, if I try just a little more, I'll find underneath this woman's scowl a hint, a glimmer, of a smile?
Read MoreI thought it was the rain, long days of it. No sunshine. No color. I thought, I'll be fine when the rain stops. But when it stopped, finally, last Monday and the sky brightened for a while, I wasn't fine. It was June 5, my mother's birthday, and though she has been absent from this life for many years, the lack of her felt new, my loss startling, like walking into a familiar room and banging into a glass door.
Read MoreIt is not a beach book. It is not funny like "Marley & Me" or intriguing like "Beach Road" or trendy like all the Whitey Bulger books now suddenly in print. It is, no doubt about it, totally incompatible with summer and sand and sea air laced with Coppertone and flimsy bathing suits and cups full of lemonade. "Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust" is exactly what you don't want to read on a summer day. Which is why it's not on any summer reading list that I've come across. But here is why it should be.
Read MoreIt's not something we talked about, and we talked about everything. But not this. Not then. Not now. Not ever. Our imagined husbands might go off to fight a war someday, we said, and our sons, if we had sons, might someday be called to fight. We were, even as small children, familiar with battle. We'd read the poetry my father had written in combat. We'd watched "The Fighting Sullivans." But we never imagined the kind of war we're mired in now. We never anticipated raising a child and seeing him grown and married and settled, then suddenly unsettled and terrifyingly vulnerable. We never expected that at 35 he'd be called to serve.
Read MoreBLACK HILLS, S.D. - You'd think that we'd know his name. You'd think if a man from Boston, born on Harrison Avenue, orphaned at the age of 1, beaten and abused his whole childhood, grew up and did something great something no one else has ever done we'd have at least heard of him. You'd think that conceiving and working for 35 years on the biggest sculpture in the world, bigger than the pyramids in Egypt, would be a shoo-in to fame.
Read MoreI had been thinking about her. That's the way these things happen. Coincidence? A random pairing of events? Or something more? Sound just out of earshot? Sunlight, bright and steady, but in another room? I had been remembering who knows why? being a child sitting on a kitchen chair, my face pressed against a window, waiting for my aunt to come and play with me. I could hardly say her name. "Rain coming?" I would ask my mother, "Lorraine" too big a word, "Aunt Lorraine" impossible.
Read MoreA young man interviewed me for a college assignment, and he asked some interesting questions. "Do you think people like me inspire people like you?" He has cerebral palsy. He has difficulty walking. I walk the way I breathe, without thinking about it. His question stayed with me.
Read MoreThey met in Virginia in 1946. They were in their 20s. She was a Navy nurse, and he was a Navy doctor. He noticed her in the cafeteria, then on the dance floor. "All the fly boys liked to dance with her." He liked how she walked - "Lily had her own kind of gait." And how "she could recite poetry like mad." And how, at the age of 16, "all on her own she decided to become a Catholic." There wasn't anything that Dr. Jack Manning didn't like about Lily Sharpe Fields. They married at the US Naval Chapel in Portsmouth, Va., and a year later Jack Manning brought his new bride and infant son home to Taunton…
Read MoreShe has lost her words. Last year, I could feed them to her. Fill in the blanks. "How is . . . the bald one?" she said when I came to visit. She exaggerated bald, drawled the word, made a joke, covered up. I covered up, too. "How is Bruce? He's great. Definitely bald, but great."
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