by Veneranda Aguirre Depression first hit me when I was in fourth grade. I didn’t know it was depression. People didn’t talk about it back in the 1980s. And they certainly didn’t give the diagnosis to children. But as a child with undiagnosed autism, I suffered from massive anxiety and depression that kept me up at nights, crying into my pillow out of frustration and fear. As I grew into an adult, depression morphed into irrational anger. If I couldn’t…
by Renee Uitto I always had a good relationship with my mother. She believed that I should have the best of everything and she made sure that I had the best education, therapy and everything else I needed. When I wanted to live on my own after my relationship ended, she supported me then also. When she started having problems with her memory, it threw me for a loop and shocked me. She was asking the same things over and…
by Trish Cantillon “The days are long, and the years are short,” writes Gretchen Rubin in her book, The Happiness Project. It has never felt truer than now, four weeks away from an empty nest. My daughter is already a junior in college, but my son—number two of two—leaves for his freshman year across the country soon. The only parent-life that I have known where my fingerprints have been all over every decision is ending. It’s not necessarily that there…
by Nausheen Eusuf I recently had the wrenching experience of seeing a friend lose her mother to cancer. By the time the cancer was diagnosed, it had already metastasized. Treatment would be palliative, not curative, the oncologist explained. One-and-a-half to two years was the prognosis. This summer, she died at the one-and-a-half year mark. What was horrifying wasn’t the death itself—which was a welcome release—but the suffering that preceded it. The unrelenting pain, the flesh coming loose from the bone,…
by: Lauren Jonik Sometime in 1866, a fourteen year old girl named Elizabeth boarded a ship alone. Her parents had passed away and her step-mother decided to send her to America from their native land that later would be called Germany. That summer had brought the Austro-Prussian War, which lasted for about seven weeks and elicited changes of those in power and of territorial boundaries—as so often happened in Europe whenever a war broke out. Perhaps, Elizabeth’s stepmother felt that…