A friend called to talk to me about some issues she was having with her husband. She told me they were in therapy. Again. They’ve been down this road several times before. According to her, she’s tried everything to save her marriage, and she has: counseling, communicating, crying. But the bottom line is if he’s not willing to work on…
It’s 5:20 on a Monday evening. I took a vacation day, and I’ve been sitting in a coffee shop in Logan Square since morning, frantically cramming for the neurobiology portion of my Anatomy and Physiology final. I’m woefully underprepared, and I know it. I can’t stand being underprepared for anything, but I haven’t been able to focus on studying. I’m…
As I was growing up, the idea of fatherhood haunted me. I don’t remember my own father—he died when I was only three. I’ve been told that I resemble him more than my siblings do, so I felt that I was carrying on the legacy of someone I didn’t know. I would often imagine what it would be like to…
When I was six my dad got down on our living room floor and placed a twelve-inch-wide string circle in the middle of the room. He filled the circle with a slew of shiny new marbles, then patiently showed me how to curl my index finger into the crook of my thumb and place the “shooter” marble in the pocket…
When my mother’s father died, she was only two years old. She had a few early memories of him, and in her last days she told me again how her father had given her a ball with red stripes on it, and how she remembered him smoking and coughing, a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. She remembered…
I can’t recall having any kind of Father’s Day observance for my dad. He was someone for whom a celebration would have been a drop in a giant cavern of want and need, beyond what his wife and five children could have delivered. He’d get a card maybe, and then move on to the business of the day—which would have…
Sometimes I think that dads get the short end of the stick. If moms get a more automatic dose of our warm and fuzzy feelings, dads may be the disciplinarians or the ones further in the background. But we need dads! We appreciate them! Their role is so important in the family, in relationships, in the work environment. Though we…
Imagine a scar turning back into living, thriving tissue. Or a cell originally meant to develop into a specific organ becoming capable of turning into any kind of organ. Sounds like science fiction. But these possibilities are closing in fast, thanks to the pathbreaking field of epigenetics. Epigenetics goes beyond the boundaries of what’s possible in changing the function and…
On May 9, 2002, I was on vacation in Florida with my best friend. It was great to have a break from work and just relax. I considered not taking any calls, but decided I would receive calls only from family. During that vacation, I got one of the worst calls of my life. My brother, John, had been in…
