“I need your expert opinion on something,” I said a bit hysterically to my mother over FaceTime. “Uh... OK,” she replied, unsure how to react to my desperate mood. She had just picked up the phone on the second ring and I hadn’t even bother to say hello.“Does this look like two pink lines to ...

Before my dad moved to the house on La Salle Road, the house where my dad and his siblings spent most of their childhood, and where I lived as an infant, he lived on Peking Road. A short street only a couple of blocks from the harbor, Dad's family's flat was on the third floor of a long, low ...

My younger sister Maggie was a renaissance woman—a no-nonsense nurse practitioner in a rural Vermont community, an accomplished artist, a mother and farmer and beekeeper and maple syrup producer. She also was my stem-cell double, something we discovered two years ago when her lymphoma roared back

I met my boyfriend at a work event. I knew him by sight but not much more, so when we ended up leaving the party together, I didn't expect much to come of it. In fact, I spent the next few days congratulating myself on a successful one-night stand and trying to avoid him in office ... Continue

I had been married for 10 years to one of the smartest and most compassionate people I had ever met. But by the time we hit 10 years, he was also the most depressed, unhappy person I knew. After two attempts at a separation, I finally had enough. All I wanted was for him to be happy. ... Continue