Mother's warning saved her life

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Mother's warning saved her life

It was a book that alerted me, 'Beyond Belief' by Emlyn Williams. I read it when my youngest child was in nursery school. She had a sweatshirt with her name painted on it. After I finished the book, I tossed the sweatshirt in the trash.

'Beyond Belief' is a true story about a man and woman who kidnapped and killed children in Great Britain in the early 1960s. At a carnival one day, they followed a group of young girls and listened as the girls called each other by name. When one was alone, they raced up to her, used her name and told her that something horrible had happened at her home and that they had been sent to get her.

She went with them, and they killed her.

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With all we know, how can we let the Bosnia killings continue?

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The photograph by Agence France-Presse no doubt will win a Pulitzer prize. It is the face of war, a 77-year-old man, his white hair wild, his eyes wet with tears, his cheeks and forehead scraped and bloodied from shrapnel, holding up a hand that says, "stop" to the photographer, but that also says "stop" to the world.

Mensur Dragnic, the man in the picture, lost his entire family last Monday: his 68-year-old wife; his 49-year-old son; his 42-year-old daughter; his son-in-law, 41; and his two grandchildren; 16 and 10.

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This Love Goes On and On

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I have to piece together their love story. I know so little of it. I don't know him, and I hardly know her, for I have been privy to only the briefest outline of her life. And yet she inspires me. She's 90 and still in love with her husband - not just fond of him, or devoted to him, or committed to fulfilling an obligation. She's in love. She says his name and her face softens. She tells stories about him and her eyes shine like a girl’s…

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The rarest doctors treat patients, not disease

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What you want when you or someone you love is sick is a caring human being on the other end of a telephone line. You don't want voice-mail. ("Press your party's extension, now.") You don't want to be put on hold. You don't want to be told that the doctor returns all phone calls after 5:00 p.m. and doesn't have an opening until March 13. You want someone to listen to you, to advise you, to treat you as if you matter…

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`Life' asks us to make peace with past before it's too late

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`Life' asks us to make peace with past before it's too late

It isn't a flawless movie, but it's powerful. "My Life" is about a man, diagnosed with terminal cancer, who decides to make a video for his unborn child so the child will know his father.

The man, who has about four months to live, sets a camera on a tripod, sits in front of it and talks, hesitantly at first, uncomfortable before the mechanical eye.

After a while, the process gets easier and he begins to record everything. He reads a Dr. Seuss book to his unborn son. He teaches him to shave. He demonstrates the correct way to walk into a room, not self-consciously but with confidence.

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The woman no one remembers

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The woman no one remembers

It was a small ad that ran in the theater section of the New York Times last Thursday. The graphics were simple; nothing clever stood out. Even the words were old, the promotion a cliche: "Cyrano. The Musical. The Greatest Love Of All." And yet it has stuck with me, nagged at me. “The Greatest Love of All?” Most everyone knows the story of Cyrano de Bergerac, a love-struck young man who pens eloquent, romantic letters to the woman he loves, only in another man's name. Because he is ugly, Cyrano fears rejection. Because he doesn't trust in the power of love, Cyrano hides his identity. And so he writes love letters for a handsome man who uses his words and emotions to woe Roxanne.

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Remembering the tough times

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It's 10 days after the operation and everything is getting back to normal. The hole that opened in the earth has closed, and falling into it is almost - though not quite - a memory. All's well that ends well is what we say, what we repeat, what we believe. My husband is home. He is healing. Life, as we've known it, returns a little more each day to the way it was, to the way we want it to be. That's the goal, getting back to normal, putting the operation behind…

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Caring friends help prevent a free fall

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Caring friends help prevent a free fall

The pain started last December, but he didn't recognize it as pain. He had a funny feeling in his jaw as he danced and he was breathless. So he stopped dancing and muttered to himself that he was 46 and he was getting old.

It happened two months later, again on a dance floor. This time he registered the discomfort, made the association with dancing and modified his behavior. He gave up dancing and the pain went away.

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Let's get serious about drunk drivers

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The stories make headlines, then go away; you don't think of them for more than a few days because there are other stories to read and other issues to ponder, plus life to live, bills to pay, appointments to keep, children to care for, parents to tend to, and on it goes.

But if you consider that the line in the middle of the road that divides traffic is just a line not a barrier; if you acknowledge that the sidewalks on which your children walk to school, and the yards in which they play are only psychologically removed from the roads on which cars travel; if you realize that highway safety is a personal responsibility and not something the state can actually enforce, then you'd remember the stories and work for and demand stricter anti-drunk driving laws, because you'd know just how vulnerable you and every one of the people you love really are.

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Parents have only themselves to blame for classroom chaos

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God help the teachers. I used to teach, a lifetime ago when kids actually had respect for adults. They learned this respect at home. "You do what your teacher tells you," parents said. If a teacher told you to stand in a corner all day, you did. And if your parents found out, they yelled at you, not at the teacher.

Now, of course, kids challenge everything. They know that teachers have no real authority, so they have little respect for them.

This makes teaching difficult.

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After the mammogram comes the fear

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Two years ago, it looked like a rich grandparent's parlor. The carpet was thick, the upholstered couches and chairs, elegant. Everything matched: furniture, drapes, end tables, lamps. The room evoked a sense of calm and comfort.

And yet it was all pretense, mental Valium, because the Sagoff Center at Faulkner Hospital was never a parlor. It is, and always was, a waiting area for women who've come for mammograms. A door opens and on the other side of a designer wall women sit in thin, cotton hospital robes on hard, armless chairs, waiting to be X-rayed and told they can go back into the land of the living - at least for a while.

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We are all to blame for death of Samore

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I'm looking for someone to blame. If I can blame someone or something, then I can put the death of 13-year-old Samore Vassel out of my head and get on with the pretense that life is manageable, and we can keep the wolves from our doors.

Samore Vassel lived in Dorchester with his father and younger brother and sister. Last week he was in Brooklyn, visiting his mother, when he was shot and killed. The boy had told his mother he was going to a movie with a friend. But he and his buddy went off to meet a couple of girls instead.

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Mother Teresa: Her message is love

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Mother Teresa: Her message is love

I think of it as myth, now, as a fairy tale I once believed. Truth has been downsized to fit a package I can carry around with me. The whole truth grew too heavy and cumbersome with age. The whole truth demanded a responsibility I continue to shun.

But I remember the child who accepted the whole truth, the child I was, who knew that life on Earth was only a test, that Heaven was the reward, not anything we might win here on Earth, and that the sole purpose of existence was to love God in this world and be happy with Him in the next.

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