Our family loved Easter. We loved the beautiful church service, the pretty new dresses for our girls. I always woke up excited to celebrate God’s promise of new life. This year, I woke up with a knot in my stomach. It had been three months since I’d watched Emilie, my six-year-old daughter, board the yellow […]
I pulled the bedcovers over my head and closed my eyes tight, trying to shut out the world, the pain, everything. It was Thursday afternoon, and my three youngest kids were home from school. At that moment all I wanted was to escape. I didn’t want to be the wife of Steven Curtis Chapman, Christian […]
Mrs. Naman, we need you to come to the high school—immediately.” The phone call was from the secretary at my 15-year-old daughter Natalie’s school. I have three children, one older than Natalie, one younger. I had never been summoned to a school office before. And certainly not for anything like this. It just wasn’t possible! […]
Our lost year. Looking back, that’s what I consider it, that first year after my husband was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. A gerontologist at the Cleveland Clinic broke the news to us one afternoon in January 2012. “Bob has what’s known as early-onset Alzheimer’s,” he told us. I was stunned. Yes, Bob had been having some […]
Father’s day cards from Grant–zero. Birthday cards from Grant–zero. The silence is deafening.” I didn’t even have to look at the postcard from my dad to tell my therapist what it said. The words were seared in my memory. Dad was always finding fault. Keeping score. There was no change in my therapist’s calm expression. […]
Retirement. I wasn’t just looking forward to it. I yearned for it like a desert nomad glimpsing an oasis shimmering in the distance. After 40 years of marriage, of raising five daughters in the Detroit suburbs, of hard work—especially with my husband Joe’s demanding job in management at General Motors—this was finally going to be […]
How did Mom ever put up with all of this? I wondered, not for the first time since my husband, Mike, and I had moved in with my elderly father after my mother passed away. The living room was a total mess. I stacked the condolence cards into a neat pile on the coffee table […]
That Saturday morning last April I had butterflies, waiting for some special guests to arrive. A month earlier I’d found out that I won the New Year, New You contest. Even though the people at Guideposts said I’d been chosen because I showed the most promise of all the entrants, I couldn’t quite believe it. […]
Back home in Brooklyn we did things different. You went to the butcher’s for meat, the pharmacy for aspirin and the grocery store for food. But when I spent the summer with my grandmother in Warwick, New York, she sent me down to the general store with a list. How could I hope to find […]
Sunshine burst through the tall glass windows and the first light notes of the “Appalachia Waltz” sounded from the string trio. I took a deep breath, squeezed my bridal bouquet of white calla lilies and started my slow procession down the aisle. How happy I felt in this moment, happier than I’d ever dreamed possible. […]
It’s hard to believe that this past year, my beautiful daughter, Natalia, and I are again dealing with life-threatening challenges to her health. It doesn’t seem so long ago that our hopes and faith were tested the first time. In 2007, Natalia walked her first runway at my sister’s college fashion show, not far from […]
