Dear Judy,
A few weeks ago my friend’s mother died of breast cancer. The mother was skeptical of Western medicine and refused chemo or radiation. My friend moved my mother into her one-bedroom apartment (my friend slept on the couch), and provided all her end-of-life care.
In the mother’s final days, my friend took her to the [...]
Dear Judy,
Our mother died a year ago. Actually, she killed herself (drugs and alcohol…). My younger sister who is 18 found her body, and called the ambulance but it was too late. My sister was living at home. I am in grad school in New York.
My question is: what do I do about my sister? [...]
Dear Judy,
I am 19 and I go to college. When I was 10 my father died. My mother and grandfather always said my mother died in a car accident because his vision was always bad, and the night was dark (his car rolled over a hill late at night on a badly lit road not far from our [...]
As the New York Times reported this week, a fairly troubling case is about to be decided in Montana’s Supreme Court, which will likely approve the plaintiff’s last desire. That plaintiff, ironically enough, by a 76-year-old retired truck driver, who is already dead of lymphocytic leukemia.
But while he was still suffering, Robert Baxter was hoping [...]
Usually, as readers of www.thecheckoutline.org already know, we deal with the issues of either death — and how it affects us — or terminal illness, and how to deal with that in an intelligent, common sense way.
But the other day, I got contacted by representatives of Dr Erika Schwartz, a highly intelligent (and funny) longtime internist who [...]
Dear Judy,
When her boyfriend broke up with her, a young girl — 17 — committed suicide. She is (was) the daughter of a longtime friend. And to put it candidly, my friend was a so-so mother. Always criticizing the girl, never praising her, telling her she was “fat” or that her grades weren’t up to [...]
Dear Judy,
To my mind bad uncontrollable depression is as much a terminal disease as anything any of your readers usually write in about (I’ve been doing a SEARCH on thecheckoutline…).
My wife has what I’d call “terminal depression,” and so far nothing has proved a permanent cure, and we’ve tried just about every pill, shrink and [...]
Dear Judy,
I’m in a real quandary and I hear you are good at resolving quandaries. Here’s the problem. A really close friend of mine is dating a guy I’ve known for years. In fact we grew up together, and I knew his father when I was a kid, growing up. My mother knew his grandmother [...]
Dear Judy,
Although everyone in the family — even our family physician — went to great lengths to describe my wife’s death last year as an accident, I know deep down that it probably wasn’t. She always suffered from low-grade depression, and she refused to see a therapist. Also: after dropping off our two young kids [...]
Dear Judy,
I feel a little embarrassed writing all this, but I don’t know who else to ask. I live in a big city on the East Coast, and in our neighborhood a child — well a teenager really — recently died, and no one seems to know why. We all knew the teenager and his [...]
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Posted on January 24th, 2009