Volunteer Explorer

What does it mean to love another person? What does it mean to love someone who is sick? Can you really love everything about that person? Even their illness? I have been fairly effortlessly healthy all my life. Genetics, nutrition, lifestyle – these all contributed to a fully functioning body that rarely lets me down. Appendicitis last fall was a gut-punch that sidelined me for a couple of weeks. My cure was exercise, as it so often is. I walked the halls a mere two hours after the surgery, bent over and clinging to my IV cart. I ran a mile or so at the park 10 days after surgery. Getting up and moving around were the panacea my mother taught me long ago. Be it flu, a cold, arthritis or depression, your ailment can be ameliorated with exercise. That was her mantra. She read “The Bell Jar” at my urging when I was in high school – probably because she desperately wanted some tiny glimpse into my sullen teenaged psyche. Her response to the lead character’s suicide attem...

I spent the first 26 years of my life with my father’s last name. Then I spent 23 years with my husband’s last name. I will now spend the rest of my life with a name of my own choosing. My maternal great-grandmother chose her own name. She was born October 18, 1894 and her parents called her Dutch until she graduated from high school. They couldn’t seem to settle on a name, so they simply let her choose her own legal name when she became an adult. She chose Mary for the woman who sewed her graduation dress and Adelaide for a family friend. Best was her last name because that was her father’s last name. I only met Nanny — as we called Mary Adelaide in my family — once when I was 3 or 4 years old. I clearly remember climbing the wooden stairs on the outside of the two-story house in Punxsutawney that belonged to my grandmother’s sister where Nanny lived out her final years. She sat in an oversize easy chair leaning on a cane. She wore enormous black men’s shoes. When my brother...