Tag: mental health

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I Want To Live by Helen Imagene (Jean) Jones Felfe

This was an easy book to read.  This was a hard book to read.

It was an easy book to read as it was well written.  The first part of the book started off a little slow for me, but persevere, it picks up quickly.  After reading the whole book those initial chapters almost seem written in a different style.  Perhaps that was intentional.  Once I got into the meat of the memoir I found it to be a real page turner.  It was an easy book to read as there was Continue reading “I Want To Live by Helen Imagene (Jean) Jones Felfe”

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Sarah’s Smiles

“It has been said, ‘time heals all wounds.’ I do not agree. The wounds remain. In time, the mind, protecting its sanity, covers them with scar tissue and the pain lessens. But it is never gone.” ~~ Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy

There are many different words that I could and do use to describe my wife, Robin. One such word would be charismatic; people are just attracted to her. She genuinely loves people, and people love her back.  She is kind and patient, qualities that served her well during her 30 plus years as a special education teacher. She is also a bit ADHD, but she uses it to good stead, getting a lot done with her need to keep moving and to be doing something.

She has also experienced great strife and loss in her life.  She and her mother had a very “complicated” relationship. Continue reading “Sarah’s Smiles”

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Rush: Revolution, Madness, and Benjamin Rush, the Visionary Doctor Who Became a Founding Father by Stephen Fried

I’ve been fascinated by Benjamin Rush ever since as a grade schooler, I realized that there was a signature on the Declaration of Independence with the same last name as mine, Rush.   Rush is not the commonest of last names. Of course, I fantasized that he might be a direct ancestor or other relation. At that time there had not been a lot of genealogy done on my family.  Since then I have discovered that we are related, not closely, but related.  We are 3rd cousins 6 generations removed. We share a common ancestor, Capt. John “Old Trooper” Rush.  What is interesting about John Rush is that he was a captain in Oliver Cromwell’s army.  If you remember your English history, Cromwell briefly established a republic in Great Britain in the 1650s.   Capt. Rush later immigrated to the Pennsylvania colony.

There are several reasons that Benjamin Rush has been assigned to the second tier of founding fathers.  Continue reading “Rush: Revolution, Madness, and Benjamin Rush, the Visionary Doctor Who Became a Founding Father by Stephen Fried”

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No More Teddy Bears

No more candle light vigils.  No more piles of teddy bears.  No more stacks of flowers.  No more fences covered with ribbons.  No more platitudes or speeches of remembrance.  We react compassionately to tragic events after the fact.  They fade from memory and we fail to act to prevent the next one.

There were probably a multitude of factors that collided in the Tucson shooting that left 6 dead and many more wounded.

First, it is much, much too easy to get guns in this country.  I read recently that there are 85 guns for every 100 people in the US.  If they were evenly distributed that would be almost be a gun for every man, woman and child in the US.

Secondly, access to health care in this country is atrocious Continue reading “No More Teddy Bears”