Just after my most recent speech on dealing with difficult people, a 40-something woman approached me and confided in a desperate half-whisper, “My problem is my 22-year-old daughter who lives with me. She’s a single mother with no job and no plans. It’s not working. I don’t know how much more of this I can take. What should I do?”

When I learned last night that Dr. Jerri Nielsen had died of breast cancer at age 57, I couldn’t help but take it personally, even though I’d forgotten her name in the 10 years since she made news around the world. I still remembered the tale of her dramatic rescue from the Antarctic research station where she had diagnosed and treated her own disease all winter until a plane could land.

Admit it: sometimes you just want more. There’s so much stuff out there for the craving, and so many other people have more of it than you. I’ve been there. Last week, in a want-more moment, I became transfixed by a young woman’s death on the seething streets of Tehran. And I thought about what it means to want the most important thing of all, with such urgency and passion that you’ll put your life on the line.

The way some people carry on, you’d think old age was the well deserved affliction of the lazy and the clueless. Crow’s feet, turkey neck? Get yourself to a surgeon, honey. Aches and pains got you down? Tsk tsk. Guess you’ve been neglecting yoga. But the fact is that one of two things will happen to us all: we’ll die too soon, or we’ll grow old. Thank goodness we now have a straight-talking mentor in the unwelcome art of aging—legendary British author Diana Athill, now 91.

I don’t tell my mom, Myrna, often enough, but she… Posted by Lisa MacColl.

I don’t know anyone in Novi Sad, most likely will never go there and had to Google the place to find out that it’s in Serbia. So I can’t help but wonder how it happened that on May 14 some stranger in Novi Sad set out for an online stroll and ended up on this website. We’re not talking just a peek in my virtual doorway. The mystery guest actually read these pages for 11 minutes and 47 seconds—a not-inconsiderable sojourn in Blogland.

Last summer, with much yawning and complaining, I reduced my coffee intake from five cups daily to two. A doctor had warned that if I didn’t ease up on the caffeine, I’d have to put up with chronic insomnia. Now a study of 1400 people shows that drinking three to five cups of coffee a day can dramatically reduce your risk of Alzheimer’s disease, which has ravaged my family. What to do?

Our grandson had no name for what seemed like the longest time. Then he got one—Gabriel—only to be renamed Cameron. A fine name, in my opinion. But everyone calls him Peanut. As one who never had a baby name, I’d better own up to some mixed emotions about that.

I was in no hurry to read Still Alice, the best-selling novel in which Alzheimer’s disease overtakes a woman of 50. I didn’t want to care about Alice Howland—wife, mother and Harvard neuroscientist—only to see her erased the illness I fear most, which runs in my family. But I had a long flight ahead, and a little more room in my carry-on bag. Now I’m here to say, “You’ve got to read this book.”

Twenty years ago today, when tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square and crushed a peaceful protest with harrowing force, I was too caught up in my own pain to give more than a fleeting glance to reports from the scene. My mother was dying of brain cancer. In the fog of impending bereavement, I couldn’t mourn the students whose mangled bikes were their only memorial. Now, just back from China, I can’t get them off my mind.

Have you ever cringed at some annoying habit of your father’s? Have you wished he’d act more like normal people and less like his incorrigible self? Ann Banks has been there. With Father’s Day around the corner, she looks back on the first man in her life and sees the gift that escaped her notice then.