My 15-year-old niece lost her boyfriend a few months ago to cancer. While she's doing pretty well, she feels very lonely. She has friends and a lot of hobbies and activities. I was wondering if you know of a good site for teens that would help her through this difficult time. I'm also in the process of trying to find a therapist for her because I feel a few visits would be a help.

Caring Aunt

Dear Caring Aunt,

Thank you for your letter. Though your niece has friends, she feels lonely. She may not know how to communicate with them about what she is feeling. She may feel they don't understand what she is going through. To some extent, "lonely" may be a catchall word for her, indicating sadness, lack of energy, consciousness of loss, anger, etc. At 15, one's emotional vocabulary is limited. At the same time, she is of course lonely.

She is lonely. She had someone she was with a lot. She had enough human contact. Her boyfriend gave her that.  Now he's gone, so of course she feels lonely.

As you probably know, she will have to live with this loss for a while. It will take time for this loss to take its place in her world.

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Just yesterday, my cat died. I know that will probably not sound like a big deal to many of your readers, but it is monumental in my world. He was not just any cat. He was the kitten I was tasked with caring for when he was less than a week old. His eyes weren't even open yet, and he had been abandoned in the dog toy aisle of a PetSmart. I was working at the vet clinic next door, and was planning on adopting another dog. I was allergic to cats. I said I'd foster him for two weeks ... and up until yesterday, I would follow that sentence by saying, "and almost eight years later, I have a cat." Now there is nothing but hurt.

I bottle-fed him every two hours, and I made him pee and poo. He had no mother, and I have never been anyone's mother ... nor will I ever be. Except his. I taught him how to use a litter box, and I taught him and my dog to get along. On his own, he learned to sit in response to both voice and hand signals, just by watching the dog. He would come when called, and one day he decided to walk on a leash because he simply didn't want to be left behind when we took the dog out.

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Exactly two years ago my mother died. I went to the hometown to take care of things and then my girlfriend joined me for the funeral. She acted her part great, but there was something in the air.

After the ceremony we went home, and as I got undressed and lay on the bed I was thinking, "Now I can fall apart, and cry and mourn." In that exact moment, my girlfriend approached me and said that when she was preparing for travel to the funeral, she found an opened box of condoms. She was on the pill; I used them for hygienic purposes in our lovemaking that she didn't know about, and she expects me to explain it.

The next three hours is a blur. I finally managed to ease her concerns, but the moment for mourning was lost. And I can't get over it.

My relationship with my mother was a difficult one. Lately I had thought of her as the always demanding monster who took away the best years of my life. And in the moment the monster died, when I was to be free at last, another one took its place and presented her demands.

I didn't cheat on my girlfriend, but it was this moment I felt that that sacrifice on my part was wasted.

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Since actress Valerie Harper went public with her terminal brain cancer diagnosis last week, she's presented a remarkably upbeat – and distinctively clear-eyed – example of how to face the inevitable with moxie and grace. The 73-year-old "Mary Tyler Moore Show" and "Rhoda" star says her doctors have given her as little as three months to live, but that "I don't think of dying. I think of being here now."

It's a valuable perspective, one that seems to fly in the face of our perception of the end of life as being one long slog through Tragedy Town. As Harper, who learned of her diagnosis in January, explained this week on "Good Morning America," "Let’s discuss it because we are all terminal. We really are. We have a lot of fear around death and I thought maybe I can help somebody … I want people to be less scared."

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And just like that, we go on. Or, try to. Three of us stumbling through that first year. My mother, thirty-three, a widow now. My brother and I, eight and six, 1970.

A death, quick. Abrupt. Unwitnessed. Mysterious.

*

The parking lot. That morning. I am on my bike, my new two-wheeler, riding in circles in the parking lot of the Kroger grocery store. My mother has sent me out. Or have I chosen to leave?

Here they come. People I know. People who know me. Blood, they say. Relatives, all. In big, wide American cars, they drive into my faded-asphalt lot. There’s my uncle Paul, my aunt Nancy; my godmother Lorraine and her husband, Clarence. There’s Uncle Harry, there’s Aunt Sue. They are waving to me. I am one boy on two wheels, going in circles, not stopping. And there they go, one after another, to do what you do when a life stops. Coming to close the circle.

*

“What do you remember about that day?” I ask my grandmother as we sit toe-to-toe, her in her wheelchair.

She tells me that after they broke it to my brother and me, she went upstairs to the bathroom.

“I needed a place to cry,” she says. “That’s when I saw them, right there in front of the radiator—your father’s slippers.”

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I have never written a letter seeking advice from a columnist before, but since I think you are the best advice columnist that has ever lived, and since you are quite well and alive, I thought I would ask for your advice today.

I recently had a friend die, a friend that I had not seen in over a decade, but whom, nonetheless, I had remained quasi-close to during most of that time. He was a musician, as am I, and so we both influenced each other at times although I consider him my mentor still, to this day. He taught me a great deal about old-time country music, from Dock Boggs to the Carter Family; from Doc Watson to Norman Blake. He was a god to me.

And he was also a junkie.

He quit junk a few years after I met him -- we all knew this. I did not find out until later that he had been smoking crack to keep himself "straight," however.

I have never so much as more than smoked a joint in my life, so you can imagine how distraught I was the first time I learned that my friend, "Nephew" Jimmy, was a junkie. One night, as I remember, at some party, I actually begged him on my knees in front of all of our friends, hysterical and in tears, to stop shooting smack. Silly me.

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I am writing to ask your advice on how to proceed with my father. Five years ago this month my mother got her diagnosis of liver cancer, the day of her 60th birthday. Her initial diagnosis was six to 12 months, and she passed after four years of treatment, so technically she "beat the odds." She and my father saved scrupulously during their 40-year marriage -- he working sometimes seven days a week, 12 hours a day as a union boilermaker (pressure-vessel welder) and she handling every other aspect of our lives. All he had to do was work, and she took care of the rest. We lived comfortably, and they were able to take four big vacations a year once retired.

He led a rough life before meeting my mother. His childhood ended at 14 when his father left his mother with four kids, and he had to work after school to feed the family, eventually going to vocational school instead of following his dream of being a doctor. He was in the Air Force in Vietnam as an engine mechanic and generally led a wild and carousing-oriented life until Mom came along and "tamed" him. Mom was one of those people who saw the best person you could be when she looked at you, and behaved accordingly, expecting you to do the same.

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At 20 years old, I suddenly find myself fatherless, and as the oldest child, the person my mother is leaning on.

My father had dwarfism, with severe respiratory problems and chronic pains that plagued him especially during the last five years of his life. Recently, my mother and he were in Spain on a trip. The universe is unsympathetic, and my mother ended up bringing his urn back home in her backpack. It was a huge shock to all of us, though after talking about his health lately among ourselves we have concluded it shouldn't have been; he was living on borrowed time. The doctors told him years ago that a reasonable life expectancy in his condition was 35 to 40 years old, and he was 54 when he died, and his breathing had gotten worse with every passing week. We also suspect he knew the end was near, though he never said anything or complained of more pain than usual.

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If you’re wondering why, in the darkest, scariest period in my family’s life, I got the bright idea to sign us up for a club where moms and dads die all time, the answer is: because I didn’t really think it through. I had joined the club, a support organization for people with cancer and their loved ones, at the recommendation of my friend Annie after I was diagnosed with stage-4 melanoma last year. Annie had been the one who’d seen right through my flippant assertion that we were all doing “great,” and had suggested tenderly, “Maybe you need a place to sometimes be not great.” I made the call that day.

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Will, a book editor and author, was one of the relatives and friends who accompanied Mary Anne during these sessions. Often, the conversation between mother and son would turn to what each one was reading. To make these discussions more interesting, they decided to read the same books, beginning with Wallace Stegner's "Crossing to Safety," a novel that let them address, obliquely, Will's worries about how his father would get by once his mother was gone. Will and Mary Anne's two-person experiment in communal reading is the focal point of Will's memoir, "The End of Your Life Book Club," a tribute to a remarkable woman and an exemplary reader. I met with Schwalbe recently to talk about it.

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These were three things my mother, Ann Krieger, was pondering when she reached the final leg of her terminal illness last year, a month before Mother’s Day. After several years of fighting colon cancer, her doctor broke the news that the cancer had spread and the treatment was no longer working. There was no more they could do.

“You’ve got months, not weeks,” he said.

“What should I do?” she asked. “Should I end it now?”

“No,” he said. “You don’t want to do that.”

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Here's the situation: I've been married to my husband for 13 years. All but the first year have been miserable. He never adjusted to being a father -- never understood that his needs came second. He's terrible with money (mine, his and ours) and has plunged us into debt while I was in a coma by using my credit cards and borrowing money from my elderly father, which he spent on no one knows what. He refuses to take responsibility for any of his actions (it's always "that asshole"). He won't do anything fun with our kids (two girls -- ages 9 and 12) -- he'd rather sleep on the weekends. He has serious stress/anger management issues for which he refuses to seek help; he throws things, calls us names, punches walls and we never know what will set him off. He parents sporadically if at all -- since he "doesn't understand girls." He loses his temper and verbally abuses them. "Stupid cow" and "lazy bitch" are some of the things that spring to mind.

He took a pay cut when I returned to work so he didn't have to commute -- a cut of about one-third. Despite the fact that we can barely cover our debts. In short, he acts like a 3-year-old, and adds little if anything to our lives.

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My friend "Cristina" is smart, attractive and sociable. We have been best friends for more than a decade and have always been there for each other. As far as I'm concerned, the only serious flaw in her character is that she demands a lot of attention, support, favors, etc. She monopolizes conversations about her and her children and is the kind who might borrow a piece of furniture from a friend and "forget" to return it. All this has until recently bothered me only mildly, as I tend to be a person who knows how to listen, likes to and can help, and has enjoyed a relatively drama-free life.

But now both her life and mine have changed radically. She has been ill with terminal cancer for several years and is divorced. She has (rightly) tapped into her many friends as a resource for logistics, company and even financial support. I was happy to take her on long trips to the hospital, take care of her children, even contribute funds for a much-needed vacation.

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My mother is on a ventilator. She is 94 years old. The decision to put her on it was not mine, but my older sister's. I find it grotesque.

My sister seems to believe that some cure will be found for what is essentially old age. We just need to find the right doctor. She thinks we must leave no medical procedure untried.

It would be unsafe for my mother to return home without around-the-clock help, and even with it, I cannot envision much quality of life for her.

My sister believes she is doing what my mother wants, but my mother is unconscious.

The doctors keep telling us that my mother's organs are failing; they need machines to keep her "alive."

I am worried that my sister is freaking out, is terrified of losing our mother and is not dealing with the situation rationally.

How can I keep her from losing her sanity?

Thank you for considering my question.

Trying to Stay Calm

Dear Trying to Stay Calm,

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I have spent the last 30 years taking care of women in pregnancy, birth and beyond. I use my hands to help bring life into this world. Over the past few years, however, I found myself using those very same hands in the performance of a Taharah, a Jewish ritual that prepares a dead woman for burial. Birth, life, joy, beginnings vs. death, decay, finality. Such a contrast! What could be more different? And yet, somewhere in my consciousness, there was a commonality. Caring for a woman in her life, preparing a woman for birth had a parallel in preparing a woman for burial. The act of helping a woman and her baby through their many transitions seemed analogous to helping the soul transition from this plane of existence to the next.

“Taharah” means “to purify.” Particular prayers are said and simple hand-sewn white linen garments dress the body. All this is identical for everyone, no matter how old, how young, how rich, how poor. During a Taharah, all are treated the same.

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I fear my marriage is in trouble and I need help. My wife and I used to be well matched as slightly neurotic types who worried about small things. Perhaps it's better to say that we were both risk-averse types, and worried that things weren't going to work out. That made us work to manage our lives in order to minimize risks.

Five years ago my dad died. He had heart problems and so it wasn't wholly unexpected. After this I searched for some good books to help me understand how sons deal with the death of their fathers. One sad thing about our culture is that there are few cultural references for this event. I guess that's liberating in a way, but I also really wanted to know how others had responded to this shock.

Through my own searching  I've come to realize in these years one important way his death has changed me. It has enabled me to value the days more, and fear living less. This is a wonderful thing. Having been visited by the experience of the death of someone close to me, I feel like I am now much better at understanding what matters and what does not. That's helped me to become a more relaxed person, and more adventurous too.

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