She stopped me as I rushed to work, her cool wrinkled hand lightly touching my shoulder, "You're going about this all wrong," she said with ragged vocal cords at least three times my age.

Shocked at the sudden image in mind of my current failing relationship, the job I hated and the baby I'd just killed in a sterile setting, I waited for more.

"Listen to your heart, slow down, choose as if everything matters. You have time, but none to…

Sixty-nine year old Eve and her husband are raising their twelve year old granddaughter for the past five years. When the child was seven, her mother shot herself in the heart. The little girl was in counseling for a couple of years but it never seemed to help. She cried only briefly at her mother's funeral, but a few years later there was an incident when the granddaughter had trouble with her homework and screamed, "I want my mother and I want her this instant!" Then she was silent and…

Twenty-five year old Anne is indigent. She lives in a car with two children (2 & 4) and a husband fifteen years her senior. She tells me that her two year old son was born premature but she's not sure what that word means. He's sick a lot she says. Anne is from a family of eight but her husband never lets her see them.

She thinks she's pregnant again.

Her mother told her she was beautiful.

Her father told her she was smart.

Her friends told her she was funny.

Her boss told her she was competent.

Her husband told her she wasn't good enough.

She told herself she wasn't good enough.

I only saw Emma Glossip once, bent though standing as straight as she could, tending her fading tomatoes in a garden I would have abandoned long ago.

For many months thereafter I only saw a home healthcare van parked next door for several hours each day, and on occasion heard the faint sounds of Ave Maria coming through her open windows.

A year later I watched as Ms. Glossip's body was removed from the house, followed in subsequent days by her…

"I can't tell you how sorry I am," said the well-dressed woman who'd just run over my dog with her Mercedes SUV.

"Her name was Sally," I told the woman between sobs, thinking she'd drive away with the resonance of a name in her gut: Sally, Sally, Sally - you ended her life today fancy Mercedes woman...Sally, Sally, Sally, the mother of six puppies, the dog who saved me from a pit bull when I was nine.

"Sally? Oh, that's such a nice name and I'm sure…

When I was in high school, we were asked to stand at the front of the class while the rest of the room wrote a single word to describe us. One word. I still have my collection of "words" in a small box along with other mementos, a fairly good representation of who I am considering my classmates were more like associates than intimates.

The other night I looked over at my spouse of nearly a decade as we lay together in bed and asked, "If you could describe me in one…

Lying on her back amidst the trees in this wonderfully landscaped park, she thought briefly of how long it may be before she was spotted. The air felt cool as the leaves around her crackled in the soft breezes sweeping them across the grounds. Looking toward the sky, sunbeams pierced the treed canopy while finding their way to the soon to be warmed foliage. Birds and squirrels scrambled about carelessly even coming close to her on a few occassions only to quickly scatter like the bustled…