We at Tribune Opinion are focused on offering our readers intelligent voices on a plethora of issues to encourage critical thinking and constructive debate. But we also like to provide plenty of room for op-eds that speak profoundly to the heart and compel our readers to feel deeply.
We are very fortunate to have contributors who share these kinds of stories. Here, in excerpts, is a look back at the some of the best of them.
Jan. 27: David McGrath, “Taking sister, her husband fishing helps me see what matters most”
I have had some trouble sleeping.
I have been worrying about a lot of things, like the recent blood test showing a jump in my glucose levels. The 1099 tax form that arrived too late. The loud ticking sound when my car is idling. And the silent treatment from Marianne since our argument about new carpeting (which we really don’t need).
But I can’t deal with any of that right now because my little sister, Nancy, and her husband, Jay, are coming for a short stay. One more thing to worry about, right?
The second morning they’re here, we get the boat ready to go out on the Gulf of Mexico. The wind is calm enough to head offshore to the grouper grounds. But then I remember myself and ask Jay if they’re up to handling a long boat ride.
He has had multiple rounds of chemotherapy and infusion therapy for lymphoma and takes a slew of medications you can’t pronounce. Doctors say he is in remission, but there’s no guarantee, and he has to take for the rest of his life a drug that gives him painful headaches at night.
“Yeah, we’re good,” he says.
Author David McGrath’s sister, Nancy Anderson, and her husband, Jay, pose on the beach in Boca Grande, Florida, in 2023. (David McGrath)
He means both of them, since not long after his diagnosis, Nancy was told she has a rare form of carcinoma, and she had to travel to the Mayo Clinic and then to Houston for a doctor who could treat her. She’s had her kidney removed and had painful radiation and chemo treatments but was cleared for this trip.
The Gulf is frisky with 2-foot seas, and I watch from the helm to where they sit up front, Nancy portside, Jay starboard, their faces into the wind.
Not long after they return home, Nancy sends pictures from her phone: she and Jay posing with her fish. Another photo with both of them beaming, hanging on to the boat rail.
The photos arrive with her text: “I’ll tell you what, there isn’t a day that goes by when cancer isn’t on my mind. But sometimes, like when we’re on your boat, I forget all about it. Nothing else really matters except for that moment in time.”
May 4: Bob Brody, “Deafness didn’t stop my mother from learning the piano”
The 12-year-old girl who became my mother took weekly piano lessons. This happened along the Grand Concourse in the Bronx in the 1930s. She practiced at the keyboard until she could finally play a Johann Strauss waltz straight through without a mistake.
My mother also took tap dance lessons in a studio near her home. She would glide across a gleaming hardwood floor, her arms all aflutter, clacking her heels away to some catchy Cole Porter melody.
So far so good. But the first time I heard about this cultural education, it struck me as strange, largely because of an inescapable fact: Aileen Roslyn Sheft was by then profoundly deaf. She was stricken with spinal meningitis, in an epidemic outbreak in 1929, shortly after she turned a year old.
Why such theatrical lessons? I once asked this of my nana, her mother, the former Gertrude Goldberg. Why would my mother train to play piano and tap-dance despite being unable to hear music and thus performing in silence?
“Aileen had no real interest in taking the lessons,” my nana explained to me. “But I wanted to give her the feeling that she was as good as all the hearing girls in the class.”
“She once danced in a show and kept perfect step,” Nana said. “She could feel the music vibrate through the floor underneath her feet. Afterwards, the teacher went on the stage and announced to the audience, ‘The little girl you just saw dance is deaf. She heard none of the music being played.’
“It made your mother feel very important to take those bows.”
How must my grandmother have delighted in watching my mother play piano and dance, then, thrilled in the illusion thereby conjured of a daughter equipped with ears that functioned perfectly.
Maybe, despite my original suspicions, my mother actually wound up feeling just as her mother intended her to feel, in every respect equal.
June 29: Chris Schroeder, “I’ve been homeless, and it takes energy to ask for help”
During a recent weekend, I went to CVS to pick up medications after a doctor’s visit. As I walked out, I noticed a father and his daughter in the parking lot holding a sign asking for food or money or just a way to survive. The father’s sign said that he was struggling to find a job and that his daughter was not well.
While I sat in my car and talked with my wife, I could not stop looking at the father and his daughter. My medical training came to mind. The daughter’s lips were very chapped, and she had pinkeye or worse. They looked dehydrated and extremely tired, and the father’s voice had given out. The daughter was too weak to move much.
In my view, they desperately needed water, food, decent rest and some medical care without delay. I have a soft spot for people experiencing homelessness because I have been homeless and I know what it is like to ask for money and be ignored. It takes energy to ask for help. It even takes energy when none of what you do works. I wondered, as I felt waves of emotion, what I had looked like in that position when no help came.
The two human beings before me, struggling to live, were worth as much as anyone else. In the next minute, I made a few phone calls that sent help on the way.
We often encounter opportunities in our daily lives to extend kindness to others, but we may rely too much on the assumption that others will be moved to show compassion and take action. No one is perfect.
These moments, whether big or small, can leave lasting impressions on the giver and the receiver — even if what was given was just a plain bagel, help through a phone call or words of encouragement.
Sept. 4: Cindy Sher, “We called him Hersh”
We called him Hersh.
Even those of us who’d never met him.
Hersh Goldberg-Polin, the Israeli American with family ties to Chicago, was like a member of our family. He was our son, our grandson, our brother.
It’s hard to distill the horror of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks into something — someone — relatable. But for us, especially in the Chicago Jewish community, Hersh was it. He represented every one of the 1,200 innocent people murdered that day, every one of those 251 hostages stolen from the prime of their lives — and from their loved ones.
For those of us who had never met Hersh, we grew to know and love him while he languished in captivity. We learned who he was through his fierce and beautiful mother, Rachel, who came to symbolize the agony and resolve of the parents of the hostages.
Hersh was kind, courteous and vibrant. He loved soccer. He had wanderlust, having backpacked across Europe not long before Oct. 7. He had made the seemingly innocuous decision to celebrate his 23rd birthday with peace-loving friends at a music festival in southern Israel last fall.
Hersh had so much joy left to experience, so much impact left to stamp on the world, and so many more people to love and be loved by.
Over 11 months, we held our breaths — praying that one day we’d be scrolling mindlessly through our phones and stumble across the news that “Hersh was alive.”
We prayed that Hersh — like so many of us are doing this week — would one day get to escort his kids to their first day of school.
But our prayers have been shattered. Instead, we grieve for Hersh, and we grieve for Alexander, Almog, Carmel, Eden and Ori, the five other innocent people whose bodies the Israeli military recovered over the weekend.
We grieve for the thousands of others who have lost their lives in the horrors of this war.
We grieve for all of them; any of them could have been our sibling, our grandchild, our child.
Nov. 9: Adam Patric Miller, “Why do I write college recommendation letters? It’s very simple”
It’s the time of year when students arrive at my office and ask if I will write them a college recommendation. I say, “Yes, I’ll be happy to write one for you.” Sometimes, I’ll thank them for asking in person.
It’s what teachers do. I’ve written hundreds and hundreds of college recommendations.
One of the first recommendations I wrote was for a student who entered my class after escaping war in Eritrea. Writing for her, I felt I had better bring to the fore the advantages I’d experienced with my education. I don’t know if my recommendation did much for her — she was unstoppable academically because she had no choice. She returned years later to proudly tell me she earned her degree and was pretty sure her salary for her first job paid her a yearly amount higher than mine. We shared a chuckle at that. It was what teachers call in this game a professional highlight.
Students will thank you. I’ll read the thank you note, then stuff it with the rest into my desk drawer. Every once in a while, a thank you note will pop out the back of the drawer. I’ll see it on the floor, pick it up and read again about what my teaching meant to a student.
I’ll remember these students, how one drew a cup of tea on her quizzes, how one started her essay with the phrase, “Consider the beehive,” or how the only poet I ever taught left a weary world too soon.
Dec. 14: Barbara J. Ferraro, “It took me 30 years to read the wartime letters my father wrote to my mother”
Fifty-nine letters, bound by a brittle rubber band, saved in a dresser drawer for a half-century. Wartime letters sent by my father to my mother at her family home in Chicago, written in his own hand on Navy letterhead, the precise print of an engineer, angled slightly to the right. Yellowed on the edges but otherwise pristine, each tucked in its envelope with care. Personal letters, private letters, too painful to touch.
Dad gave them to me one year after Mom’s agonizing death from breast cancer. The next day, my despondent, can’t-eat-can’t-sleep, won’t-come-out-of-the-basement father invited her childhood friend on a date. And married her.
How does grief end on day 366? Does it slip into a compartment under lock and key? I couldn’t even look at the letters for 30 years, let alone read them. They sat on a closet shelf in a dusty box marked “Mementos of Mom” until Dad’s final year on earth, after the death of his second wife. Older me, wiser me, finally felt ready. I sorted them by postmark and traced his path on a world atlas. By land from Chicago to South Bend, Indiana, to Newport, Rhode Island, then west across the country to San Francisco. By sea to Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, then Manila and Shanghai and back. Twenty thousand miles by train, bus and ship.
They tell the incredible journey of a thoughtful young man from Berwyn, from college student to naval officer, from teenage boy to married man. He shared this journey in letters to his girl back home and never spoke of it again. These letters are part travelogue, part history lesson and part love story. And a window into my mother’s 20-something world.
I wanted to breathe in the bus exhaust on Fullerton Avenue. Feel the warmth of blurry city lights on a foggy November night. Dance cheek to cheek to “Moonlight Serenade” at the Edgewater Beach Hotel.
The letters took me there.
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