Popular articles by Rona / Sort by date

I felt like cheering when the Globe and Mail launched a 28-part series on mental illness, produced by a team of reporters. As a survivor of depression, I'd been waiting for the day when diseases of the mind would command that kind of attention. I didn't stop to notice that one of the Globe's biggest names, Jan Wong, was missing from the team. And I couldn't have guessed that she'd been laid low by depression. [more]

I grew up wishing I could grow up anywhere but Durham, New Hampshire, where I never fitted in at school, where the few friends I had were other weirdos like me. But for one extraordinary August weekend, Durham was where I most wanted to be. I'd been chosen to speak at my school's first all-class reunion, to people who had juggled their schedules to be there. And suddenly it no longer mattered that no Durham boy had ever asked me out. I had to be there. [more]

I never planned to be an estrogen lifer but I seem to be headed that way. I've made two attempts to quit; both times broken sleep and sour moods drove me back to my little blue pills. I've been on estrogen 15 years--three times as long as the maximum that even the most hormone-tolerant doctors recommend. What am I doing to myself? [more]

I was packing for a trip to Argentina with my husband, and we deserved every mind-clearing minute of our escape to the land of tango. We'd just moved from a house-size condo with three walk-in closets and endless built-ins to the compact loft that now held just a fraction of our former possessions. We had jettisoned carloads of belongs---some of them nearly new---that used to seem essential but suddenly felt like excess baggage. The more bags and boxes we filled with cast-ffs, the more useless things we uncovered that we didn't even know we had, from Annie Hall pants last worn in 1980 to a 25-year-old Encyclopedia Britannica from our son's school days. [more]

I once thought I wanted to be a ballerina. What I really craved was the beauty of every woman who moves with assurance and grace, never mind a less-than-perfect body. An eccentric, small-town ballet teacher pointed the way. [more]

I once owned a man's silk paisley scarf in burgundy, cream and navy blue. It was the kind of thing that looks expected on a silver-haired guy in pin-stripes, but playful on a 30-something woman in jeans and a T-shirt. I wore that scarf so often that it smelled of my favourite scent and felt like an extension of my skin. One day I wore it to a movie. Halfway home, I realized that I'd left it on the seat. I rushed back but no one had seen a paisley scarf. Something plummeted inside when I knew for sure that I had lost it. [more]

For the better part of three decades, I've been shrugging off milestone birthdays. Forty: eclipsed by my mother's death two weeks earlier. Fifty: an excuse to squeeze a girlfriends' lunch between meetings. Then I turned 60---the boundary between thinking I have forever to do my growing up and accepting the fact that I don't. [more]

It started years ago as a multi-tasking move. With one brisk daily walk to work, I could turn my commute into a fitness program. No more jostling for space on crowded subway cars, no more sprints to the gym between meetings. Come to think of it, maybe I wouldn't need the gym at all (no more annual fees). What a plan! [more]

Way back before anyone I knew had died, I cringed at the very thought of funerals. I pictured dark rooms, fussy floral arrangements, ministers droning pieties about people they'd never even met. I've since discovered that a funeral can be rich in potential---for creativity, for celebration, for a deepened connection with the world. And I've developed a few rough working principles about the elements of life's most underrated ritual. [more]

Adults belittlingly call it "puppy love." But there's nothing trivial about the tenderness of children's first longings for each other, or the anguish of their first heartbreaks. That's what I learned from the five-year-old boy who named his doll Rona after me. [more]

At the bottom of my purse lies a battered leather case containing a fistful of cards from people with corner-office titles: Executive Producer of This, Senior Vice-President of That, Grand Poo-Bah of Whatever. My favourite card puts them all to shame. It belongs to a much older woman who announces her well-earned role in life with one authoritative word: "Advice." [more]

At 12 I dreamed of winning the National Spelling Bee, but I went down to ignominious defeat in my Grade 6 class. I cried all the way home and later told the sad tale on my first date with my husband. Then I got a chance to appear on Broadway as an audience volunteer in The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. Good-bye, orthographic angst! [more]