In shadows of my childhood, a tale unfolds,
Of a fractured family, where sorrow molds.
A black box whispers secrets long untold,
A narrative of pain, in letters penned in gold.

Tiny voices echoed in the paper’s embrace,
Innocence scrawled, each heartfelt trace.
“Daddy, where are you?” in a child’s grace,
Penning pleas and dreams in a desperate chase.

A brother’s memory, a phantom in the past,
Gone at three months, a love that couldn’t last.
His clothes, a reminder, in the box amassed,
A tragedy’s echo, a life’s fleeting contrast.

Mom and Dad, once entwined, love turned to strife,
A broken bond, unraveling the threads of life.
Divorce’s bitter aftermath, carving like a knife,
Pain’s cruel dance, as they battled inner strife.

Enter a new man, a chapter of despair,
Abuse’s cold touch, a burden hard to bear.
Fifteen years of shadows, a relentless snare,
In a house of torment, where love was rare.

In the dance of addiction, Dad lost his way,
A little girl’s hero, fading to shades of gray.
Baby pictures and letters, memories in disarray,
In a black box, fragments of a yesterday.

Letters pleading, a child’s silent scream,
“Daddy, do you hear us?” in every desperate theme.
Abandonment’s weight, a river of tears extreme,
In the echoes of silence, love became a dream.

Through the haze of addiction, love’s flame grew faint,
In the heart of a child, an enduring plaint.
A father lost, a bond left to taint,
In the dance of shadows, a life left to acquaint.

In the black box’s whispers, the past does unfurl,
A symphony of sorrow in this broken world.
Yet, within the pain, resilient spirits swirl,
Hoping for healing in the journey’s twirl.

There is this liquid that many consider magic.
Society says it’s a great social catalyst.
Drink some of it and you may become a whole different person.
Be careful – too much may leave you with only a headache and nausea to remember your night.
Growing up this liquid was the answer to all of my mothers worries.
Its an antidepressant, if you will.
As I entered my teens ,
It became the medicine, taking away all my pain.
I even learned the secret formula,
Making it through the night with minimal side effects.
As I grew older this liquid became my BEST friend!
There for me when I was lonely
Giving me courage by masking my socially awkwardness.
The gifts of blackouts and uncertain regrets.
Eventually, my best friend grew to become my enemy.
Courage became sadness
Blackouts became spotty nights of horror.
It allowed strangers to carry me to their cars
Driving me to their homes.
Eyes flooded my face with painful tears.
My brain and heart screaming for love and healing!
This liquid was no longer magic,
My kryptonite love affair!
There is no real secret formula to avoiding the side effects.
It is my depressant.
I destroys me from the inside!
This liquid is not special,
It is not a cure to your pains.
It will tear you apart,
Taking you family as collateral damage.
This liquid is a poison,
-It is Alcohol!

I have been happily married for 51 years to a former New York Jets professional football player turned lawyer and educator, my husband Hank. We met and married young in my sophomore year in college. I was a pioneering woman student in the first 4-year class of women admitted to Princeton University. Being married in no way slowed down my academic ambitions: I graduated Phi Beta Kappa in three years from Princeton, where I was also a founding member of the women’s varsity basketball team and the Medieval Society of Princeton. I went on to earn a Ph.D. in Medieval Studies at Yale University and a law degree at Columbia University School of Law. I was among the first women to make partner at my international law firm in its New York City office. There I founded and headed the firm’s Exempt Organizations group representing charities, their boards, and their donors. Among my clients were the Louvre Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, the American Museum of Natural History, the Robin Hood Foundation, and Doctors Without Borders USA, of which I was the founding American director and where I still chair the Board of Advisors. I also taught the law of nonprofits at Harvard Law School for 9 years.

My husband and I have led an exciting personal, educational, professional, and recreational life together. That great life was turned upside down on April 18, 2016, when Hank collapsed at the gym and was rushed by ambulance to the hospital. After many examinations and tests, doctors determined a problem with his brain. Now, almost 8 years later and after having seen more than 70 doctors and specialists, we still do not have a diagnosis for my husband’s brain condition. We do, however, suspect that the brain challenges that he fights every day are attributable to the 16 years of his life spent playing tackle football from Pop Warner to the pros. Recent studies by the Boston University UNITE Brain Bank and the Concussion Legacy Foundation show that the risk of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (“CTE”) increases with every year of tackle football played. Development of CTE is correlated with number of years played, number of sub-concussive hits received, and the force of each hit. Unfortunately CTE cannot yet be diagnosed during life. Hank has joined thousands of athletes and their families in pledging his brain to the UNITE Brain Bank after his death. Although he does not exhibit any of the typical symptoms of CTE, we wonder whether the disruptions of his autonomic nervous system that he now lives with are an atypical presentation of CTE.

When my husband was stricken in 2016, he was suddenly debilitated, unable to walk more than a few steps without using a wheelchair. For a man who considered himself a 65-year-old stud, this was a shock and very depressing. In an instant, our favorite activities of mountain climbing in Europe, snow-shoeing in New England, and trekking in Scandinavia were over for us. Everyday living was so challenging that we had to move out of our house to the home we had bought for my Mother where we might live on a single level.

Thinking my husband was dying, we decided in 2016 that I should see a ”widowhood counselor” to help me deal with the sudden changes in our lives. The counselor asked me one day, “What in your earlier life made you so extraordinarily capable of coping with challenges?” That question stopped me in my tracks. I hadn’t analyzed capability. I was just a doer—somebody who got things done by putting one foot in front of the other, solving complex problems step-by-step with clear intellect and determination. Where did that life approach come from?

When I was 16, my parents announced to my older sister, younger brother and me that they wanted to have another baby. My older sister was married and moved to the west coast a few months after my mother gave birth to my younger sister during my junior year of high school. Unfortunately, my Mother experienced afterbirth bleeding and was repeatedly hospitalized for surgery, even having a near-death experience. My Father was so stressed with this, he had a heart attack and was hospitalized in a different hospital. I found myself at home with a precious infant sister, a younger brother to feed and get to and from school, household scheduling and tasks, and visiting my parents in their respective hospitals. This was a formative coping experience for me, yet one that I know confronts many other young people all over the country and the world. Over the years, my Father had multiple additional health issues that required my involvement including managing my parents’ affairs. After my Father’s death, my husband and I moved my Mother across the street from us so that we could be more deeply involved in her Alzheimer’s care. We managed her medical care, her finances, and spent hours with her every day enjoying her company and supporting her aides. In fact, my husband’s 2016 collapse came at the same time that my Mother’s dementia significantly worsened requiring more of my daily involvement as she stopped walking and needed to be moved in and out of bed several times a day with a Hoyer lift requiring two people.

In my academic life, being in the first class of women at Princeton had presented its own challenges. Many male students and alumni were openly hostile to women. A professor organized a shunning incident against me in a course where I was the only woman student, which only motivated me to work harder. I earned an A+ in that course and an apology from the professor. Only recently did I realize that I never had a woman professor at Princeton, at Yale Graduate School, or at Columbia Law School. Dealing with men and their conscious or unconscious biases was par for the course. Sports were no exception. As the former captain of my high school varsity basketball team, I suited up my first week at Princeton and went to the gym to shoot baskets, hoping to get into a pick-up game. When I asked for a basketball at the equipment room, I was told by the several cross-armed equipment men that there were no basketballs for “girls”. When I asked about the 4 racks of basketballs behind them, I was told those were only for “men.” My efforts to win over the equipment men failed but I was not about to accept that treatment. So I went through the building until I found the new women’s athletic director and explained my problem. She rolled her eyes at the equipment men’s recalcitrance and told me to walk back slowly and ask for a ball again. By the time I got back downstairs to the equipment room, one rack of basketballs had been rolled to the side and bore a hand-lettered sign saying “Girls.” I went back to the gym every day for many days to shoot baskets with balls from that rack. I was the only girl asking. The “men” never let me join a pick-up game, but the women’s athletic director did watch me every day. The next fall she called me and said, “I’ve decided to form a women’s varsity basketball team and my first call is to you!” I was glad to join. And by the time later that year that I married the big football star, the equipment men who had once denied me a basketball were such my close buddies that they offered to throw me a bridal shower.

In graduate school, I was the only woman Ph.D. in my graduating group along with 6 men. The head of my department said, “I’ll place the men in their jobs first and then I’ll get to you.” My reaction? “The hell with this! I’m getting my own job.” And I did. That infuriated the department head, who believed it was his right to place graduate students. When I decided to apply to law school several years later, he refused to provide any paperwork documenting my Ph.D. Rather than fight with an older aggrieved man, I contacted the head of the Yale Graduate School. He said, “Well, I could direct him to write for you but who knows what he might say. I would prefer to write for you myself.” Thus, I ended up with a much better letter of recommendation than I would otherwise have received. I was accepted at both of the law schools to which I applied. When I graduated as an honors scholar from Columbia Law School, I was advised that I had 3 strikes against me: I had a Ph.D., I was married, and I was a woman. A senior professor advised me to “Go be a big fish in a little pond.” I told him “But I want to be a big fish in a big pond” and so I accepted the offer of a top-10 international law firm in New York City. After working at the firm for over 30 years, I was honored to receive a trophy as a “Trailblazer” being the first woman in the Firm’s more than 140-year history to have “run the table” from summer associate to partner to senior partner/group head to retirement.

The late Rosalynn Carter famously said “There are only four kinds of people in the world: Those who have been caregivers, those who currently are caregivers, those who will be caregivers, and those who will need caregivers.” Managing my husband’s healthcare at the same time I was managing my Mother’s care during her last years was incredibly stressful. Nonetheless, I know that I am incredibly privileged having had supportive family, friends, aides and health insurance to help me bear this load. I have turned my intellect to learning as much as I can about brain health and supporting Hank with medical appointments, tests, physical therapy, neuropsychological therapy, nutrition and sleep. In addition, I have sought out opportunities for my husband to replace his past sports activities with intellectual activities that help him cope with the grief of losing his former life while stimulating his brain. The main activities Hank turned to were writing poetry and singing his poems. In a caregivers group I participate in at our local Glen Cove Hospital, I was asked to share with the group an activity that my husband could manage. When I said that Hank had taken up poetry to help him cope, the caregiver sitting next to me piped up, “Well, I am the Poet Laureate of Nassau County, and I teach poetry.” I literally ran after this woman at the end of the meeting and cornered her in the hospital hallway. “May I bring my husband to your class, please?” She replied, “Yes, but you can’t just bring him. If you come, you have to write too.”

So that is how Hank and I started working with now-former Poet Laureate Evelyn Kandel, who is also an Unsealed Writer. We have spent hours and hours preparing for and with Evelyn and our new classmates in her weekly classes over the past several years. She encouraged Hank to write a book about his football and brain experiences, which he mustered the effort and courage to do. His 2022 book, entitled “Head Hits I Remember: Football, Dysautonomia, and my Brain” is a very honest exploration of his athleticism and brain challenges. Our poems are also included in the new anthology of Evelyn’s students entitled “13 Poets From Long Island” published in September 2023. So from having to “give up” many activities Hank and I did for decades before, we have now elected to invest our time and energies in our “new normal” which includes poetry and singing alongside daily exercise, nutrition and healthy sleep. I am thrilled to report that Hank has made huge strides in recovery, vastly improving his physical stamina and walking ability. We have also met and enjoyed the company of a new set of friends whom we now regularly see via Zoom poetry meetings.

Ironically, on October 15, 2023, in a simple trip-and-fall, I managed to break my knee cap into three pieces requiring surgery, three weeks in the hospital, and wearing a cumbersome Bledsoe Brace. Now I am on the cusp of starting outpatient physical therapy to regain my normal walking gait. What a turnabout in our lives! In an instant, I was transformed from the perennial care-giver to the care-receiver. We quickly learned several lessons. First, thank goodness for the family and friends who jumped in to help us—his sister and my sister dropping off food for Hank and having him for dinner, for instance. Remember the precious infant sister I cared for? She is now my health-care proxy actively engaged in my recovery. Second, Hank actually benefitted from swapping roles. He found strength to drive himself to and from the hospital to visit me and the confidence to manage household chores in my absence. Third, we were reminded again that life circumstances are never static; they ebb and flow constantly. Despite my feeling incredibly fit and stable, one day-dreaming step looking up at the sky through beautiful willows had proved otherwise. None of us is invincible. I am not invincible.

Equally as important, I, a caregiver for so long, have had to relax into being the care-receiver, asking for and accepting support from my family and community of friends. I am extremely grateful to all of them, including my “new” friends and colleagues in poetry. Many public libraries and adult-education programs offer classes in poetry, in journaling, in writing. I encourage anyone needing to jump-start a change in outlook to give them a try.

Check out my poem in the book “13 Poets From Long Island” on Amazon – It is free for those with Kindle Unlimited.

Should Sadness visit unannounced

And you wonder “why?”

Greet them at your door

Have them come inside

Offer them a drink

Ask them why they’re here

Pull open the shades

So Sunlight will appear

Politely and gently

Listen to concerns

Kindly end the chat

Ask them never to return

But if Sadness reappears

And their shadow mars your Zen

Rely upon your Feng Shui

And close your door on them again

This is a ramp; at first, I took a picture to post on my social media platform to credit Buffalo Wild Wings for having this ‘assistant’ for people like myself who need an alternative to reach their destination. Don’t get me wrong; I appreciate not having to worry I might have ‘egg on my face’ before I enter the establishment or my cheeks being red, not because I had spicy wings, but because I fell.

Having two letters attached to my name is hard. These letters are CP. If I wanted to take the ‘steps’ — in my case, the longer route, I would say cerebral palsy, but my parents call me Jake instead of Jacob for a reason, right? Yes, my jokes are making this longer.

As I thought about posting this picture to social media, I pondered, “How could I post this phenomenal demonstration of universal design and make it universally understood?”

As I muddled for an answer, my subconscious blatantly interjected, “Your fudging kidding me, Jake? You know better; this is about your valid desire and craving for others to comprehend your sometimes paralyzing negative thoughts when ‘boxed’ or thinking you are ‘boxed’ because of two letters, CP.

So…after all of that stewing over, I realized the ramp served as a reminder, “I do not only need a ramp for physical assistance; I also need it for mental assistance! Fortunately, I do, and I hope you all do too! Keep unsealing your stories; this UNSEALED family has you!!

I grew up with migraine, it was like another member of the family. Always there, sometimes quiet, sometimes not but, always pretty need.

I spent my childhood in waiting rooms; chiropractors, neurologists, nutritionists all for my 4 year old brother who was getting daily attacks. As a child there were times this was fun. I would get to miss school to come to the neurologist in Manhattan. I got to know the man at the pizzeria next to the chiropractor so well that he let me put on whatever I wanted on the TV while my little brother was next door getting adjustments on his spine. As a child there were also many times this made me mad and annoyed at my brother. When we had to leave a party or family function because of his attacks, when we didn’t have chocolate in the house because he was on an elimination diet, when I was put in charge of taking care of him when we were are friends houses and their parents didn’t know what to do.

When I wasn’t in waiting rooms I could be found on the other side of a dark bedroom door wishing my mom could come play with me or help me with my homework. Or waiting on the outside of the bathroom or at the top of the stairs while my mother vomit from one of her episodic attacks. I was never allowed to wear perfume because it could trigger an attack for my mom.

When headaches became part of my daily life I didn’t think anything of it. When my vision blurred, I broke out in sweat and it felt like a knife was stabbing behind my eye I didn’t panic, I knew what it was. As I began my career as an occupational therapist my anxiety and depression worsened and I began mental health therapy for this. I casually mentioned my daily pain and my therapist seemed shocked. This was the first time I realized not everyone gets headaches, it’s not part of everyone’s life.

It had always been part of mine and I genuinely didn’t realize it wasn’t part of everyone’s. When these attacks began to worsen and increase in frequency I visited my PCP and asked if I should see a neurologist. Her response “no, you’re young, here’s this medication”. A medication I later found out can make attacks worse when I finally saw a migraine specialist. My good friend a fellow warrior pressed me and advocated to me and after months of the attacks becoming more severe I finally began my journey on living with chronic migraine and not letting it control me.