“I work in IT and my job is basically just staring at code on a computer all day. So when my ten-year-old daughter, Sadie, came with me for Take Your Daughter To Work Day, she was immediately unimpressed. That is until I showed her the room where we keep all the old equipment, including an old Mac that still had Oregon Trail installed. You remember, that ‘educational’ computer game every kid from the ’80s played in school? She played it for seven hours straight. A couple of my coworkers even joined her on their lunch break. It was quite the party. On the way out, my boss asked what she learned. ‘I played in the back room with my dad’s friends and I got chlamydia like 20 times,’ Sadie answered. She meant cholera, as in the pioneer disease everyone dies of in the game. My boss looked like she was going to have a heart attack until I explained.” —Steven Johnson, Baltimore
Did Leonardo da Vinci really paint Salvator Mundi?
The painting, Salvator Mundi, sold at Christie’s in 2017 for an eye-popping $450 million, in large part because it was attributed to Leonardo da Vinci. But some art experts, including Oxford art historian Matthew Landrus, believe that only 20 percent of the painting was completed by Leonardo himself. Citing artistic details and painting techniques evident in the brushwork, Landrus suspects the rest of the painting was done by Leonardo’s assistant, Bernardino Luini. Bernardino’s work has never fetched more than $654,545. Adding fuel to the fire, it’s thought the da Vinci completed a mere 15 paintings in his lifetime.
When the 1980s farm crisis hit, Mike Rosmann moved home to Harlan, Iowa, near the farm where he grew up.
It is dark in the workshop, but what light there is streams in patches through the windows. Cobwebs coat the wrenches, the cans of spray paint, and the rungs of an old wooden chair where Matt Peters used to sit. A stereo plays country music, left on by the renter who now uses the shop.
“It smells so good in here,” I say. “Like …”
“Men, working,” finishes Ginnie Peters.
We inhale. “Yes.”
Ginnie pauses at the desk where she found the letter from Matt, her husband, on the night he died.
“My dearest love,” it began, and it continued for pages. “I have torment in my head.”
On the morning of his last day, May 12, 2011, Matt stood in the kitchen of their farmhouse.
“I can’t think,” he told Ginnie. “I feel paralyzed.”
It was planting season, and stress was high. Matt worried about the weather and worked around the clock to get his crop in the ground on time. He hadn’t slept in three nights and was struggling to make decisions.
“I remember thinking, ‘I wish I could pick you up and put you in the car like you do with a child,’” Ginnie says. “And then I remember thinking … ‘and take you where? Who can help me with this?’ I felt so alone.”
Ginnie felt what she describes as an oppressive sense of dread that intensified as the day wore on. At dinnertime, Matt’s truck was gone, and he wasn’t answering his phone. It was dark when she found the letter. “I just knew,” she says. She called 911 immediately, but by the time the authorities located his truck, Matt had taken his life.
Ginnie describes her husband as strong and determined, funny and loving. They raised two children together. He would burst through the door singing the Mighty Mouse song—“Here I come to save the day!”—and make everyone laugh. He embraced new ideas and was progressive in his farming practices, one of the first in his county to practice no-till, a farming method that does not disturb the soil.
“In everything he did, he wanted to be a giver and not a taker,” she says.
After his death, Ginnie says, she began combing through Matt’s things—“every scrap of paper, everything I could find that would make sense of what had happened.” His phone records showed a 20-minute call to an unfamiliar number on the afternoon he died.
When she dialed the number, Mike Rosmann answered.
“My name is Virginia Peters,” she said. “My husband died of suicide on May 12.”
There was a pause on the line.
“I have been so worried,” said Mike. “Mrs. Peters, I am so glad you called me.” Matt had made an appointment to talk to Mike again, but when the time came, he hadn’t called.
Ginnie Peters stands by the tree she planted after her husband, Matt Peters, took his life.
Mike Rosmann, an Iowa farmer, is a psychologist and one of the nation’s leading experts on the behavioral health of farmers. His mission is to help those in crisis. And for 40 years, he has worked to understand why so many farmers take their own lives. Learn the 13 suicide warning signs that are easy to miss.
An analysis by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggests that male farmers die by suicide at nearly twice the rate of the general population. And this could be an underestimate, as the data did not include several major agricultural states. It’s also hard to capture an accurate number because some farmers disguise their suicides as accidents.
Mike looks like a midwestern Santa Claus—glasses perched on a kind, round face, a head of white hair, and a bushy white mustache. In 1979, he and his wife, Marilyn Rosmann, left their teaching positions at the University of Virginia and bought 190 acres in Harlan, Iowa, near the farm where Mike spent his boyhood. Mike told colleagues, “I need to go take care of farmers, because nobody else does.”
In the 1980s, the family-farm crisis began with the worst agricultural economic forecast since the Great Depression. Market prices crashed. Loans were called in. Interest rates doubled overnight. Farmers were evicted from their land. There were fights at grain elevators, shootings in local banks. Farmers’ suicide rates soared. It was a wrecking ball for rural America.
So Mike moved back home and opened a psychology practice. Marilyn got a job as a nurse. Together, they raised two children and began farming corn, soybeans, oats, and hay and raising purebred cattle, chickens, and turkeys. Mike walks with a slight limp—in 1990, during the oat harvest, he lost four of his toes “in a moment of carelessness” with the grain combine, an event he describes as life-changing.
Joyce and John Blaske had to sell most of their farmland. But they aren’t giving up.
We are walking through the wet grass toward the cornfield behind his house when he cranes his head. “Hear the calves bellering?” he asks. “They’ve just been weaned.” We stop and listen. The calves sound off in distressed notes, their off-key voices like the cries of prepubescent boys across the field.
Mike began providing free counseling, making referrals for services, and coordinating community events to break down the stigma of mental health issues. “People just did not deal with revealing their tender feelings. They felt like failures,” he says. Here are some more myths about mental health that need to be set straight.
During the height of the farm crisis, telephone hotlines were started in most agricultural states. Every state that had a hotline reported a significant drop in the number of farming-related suicides.
In 1999, Mike joined an organization called Sowing Seeds of Hope (SSOH), which referred farmers to affordable behavioral health services. In 2001, he became the director. For 14 years, until its federal funding ended, SSOH fielded more than 250,000 calls from farmers, trained more than 10,000 rural behavioral-health professionals, and provided vouchers for counseling and other resources to some 100,000 farm families. The program became the model for the nationwide Farm and Ranch Stress Assistance Network (FRSAN), which was approved as part of the 2008 U.S. Farm Bill but was never funded.
Mike continued to help farmers on his own and is now the director of AgriWellness, a nonprofit organization that offers behavioral health services in rural areas. The small outfit is trying to fill a big void. Currently 80 percent of rural residents live in areas with a shortage of mental health professionals. Farm Aid, the organization founded in response to the 1980s farm crisis, reported a 30 percent increase in calls to its farmer hotline in 2018 over the year before. Hope may be on the horizon, though, as the 2018 Farm Bill included $10 million in annual funding for FRSAN through 2023.
Will that be enough? Unfortunately, today’s bleak agricultural economy looks very much like a new farm crisis. Income for U.S. farmers has declined nearly 50 percent since 2013 and is at its lowest level since 2002, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. More than half of farmers lose money, and most have second jobs. Some farmers simply can’t afford to keep farming; more than 600 Wisconsin dairy farms shut down last year.
Dr. Nancy Zidek, who practices family medicine in Onaga, Kansas, sees behavioral-health issues frequently in her patients: “The grain prices are low. The gas prices are high. Farmers feel the strain of ‘I’ve got to get this stuff in the field. But if I can’t sell it, I can’t pay for next year’s crop. I can’t pay my loans at the bank off.’ And that impacts the rest of us in a small community, because if the farmers can’t come into town to purchase from the grocery store, the hardware store, the pharmacy, then those people also struggle.”
The sky in Onaga is chalk gray, and for a moment it rains. John Blaske’s cows are lined up at the fence; cicadas trill from the trees. It’s been a year since he flipped through Missouri Farmer Today and froze, startled by an article written by Mike Rosmann: “Suicide Rate of Farmers Higher Than Any Other Group.”
“I read it 12 or 15 times,” John says, sitting next to his wife, Joyce Blaske, at their kitchen table. “It hit home something drastically.”
John is tall and stoic, with hands toughened by work and a somber voice that rarely changes in inflection. He says softly, “In the last 25 to 30 years, there’s not a day that goes by that I don’t think about suicide.” Watch out for the signs you or someone you know should think about seeing a therapist.
Research from the University of Iowa suggests possible causes for farmers’ high suicide rate, including social isolation and loneliness, access to guns, financial stress, chronic pain or illness, and ruinously unpredictable weather—a problem now more than ever. “Farming has always been a stressful occupation because many of the factors that affect agricultural production are largely beyond the control of the producers,” wrote Mike in the Journal of Rural Mental Health.
Loss of land can feel like a death, something John understands firsthand. On Thanksgiving Day in 1982, a spark shot out from his wood stove and landed in a box of newspaper. The fire burned most of the Blaskes’ house. Soon after, the bank raised their interest rate from 7 percent to 18 percent. John raced between banks and private lenders attempting to renegotiate loan terms. Agreements would be made and then fall through. “They did not care whether we had to live in a grader ditch,” remembers John.
Desperate, the family filed for bankruptcy and lost 265 of its 300 acres. That’s when John began to think of suicide. “I can’t leave our property without seeing what we lost,” he says. “You can’t imagine how that cuts into me every day. It just eats me alive.”
After finding the article in Missouri Farmer Today, he decided to contact Mike. But the article listed a website, and the Blaskes did not own a computer. So John drove to the library and asked a librarian to email Mike for him. A few days later, as John was driving his tractor down the road, Mike called him.
When farmers struggle, towns feel the pinch too. Downtown Onaga, Kansas, is studded with boarded-up storefronts.
“He wanted to hear what I had to say,” John says. “Someone needs to care about what’s going on out here.”
Since the 1980s farm crisis, Mike says, experts have learned much more about how to support farmers. Confidential crisis communication systems—by phone or online—are effective, but staffers need to be versed in the reality and language of agriculture. “If you go to a therapist who may know about therapy but doesn’t understand farming,” Mike explains, “the therapist might say, ‘Take a vacation—that’s the best thing you can do.’ And the farmer will say, ‘But my cows aren’t on a five-day-a-week schedule.’”
Affordable therapy is critical—and inexpensive to fund. Mike says many issues can be resolved in fewer than five sessions, which he compares to an employee-assistance program, something many companies offer their workers. Medical providers need to be trained to look for physical and behavioral health vulnerabilities in agricultural populations, an effort Mike is working on with colleagues.
John Blaske says painting helps him. When he’s feeling up to it, he’ll paint detailed farmscapes on heavy saw blades. Counseling and medication have also worked well, but he craves conversation with farmers who know what he’s experiencing. “I would really give about anything to go and talk to people,” he says. “If any one person thinks they are the only one in this boat, they are badly mistaken. It’s like Noah’s ark. It’s running over.”
Inside the farmhouse, John places two journals in my hands. They’re filled with his memories of walking through town barefoot as a child, how his mother would pick sandburs out of his feet; of the years he worked at the grain elevator, only to come home to farm work, counting cows by flashlight. The image of John on the farm, illuminating the darkness, is a powerful one. “Sometimes the batteries were low and the light was not so bright,” he wrote, “but when you found the cow that was missing, you also found a newborn calf, which made the dark of night much brighter.” And sometimes that ray of light is all you need to see the promise of a new day. Read on for more inspirational stories about the kindness of strangers.
Where to find help
Many states offer mental health resources for farmers; most will help people in need regardless of location. These national organizations are also good places to start:
In 1939, more than 120 years after the first photograph ever was taken, Robert Cornelius set up a camera in the back of his family’s store and took what’s believed to be the very first photographic self-portrait ever. What’s astounding is how long it took for someone to take that first “selfie.” One thing is for sure—he nailed his lighting, and so did the takers of these other historical selfies.
The Dye brothers, Billy Howard and Robert, disappeared in 1956 along with their cousin, Dan Brasher. They were last seen leaving a relative’s house in rural Jefferson County in a 1947 green Ford, but no one even noticed they were missing because they were known to be heavy drinkers and often disappeared for days while sleeping off a binge. When a missing person’s report was filed, investigators’ questions were met with silence or tall tales—for example, of a bulldozer burying a car under a highway. The case remains unsolved. Check out these missing person mysteries that were eventually solved.
The patient: Ted*, a public sector worker in his late 40s The symptoms: Low-grade fever, persistent cough and fatigue The doctor: Dr. Neil Shear, head of dermatology at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Center in Toronto, Canada
For three weeks in February 2017, Ted struggled to banish what he thought was a nasty flu bug. He had a dry cough, a fever of 100.4 degrees, and a feeling of fatigue that eight hours of sleep—and over-the-counter cold medications—couldn’t fix.
Finally, fed up with feeling lousy, Ted went to his family doctor, who discovered puzzling sores the size of small warts inside his mouth and nose and referred him to the internal medicine clinic at Sunnybrook Hospital in Toronto. The physician there suspected vasculitis, an inflammation in the veins and arteries that often presents with fatigue, coughing and skin sores and is one of the surprising diseases dermatologists find first.
It was now April, three months after Ted started feeling sick, and his health quickly deteriorated: his cough worsened and he was so tired he could barely make it through his workday. He’d also lost his typically healthy appetite and was dropping weight. More troubling: the lesions in his mouth and nose were getting larger, and had spread to his throat.
Ted was referred to an oral surgeon, who biopsied the lesions in his mouth. The results were read as granulomatous vasculitis, aligning with the internist’s earlier suspicions. This variant typically involves the upper respiratory tract—an X-ray revealed a fuzzy shadow in Ted’s lungs. The disease affects about one in 25,000 people, often in their 40s and 50s, and may lead to heart disease and kidney damage. While the condition can be very serious, when it’s diagnosed and treated promptly, the current survival rate is about 90 percent.
Unfortunately, two weeks of taking corticosteroids to control inflammation and suppress his immune system didn’t relieve Ted’s symptoms. The lesions had spread to the skin on his arms, legs and torso, and the abscesses in his mouth and throat made it difficult to eat or talk. By this point, it had been almost six months since the onset of his illness, and Ted had lost hope of ever getting better. He was referred to dermatologist Dr. Neil Shear because the sores on his body were so disfiguring, one of the clear signs you need a dermatologist right away.
Shear took one look at the patient and knew he didn’t have vasculitis. “Once you see a condition like this, you don’t forget it,” he says. What Shear saw was blastomycosis, an airborne fungal infection that originates from mold that grows in damp soil and decomposing leaves. It’s found in the U.S. and Canada, as well as parts of India and Africa, and affects people (and animals) who breathe in the spores, though not everyone who’s exposed will develop the infection.
Flu-like symptoms typically appear one to three months after a person inhales the fungus. Once the microorganisms enter the lungs, they transform into a yeast that spreads through the bloodstream. “Eventually, the patient would have been on a ventilator and likely would have died,” Shear says.
Blastomycosis is uncommon in many regions, and Ted is still unsure where he picked up the illness. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, yearly incidence rates in the U.S. are approximately one to two cases for every 100,000 people. Shear says the infection is often misdiagnosed because it so closely resembles the flu. When reviewing biopsy results, it’s helpful to know what to look for, he says, like these small body changes that can signal a major problem.
In Ted’s case, the fungal elements were noted but weren’t perceived as being significant. “It can take a little extra detective work.”
Fortunately, the condition is treatable. Although Shear performed a second biopsy and fungal culture, he didn’t wait for the results to start a regimen. He promptly prescribed a high dose of antifungal medication two times a day for a month. “After a week, the patient started getting better,” Shear says. Today, Ted has fully recovered. The fact that serious conditions like blastomycosis often mimic flu symptoms is just one of the reasons it’s time to take the flu more seriously.
Growing up with a brother who is on the autism spectrum meant a lot of compromises. My brother is high-functioning, but there were still a lot of things we had to do to adapt. Though we felt like it at times, we weren’t alone: According to the Autism Society, the disorder occurs in one in every 59 births in the United States. Autism can impact a person’s ability to communicate and interact with others, as well as their fine motor skills, coordination, and even their basic senses in some cases.
As a child, I had to make concessions for my brother’s condition, and there were more than a few situations that led me to say “that’s not fair!” or “you would never let me get away with that.” But, as we all grew and evolved, I realized I had to help the family work as a cohesive unit—and this continues to be the main priority for everyone in my family. Learn about the 18 autism myths that doctors wish you would stop believing.
There will be tantrums
This was especially true when my brother was young: The tantrums usually came out of a misunderstanding or a breakdown in communication—a common issue for people on the autism spectrum. They cannot always communicate what they are feeling, and the frustration can lead to tantrums. But as we got better at communicating as a family, the tantrums lessened until, eventually, they stopped completely.
Respect the routine
Something my family learned is that routine equals comfort, and maintaining routines around the house helped my brother get through his day. When we had to shift the routine, we just needed to do so with plenty of warning, careful planning, and clear communication. Read about the 14 things experts want everyone to know about autism.
Read the signs
Even as my communication with my brother improved, I could still hit a point when he wouldn’t be able to comprehend exactly what I was saying. If he failed to respond or came back with something completely off-topic, it was my cue to stop pushing or risk that he might get angry or completely shut down.
Keep social life simple
Like a lot of people on the autism spectrum, my brother is very smart. But he understands life in a completely different—yet fascinating—way. Despite his intelligence, like many people on the spectrum he has a hard time reading social cues and can find social situations challenging. In this case, my family has learned to slow down his interactions with others, keep things simple, and allow him breaks when he’s feeling overwhelmed.
They will attain goals
I grew up trying to hit goals. Career goals. Life goals. Relationship goals. Money goals. And I was acutely aware of when society felt I should reach those benchmarks. My brother may not hit those goals when he “should,” but he is attaining them—when he’s ready.
Make time for downtime
We all need time to recharge and decompress, but my brother thrives on spending a ton of time alone, something that can be true of people on the spectrum. While at times I felt like it might be a good idea for him to be more social, I realized that even family dinner demanded a lot from him, and he would need downtime afterward.
There will be so much love
I’m constantly thankful for all the love I feel and receive from my brother—even if he doesn’t show it in a traditional way. I’m able to see from his behavior and small gestures how much he appreciates me. I admire him, too, for all of the amazing things he can see that I can’t.
Devil’s Pool is a natural pool created by surrounding boulders and a waterfall that feeds it, and as beautiful as it is, people say it’s cursed. According to legend, Oolana, an Aboriginal woman, drowned herself in the pool after being separated from her true love. Still searching for him today, she lures young men to their death in the green waters. Sixteen young men have died there in the past 50 years, reports News.com.au.
Dan or D.B. Cooper is the alias for a hijacker who is infamous for taking over a commercial plane leaving Portland, Oregon the day before Thanksgiving in 1971. The 40-something-looking man gave the fake name Dan Cooper and, during the flight, told the flight attendant of a bomb in his briefcase. He demanded four parachutes and $200,000 in $20 bills, about $1.2 million in today’s dollars, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica. After the plane landed and let out passengers, they refueled, and Cooper forced the pilots and flight attendant to keep the aircraft flying under 10,000 feet at slower than 200 knots. Then he parachuted out of the plane with the ransom money in hand. No one ever identified, caught, or even heard from him again. And although he used the name Dan Cooper, a reporter misheard this as D.B. Cooper thus starting his false but popular nickname. Of course, some people claim they know the real identity of Cooper—like this former FBI agent—but the case is still officially unsolved.
You’d think the White House would have lots of secret spaces, but there’s only one you’re allowed to know about without security clearance, and even that’s not exactly public knowledge. We’re talking about the bomb shelter President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had constructed in the East Wing in December 1941. While he was having it built, “mum” was the word; he acknowledged only that the East Wing construction was under construction. The bomb shelter isn’t the only thing your history teacher never taught you about the White House.
This article was originally written in 2001 by Ingrid Seward and appeared in the August 2001 issue of Reader’s Digest.*
THE TRAGIC NEWS that Diana, Princess of Wales, had died in a Paris car crash came to us in August, four years ago. As Americans watched her funeral pageant at Westminster Abbey, it was easy to think of her only as a princess, someone completely unlike the rest of us.
But within the royal family Diana was an all-too human relative. She doted on her sons, William and Harry. She loved and fought with Prince Charles, her estranged husband. And she had a complicated relationship with the Queen, her mother-in-law, alternately viewing her as a substitute mom and a meddling old woman who was out to get her. In The Queen and Di, British author Ingrid Seward, who has covered the royal family for 18 years, draws on knowledge from her own sources to show how Diana and the Queen were close to being each other ‘s salvation. When the Princess held a sick orphan or wore a stunning gown, she warmed the otherwise cold and at times even weird public image of the royal family. The Queen, meanwhile, offered Diana a chance to find the home life she had been missing—Diana’s own mother had left home, and a broken marriage, when Diana was only six. But the Princess’s psychological problems, and the Queen’s rigid sense of protocol and propriety, ultimately undermined their relationship.
In her new book, Seward recounts the morning of August 31, when the Queen and Prince Charles heard about Diana’s accident. The Princess and her lover, Dodi Fayed, were trying to escape a crowd of paparazzi when their driver lost control in an underpass. Almost immediately, the news flashed to Balmoral, the Queen’s country home in Scotland.
The Queen was awakened in the early hours of the morning. Pulling on her old-fashioned dressing gown, she went into the corridor where she met Prince Charles. The news from Paris was that Dodi Fayed was dead, but Diana had survived. Soon the whole castle stirred from its slumber. Charles took incoming calls. The Queen ordered tea, which was brought from the kitchen and then ignored.
Their first concern was to discover how badly injured Diana was. Initially they were told that she had walked away from the accident virtually unscathed. Then another call came through. “Sir, I am very sorry to have to tell you that I’ve just had the Ambassador on the phone. The Princess died a short time ago.”
Charles’s composure collapsed, and the tears the public never saw began to flow. The Queen was equally stunned. While others in the royal family had long since given up on Diana, Elizabeth had retained some affection for her daughter-in-law, and still sympathized with her. She recognized Diana’s potential—and saw her death as a terrible waste. The connection between the Queen’s and Diana dates back to when the princess’ grandmother worked for the Queen. This connection is one of the 9 secrets about Princess Diana no one knew about until after her death.
In the outpouring of grief from Diana’s supporters, the royal family found itself caught in a startling rip of public rancor. Crowds surged through the streets of London mourning the Princess, and the Palace was blamed for treating her heartlessly. Perhaps for the first time in her life, Queen Elizabeth had to ask: What do they want me to do?
I once asked Diana whether her marriage had been arranged, and she told me with some irritation: “It was Charles and I who decided on the marriage. Not the Queen. Us. No one else.”
That was true—no one ordered Charles to propose or Diana to accept. Without the Queen’s approval, though, no proposal would have been made.
As their romance acquired momentum, almost everyone urged Charles to press forward. The Queen herself never directly addressed the question of his marriage, but by nod and nuance, she made it clear she approved of Diana. The Prince, however, was confused. ”I’m terrified sometimes of making a promise and then perhaps living to regret it,” he said.
The question; when it came, was a question in itself. “If I were to ask, what do you think you might say?” Charles inquired. Giggling, Diana replied, “Yeah, OK.” Charles then ran out of the room to telephone his mother with the news.
The engagement was announced on February 24, 1981, and Diana soon moved into rooms at Buckingham Palace. Since Diana had been born into privilege, the Queen believed her future daughter-in-law knew what was expected of her. As she wrote to a friend in March 1981, “I trust that Diana will find living here less of a burden than is expected.”
In fact, Diana had no notion of what to expect—and from the beginning, she found royal life an extraordinary burden. She swam most mornings in the Palace pool, immersed herself in wedding plans, and took dance and exercise classes. The rest of the time she simply sat around, bored and increasingly irritable.
Pent-up and lonely, Diana began making herself ill, the first signs of bulimia. Several times a day she visited the kitchen, filling a bowl with Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes and fruit, adding sugar and drenching it all in cream. Afterward, she would go to the bathroom and make herself sick.
Her moods became ever more unpredictable, and Charles drew much of her fire. Why, she asked, was he not spending more time with her? It was explained that the Prince had a schedule of engagements arranged months before. That did little to pacify her.
The Queen chose to overlook Diana’s behavior in these early months, concluding that she needed time to settle in. Nearly everyone, from the Queen to the staff who looked after Diana, attributed her behavior to a bad case of “nerves.”
Left to struggle through, Diana did so, barely. After one particularly difficult stretch in June 1981, when the Prince was traveling, she bolted. Following a party to celebrate Prince Andrew’s 21st birthday, she got into her car at 5:30 a.m. and drove from London to her family home, over an hour away. She told her father, John Spencer, that she was calling off the engagement. He listened as Diana poured out her heart, then advised her that it was probably just the pressure. Once she was married, said her father, things would get easier. One of the fascinating facts you probably didn’t know about Diana and Prince Charles is that Diana his first choice, either. Feeling aside, by Sunday night Diana was back in Buckingham Palace, acting as if nothing had happened.
Most brides revel in the first weeks of marriage. Instead, during her honeymoon cruise in the Mediterranean, Diana became violently ill with bulimia. After 15 exhausting days, which were punctuated by tremendous fights, the newlyweds arrived back at Balmoral. The Prince summoned a doctor, the first of many who would try to help. “All the analysts and psychiatrists you could ever dream of came plodding in to sort me out,” Diana recalled.
In medical terms, some feel that Diana suffered from Borderline Personality Disorder. Symptoms include fear of abandonment, a tendency toward histrionic behavior, a need for adoration, and mood swings. Bulimia can be another manifestation.
The Queen was understanding of Diana’s difficulties, especially after it was made clear just how unwell her daughter-in-law was. For all her reserve, Elizabeth seemed to have a natural empathy with Diana. And for a time Diana saw the Queen’s support as a source of enormous comfort. “I have the best mother-in-law in the world,” she once told me.
But the Queen’s indulgence could not bridge the gulf between Diana and Charles. Diana was an exuberant city girl barely into her 20s, with zero experience in romance. Charles was a contemplative self-described “countryman,” with several significant love affairs behind him.
The Queen hoped that the birth of Prince William, in 1982, and Harry, two years later, would ease the tensions and give Charles and Diana reasons to grow together. Instead, the pressures on the couple increased. Diana’s emotional difficulties grew worse, and in short order, the marriage began to curdle.
As it did, Diana began calling at Buckingham Palace seeking guidance from her mother-in-law. At first, the Queen took a tolerant view of these unscheduled visits. “Diana was usually in a lot better mood when she left than she was when she arrived,” one of the Queen’s staff recalled.
In time, though, Elizabeth came to dread the meetings. After one session a footman said, “The Princess cried three times in a half an hour while she was waiting to see you.” The Queen replied, “I had her for an hour—and she cried nonstop.”
Diana went in search of comfort wherever she could find it, and by 1986 had formed a close relationship with Capt. James Hewitt of the Queen’s Household Cavalry. Charles also resumed a relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles, a married woman who many believed was the love of his life. That’s just part of the true story of what happened between Prince Charles and Princess Diana.
Queen Elizabeth was advised of these unhappy developments. She had once likened Diana to a “nervy racehorse” who needed careful handling, not harsh discipline. Despite the evidence, she convinced herself that if Diana were given the independence she claimed she needed, her self-assurance would grow and she would settle down.
Instead, what came next was the June 1992 publication of Andrew Morton’s book Diana, Her True Story. The scandalizing bestseller cast Charles in the worst light and painted a picture of a royal family so cold and self-absorbed that it was incapable of responding to the plight of a young woman who should have been at its very heart.
Although she was not quoted directly, it was clear Diana collaborated on the book. The Queen was stunned. She was well aware how unhappy her daughter-in-law was, but never imagined Diana would air dirty linen in such a way. In most families, this behavior would have meant the immediate end of the marriage. lnstead, the Queen ordered a six-month cooling-off period. Charles agreed. So did Diana. For all her grievances, the Princess realized what life would be like if she were cast out of the royal family altogether.
Through all of this, Diana presented a captivating image of beauty and compassion. The gossip magazines might print acres of stories about arguments and illicit affairs, but Diana carried on with her appointments, and the public never stopped adoring her. She also had a genuine sympathy for the ill and troubled. In a royal family desperately in need of a humane face, she was the only one who could kneel to comfort a sick child and look as if she meant it.
As much as anyone, Elizabeth saw the good that Diana could do for the monarchy. Yet as the Princess increasingly went her own way—for instance, when she gave a TV interview and questioned whether Charles had the moral character to be king—she became more and more of a liability. Charles and Diana had separated late in 1992; they were divorced in August 1996. And barely a year later, she was dead.
In the end, Diana was the one person the Queen never learned to handle. She reacted badly to criticism—any rebuke by the Queen was taken as an instance of the family ganging up on her. Neither patience nor the silent, steely-eyed displeasure Elizabeth had learned to deploy with such withering effect made any impression on Diana. Yet by doing nothing, and by allowing Diana to disregard the constraints of convention that keep the monarchy in place, the Queen unwittingly allowed the Princess to run out of control. If you didn’t know that, then you’ll also be surprised by these fascinating facts—and a few scandals!—about Queen Elizabeth.
From the perspective of today, marrying into the House of Windsor is certainly no fairy tale; Charles, Princess Anne, and Prince Andrew have all gone through divorce. Looking back on the litter of her children’s broken marriages, the Queen would come to wonder if she had failed in her duty as a mother. Or, as she once asked of a lady-in-waiting, “Where did we go wrong?”
*Adapted from “The Queen and Di: The Untold Story.” Copyright 2000 by Ingrid Seward. Published at $25.95 by Arcade Publishing, Inc., 141 Fifth Ave., New York, NY 10010
This car owner heard a scratching noise coming from the hood of her car—when it wasn’t running. When she lifted the hood, she came face-to-face with this opossum. She called David Seerveld, a wildlife removal expert at AAAnimal Control. “It chose to assume a defensive position rather than play dead, and it bared its teeth and stood still,” says Seerveld. That’s when he took the photo. After using a snare pole to noose the opossum, he placed it in a cage and relocated it to a nature preserve. Find out how to keep your home—and car—pest-free.
A death on the mountain motivated Scott Cullymore to help hikers.
Even if you’ve never been to Phoenix, you know this about the place: It’s hot. From June to September, the temperature can easily eclipse the century mark. But that doesn’t stop hikers from attempting the 1.3-mile trek to the top of the city’s famed Camelback Mountain. Signs warn that the trail is “extremely difficult.” If you continue, a posted checklist suggests at least a liter of water per person. And if you’re still not deterred, another sign farther up declares: “If you’re halfway through your water, turn around!”
Unfortunately, many people do not heed the warnings. Fortunately, Scott Cullymore does. When he’s not running his carpet-cleaning company in nearby Mesa, the 53-year-old Cullymore can be found hiking up and down Camelback a couple of times a day, doling out cold bottles of water to worn-out hikers. He has helped hydrate so many hikers that he has earned a heavenly nickname: the Water Angel. “I’d like a more manly name, but, you know,” he told azfamily.com.
Cullymore was on Camelback Mountain one day in 2015 when a British tourist died after being lost for nearly six hours in the July heat. That experience inspired him to start helping people caught unaware by Arizona’s unforgiving version of Mother Nature. “They underestimate the mountain, and they overestimate what they can do, and they get themselves in trouble,” he told the Arizona Republic. If a hiker has a flushed face and is not sweating anymore, Cullymore says, he reaches into his insulated orange backpack, pulls out a frosty bottle, and hands it to the person. It’s nothing for him to go through eight waters—which he pays for himself—in one lap up and down the mountain. “It’s misleading that we’re in the middle of the city. You can die up here, and no one would know.”
One hiker who availed himself of the proffered water agrees. “You think you know the heat, but then you get out here in the desert and it surrounds you like a blanket,” said Austin Hill, who was hiking with a high school friend. They were lucky, he said, pointing to Cullymore. “We ran into this Good Samaritan here.” And with that, the Water Angel goes in search of another hiker in need.
An Aurora police officer taking her turn cradling Axel
Axel Winch was born nearly 13 weeks prematurely, and the doctors didn’t think he’d make it. He weighed two pounds, 12 ounces and had bleeding in his brain, a hole in his heart, scoliosis, and vision and hearing problems. After a week in the hospital in Grand Junction, Colorado, where parents Melissa and Adam Winch live, he developed a life-threatening intestinal condition. Doctors decided to airlift Axel and Melissa more than 200 miles to neonatal intensive care at Children’s Hospital Colorado in Aurora.
Axel stabilized, but his health remained precarious over the next few weeks as his lungs and lymphatic system shut down. “There were many times we didn’t think he was going to live,” Adam told Today. “He would die in our arms, and the nurses would scramble to revive him.” Learn some surprising facts you never knew about newborn babies.
The roller-coaster ride felt even more frightening because the family was a four-and-a-half-hour drive from home. Fortunately, backup was on the way. Melissa, 39, is a police officer in Grand Junction, and Adam, 46, is a former officer who now owns a defense training company. The police department in Grand Junction contacted officers they knew in Aurora and said, “Hey, you need to check on one of our people,” Adam recalls.
Soon, members of the Aurora police department flooded the Winches with offers of help. One brought them banana bread. A detective gave the couple a place to stay. Others showed up at the hospital to coo over Axel. “We were overwhelmed with the support from people we didn’t know,” Adam says. “It was the blue family.” Learn these 45 secrets police officers wish you knew.
But then things got tough again. After weeks of caring for Axel in Aurora, the couple had to briefly return to Grand Junction on two separate occasions. First, their house had been under contract when Axel arrived, and they had to move out in two days when it sold. The second time, Melissa’s leave had run out, so she had to return to work for a few days. They hated having to abandon their son, who had improved but was still facing further surgeries. Melissa cried the whole way back to Grand Junction. “We were afraid he was going to die while we were gone,” Adam says.
But the blue family came through again. Aurora police sergeant Mike Pitrusu set up a schedule for his officers to spend time with Axel—morning, afternoon, and night—when his parents couldn’t be there. “I didn’t want him to be alone,” Pitrusu told 9NEWS. Somebody dubbed it “the cuddle watch.” More than 20 officers pitched in, reading to Axel, singing Elvis songs, and cradling him as his health slowly improved. They texted the parents photos of themselves asleep with Axel, updates from the nurses—even reports on Axel’s diapers. “It meant the world to us,” Adam told KKCO NBC 11 News.
It meant the world to the cops too. A detective who was traumatized by the horrific cases she had seen in child protection said “her soul was heavy from dealing with the most terrible things on the job,” Adam told the BBC. “She said that the cuddle watch healed her.”
After four months in the hospital, Axel was strong enough to go home. He can see now, has recovered some hearing, and grew into “almost a normal, healthy baby,” Adam says. “We’re just seeing miracle after miracle.”
There was, however, one condition from his time in the hospital that Axel can’t shake, Melissa told 9NEWS. “He just wants to be held all the time now.” And who could resist him? For more irresistible cuteness, check out these photos that a hospital took of premature babies “graduating” from the NICU.
Garrett loved superheroes almost as much as he loved his family and friends.
In September 2017, four-year-old Garrett Michael Matthias was diagnosed with a rare cancer. For ten months, he endured brutal chemotherapy and radiation for embryonal rhabdomyosarcoma, but he never lost his sense of humor. People who said goodbye to him with “See you later, alligator” were often taken aback by Garrett’s standard response: “See ya later, suckas!” When his parents, Ryan and Emilie Matthias, found out he was terminal, they started writing down his thoughts on life and death. Garrett died on July 6, 2018. Five days later, the Des Moines Register ran the family’s unusual paid obituary, which was written almost entirely in Garrett’s own words and is featured below. His words will make you laugh, cry, or maybe even both. Meet some more incredible parents who are fighting to end childhood cancer for good.
John Ogburn (center), with Lawrence Guiler (left) and Nikolina Bajic
John Ogburn doesn’t remember a single thing about Monday, June 26, 2017. He doesn’t remember waking up that morning, or helping prepare breakfast for his three young children, or kissing his wife, Sarabeth Ogburn, goodbye. He doesn’t remember driving to a Panera Bread in Charlotte, North Carolina, or going to his favorite booth in the back, where he regularly sat, working on his laptop. And he doesn’t remember crumpling to the floor at about 4:15 p.m., his heart having gone completely, terrifyingly still.
April Bradley was just starting her shift at Panera when her brother told her someone had passed out in the back of the restaurant. When they got to John, he was splayed on the carpet. His face was dark purple. “It was the scariest thing I’ve ever seen,” Bradley says. She dialed 911. It was 4:17 p.m.
As luck would have it, Charlotte-Mecklenburg police officer Lawrence Guiler was about 50 feet away. He had just tended to a minor accident and was about to get back on the road. Another lucky stroke: Before joining the police, he had been an EMT.
Guiler arrived at Panera in less than a minute and began CPR. Within 30 seconds, another police officer, Nikolina Bajic, rushed in. “Coincidentally, I was already dispatched to a second accident in the same parking lot,” Bajic says. A few minutes later, four Charlotte firefighters arrived, opened John’s airway, and fitted him with an oxygen mask. They took turns performing CPR. They also used a defibrillator to try to shock his heart into restarting. It didn’t.
They shocked him again. And again. And again. They gave him a shot of epinephrine to return his heart to a normal rhythm. Then another. Then another. Nothing. No sign of life. More than 20 minutes had gone by.
“Nobody wanted to give up on him,” says Bajic.
Around 4:30 p.m., while John was receiving CPR from a total of eight first responders, his iPhone started ringing. It was his wife. “I called a couple times, but he didn’t answer,” Sarabeth says. “I assumed he was in a meeting.”
A little over an hour later, she was heading to her parents’ for dinner with the couple’s three children when Novant Health Presbyterian Medical Center called. She was told John had gone into cardiac arrest. Know these warning signs that you may be about to go into cardiac arrest.
“It was terrifying,” she says. “When I got there, I was taken into a room with two police officers, ER doctors, nurses, and clergy. Basically, they said, ‘We don’t know what’s gonna happen.’”
Someone informed her that John had received CPR for 38 minutes before they established a pulse; the police estimate it at more (45). In any event, it was a long time. “Generally, after 30 minutes you start thinking, When should we call this?” says Amy McLaughlin, MD, the first physician to examine John.
He was transported to the intensive care unit and sedated in hopes of giving his body time to recover. Two days later—on his 36th birthday, in fact—he started to wake up.
“He squeezed my hand,” Sarabeth says. “I wasn’t sure if I would ever have that again.”
Astonishingly, the only aftereffects were some short-term memory loss and an extremely sore chest from the 3,500 compressions. “Not many people make it out of that situation,” Guiler says. “Seeing that he made a full recovery is—I can’t even explain it.”
Adds Dr. McLaughlin: “Everything that could go right for him did.”
Sean slept in the hospital and took on the role of Colleen’s advocate.
The day I died was the perfect New England fall morning. It was 11 a.m. on Saturday, October 8, 2011, when I set out on the 12‑mile bike ride home from work along the Connecticut shoreline. The sun was brilliant against the blue sky, and the leaves were starting to change colors.
It was an exciting time for me. I loved my job as a program manager at PeaceJam, an organization that educates kids about leaders in the peace movement. At home, my husband of one year, Sean, and I were trying to have a baby.
Sean, a mail carrier, was working, so I’d made plans with a friend for a long ride later that afternoon. But I would never get to meet up with her.
As I settled into the right-hand lane of a busy avenue, a freight truck turned in my direction from a side street. He slowed at the corner. We made eye contact. Then, for reasons I’ll never know, he accelerated.
There was nothing I could do but scream. The giant truck knocked me down onto my left side; my legs got tangled up with my bike. I heard snapping and grinding as his front tires drove over me. I felt my insides cracking when his back tires did the same.
People came rushing from all directions as the truck rumbled away. “Oh my God!” I heard. “She’s alive.”
I raised my head just enough to see something bright white and yellow protruding from my leg: bone, tendons, and fatty cells. The skin had peeled right off most of the lower half of my body, along with my clothing. There wasn’t any normal flesh to see. My abdomen was opened up, and I was bleeding out.
A woman with blond hair appeared and sat in the road with me, holding my head. One man stopped the fleeing truck. Another ran over carrying an emergency heat blanket from a kit he had in his car. He began screaming out orders: “YOU, STOP TRAFFIC. YOU, HOLD HER HEAD STILL. YOU, COVER HER ABDOMEN WITH THIS. Holy … God. Hang in there, girl. Hang in there.”
The paramedics arrived—a team of three women. They began by rolling my body onto a backboard. Later I’d learn that for one of them, it was her first day on the job. In fact, I was her very first call.
The ride to the hospital took about 20 minutes. The double doors of the ambulance opened to the sunlight, and from there it was straight to the emergency room, where, for the next eight hours, I kept dying. I would flatline, someone would do CPR, and they’d pull me back from the abyss. They did this over and over. People had to keep rotating because keeping me alive was exhausting. At the same time, the orthopedic-trauma team was debriding my insides—cleaning out the gravel and rocks and debris. My stomach was ripped open, my backside was ripped open, my pelvic bone was severed. The pelvis holds up all the vital organs, so when it’s compromised, internal hemorrhaging doesn’t stop.
On top of that, my left femoral artery was severed. The blood would run through me and right out again, over and over. Our bodies hold roughly ten pints of blood. That day, I went through 78 pints—eight bodies’ worth. At times, I had lost so much blood that there was nothing left for my heart to pump.
Twelve hours after I’d left for work that morning, I was stable enough that Sean was allowed to see me in the ICU. I had tubes running into my nose and mouth. I was bloodied and swollen. My belly was so distended that I looked like I was pregnant with triplets. Sean gingerly took my cut-up hand in his. He had been by my side for only a minute when a nurse saw red fluids staining my gown again.
“You need to leave. We have to keep working on her. Now!” she said firmly. He kissed my forehead and said a quick prayer before being ushered back to the visitors’ lounge.
With the odds stacked against me, the doctors decided to place me in an induced coma, a lifesaving step that slows down brain function and reduces swelling in order to prevent or lessen brain damage.
During this period, I was in and out of surgery several times. Once, I woke up just as the surgeon was starting to operate on me. I saw a bright light and masked faces hovering over me. I remember my chest rising and falling, but I couldn’t take a breath. As I woke, the pain hit hard, but I couldn’t move or communicate no matter how hard I tried. Well, except for my fingers.
“Her fingers are moving,” someone in the room said.
“There’s no way her fingers could be moving. She’s out,” someone else said.
I’m right here! I wanted to scream. I can hear you!
“Maybe she’s having a seizure.”
Then another masked face appeared right in front of my face, and I remember a strange smell, and then everything went dark again. They wrote “mild seizure” on my chart.
People have the wrong idea about what a medically induced coma is. They think it means you’re totally unconscious, unable to see or hear or respond in any way. But that’s not how it is. For weeks after the trauma, I felt like I was locked in a nightmare, imprisoned in my body. Sometimes I was unconscious, but other times I existed in a state that has no easy comparison.
I couldn’t focus on anyone or anything, but I could hear sounds and feel sensations. I was so hot all the time that it felt as if my body were on fire. I began having thoughts that were almost hallucinations about lying in a pool of water.
Occasionally, I would hear a familiar voice, and that brought some comfort. Whenever Sean came into the room, he would call out, “Hey, honey, I’m here.” I know that only because he has told me so since then, not because I remember it. He says I would open my eyes and look around like I was looking right through him. I was too out of it to think, Oh, that’s Sean, but I did sense the familiarity. I relished when someone would hold my hand, stroke my head, or comb my hair. That was the good part.
The dreams were the bad part. Over and over, I had graphic nightmares about being attacked. I now know that the dreams came when the nurses were cleaning my wounds. Although I was heavily sedated, my blood pressure would spike, and they would see my face grimacing. Even in that state, I recognized the pain, but I couldn’t process it, so my brain turned it into the only thing that made sense: assault.
A medically induced coma can’t take away all the pain—nothing can. The coma just dulls it enough so that you don’t actually die from the shock of it all. But overmedicating can kill you, too, so doctors must walk a fine line. As a result, you are put into this otherworldly haze of an experience where your brain tries to put the puzzle together under the influence of heavy drugs. It’s not like a trauma-induced coma, where you’re fully unconscious while your brain resets itself. It’s more like a deep dream state with moments of partial awareness.
Sean watched everything that was happening. The first time he saw me trying to scream was awful for him. During a wound-dressing change, my eyes were screwed shut and my mouth was open in a screaming position, but no sound came out. That’s when he realized the pain I was in and that I was locked inside my body. There was little he could do except try to soothe me with his words and his touch and to stay by my side. Indeed, he refused to leave the hospital for a week, and the staff provided him a cot in the lounge. After that first week, he headed home for a shower and fresh clothes, but he found it unbearable to be there without me. He cried in the shower and vowed he wouldn’t spend the night there until I was home.
By late October, there was talk of stepping down some of my medications to test my responsiveness while still keeping me sedated enough for pain management. They began by testing my breathing, turning the ventilator on and off over the course of three days to check whether my lungs would take over. After a brief failure, it was successful. The breathing tube was removed on October 30, three weeks into my stay. That meant I could no longer be as sedated; the pain medications had to be stepped down to allow my lungs to function properly. It also meant I would regain consciousness.
It wasn’t like the cheerful “Hey! I’m alive!” moment with a big smile that you see in scripted dramas. My first post-trauma memory is the gauzy image of Sean standing at my bedside. I also saw a doctor, so I knew I was in a hospital. Then I spotted my parents across the room.
I tried to speak to Sean, but my vocal cords had atrophied. I mouthed the words “When did Mom and Dad get here?”
“They came in for the weekend to see you,” he said.
“So quick?”
I thought the crash had just happened and was amazed that my parents had gotten there so fast. In my mind, hours had passed. Maybe a day.
“Honey, you’ve been in a coma for almost a month,” he said.
That stunned me. I started crying.
In mid-November, with my body stabilized, I was moved to the Gaylord Specialty Healthcare facility in Wallingford, Connecticut, to begin physical therapy. It was my next ring of hell. My therapists wanted me to try to walk with a walker. It was difficult and painful and, for someone who had considered herself an athlete, disheartening. I just couldn’t do it.
“Am I ever going to walk normally again?” I asked.
“We don’t know, but we’re going to work on it,” the therapist said.
They were so damn honest.
What pulled me out of my funk was remembering a speech I’d heard by Nobel Prize laureate Jody Williams. In it, she said, “Emotion without action is irrelevant.”
She was right. Screw this, I thought. There has to be a reason I’m still alive. All this wasted emotion feeling miserable for myself needed a direction. The direction I chose was gratitude.
I thought of all the people who had saved my life. The strangers who ran to my side after the truck hit me; the doctors and nurses who brought me back from death more than once; the staff at Gaylord who were doggedly helping me walk again and relearn basic tasks.
And then there were the strangers who had donated their life-giving blood. In order for me to receive those 78 units of blood, as well as 25 bags of plasma and platelets, more than 125 people had to donate theirs.
Suddenly I felt a need to do something to honor them. I may not have been able to walk yet, but I could, from my rehab bed, organize a cycling tour to raise money for adaptive bikes for disabled athletes. We ended up raising more than $10,000.
I then turned inward, concentrating on my own recovery. One day in December, Robyn, my physical therapist, stood behind me holding my catheter bag in one pocket and my heart rate monitor in the other, pushing my wheelchair after me as I slowly inched step-by-step across the floor with my walker. My back wounds seeped from underneath my dressings onto the floor, and my head started to tingle with weakness. Down I went, back into my wheelchair. I heard a tender voice saying, “You did it, Colleen … You did it … all the way across the room!” I’d finally taken more than a step or two.
Since leaving the hospital, Colleen, shown at the Superhero Half Marathon (left) and with Sean at the Cheshire Half Marathon, has competed in dozens of triathlons and marathons.
Ten months after I died, and eight months after leaving Gaylord, I ran in the Superhero Half Marathon in New Jersey. I did it while using a walker, toting a colostomy bag, and dressed as Wonder Woman—cape and all! At the finish line, I was greeted by Sean, who smothered me in kisses.
Since then, the colostomy bag has been removed, and I’ve completed dozens of races, sans walker.
What I endured was a nightmare. But every time I cross a finish line, I think of the strangers who literally gave of themselves. In my mind, I see a diverse group of people—black, white, and brown, of all different ages and backgrounds—all conspiring to help a fellow human whom they’d never know, for no reason other than to save a stranger’s life.
My injury also made me realize just how lucky I am to have Sean. In the darkest moments of being locked in the coma, his voice soothed me. It does to this day. With each step, I am gratitude in motion.
With the commercialization of so many holidays, we often forget the true meaning of the day we are celebrating. The National Retail Federation estimated that in 2018, the average person spent more than $180 on Mother’s Day with a total forecast at over $23 billion spent on the day. Mother’s Day, the day to honor the special women in our lives, was initially created as something very different.
The origins of Mother’s Day can be traced back to ancient Greek and Roman times when festivals honored the mother goddesses Rhea and Cybele. Later, 16th century England celebrated Mothering Sunday with celebrations on the fourth Sunday of Lent. In America, our tradition began in 1908 with a woman named Anna Jarvis. While not a mother herself, she established the day to honor her mother, Ann Reeves Jarvis, who had passed away three years prior.
This commitment to pay homage to and help other women ran in the Jarvis family. Living in West Virginia before the Civil War, Ann had an idea for a community-service based program to help mothers in need of assistance. This concept developed into the Mother’s Day Work Clubs, a program that taught women how to care for their children. In 1868, Ann also created “Mothers’ Friendship Day” to assist in promoting peace between the Confederate and Union soldiers after the Civil War. We bet this isn’t the only fact you didn’t know about Mother’s Day.
In 1914, President Woodrow Wilson declared Mother’s Day an official holiday. The yearly celebration would take place on the second Sunday in May. Anna’s original vision of Mother’s Day was a day to honor her mother Ann, but once it became a nationally recognized day, things changed dramatically. The notion of celebrating mom on Mother’s Day caught on quickly and became heavily commercialized with cards and flowers.
After seeing a Mother’s Day Salad on the menu in the John Wanamaker tearoom in Philadelphia in the early 1900s, Anna realized the day had become nothing but a marketing scheme. She then began to file lawsuits, hold protests, and demand face-to-face meetings with the president. According to The Washington Post, she also tried to lay legal claim to the holiday as “Anna Jarvis, Founder of Mother’s Day.”
In the end, she spent decades fighting a no-win battle to claim back the day as her own using every penny of her small inheritance. She died at age 84 in 1948, blind and alone in a sanitarium. Today, you can forgo the fancy gifts and make your Mother’s Day celebration more special by sharing these Mother’s Day quotes with your mom.
Dr. Kenneth Swan (above) had been in Vietnam for only a month when he worked on the injured soldier.
In the late afternoon of September 21, 1968, the crew of an Army Huey helicopter with the call sign Ghostrider 281 began a perilous descent into jungle terrain to assist a chopper shot down by the North Vietnamese.
Leaning out of Ghostrider 281 as far as possible, 19-year-old door gunner Kenneth McGarity was helping direct the pilot when an enemy rocket struck the Huey. McGarity took the brunt of the explosion. The pilot was able to crash-land. McGarity was picked up and flown to the Army’s 71st Evacuation Hospital.
“Oh, God! I hurt so bad,” McGarity cried over and over as he was brought in on a stretcher.
The young soldier was covered in mud, with one leg hanging by a thin strip of skin and the other mangled almost as badly. His arms were broken, a finger was missing, and he was bleeding from his left eye.
The surgeon on call, Dr. Kenneth Swan, 33, had arrived in Vietnam only a month before. “I couldn’t believe the man was still alive,” Dr. Swan later wrote. “I didn’t want him to be alive.” Still, the surgeon in him told him what he must do.
Fortunately, Dr. Swan had the time and resources to give the wounded soldier his full attention that night. He was the only serious new casualty brought in.
McGarity (left) and Dr. Swan, at the ceremony where the gunner received his Purple Heart
Dr. Swan directed the surgical team and amputated one of the soldier’s fingers and both legs from the thigh down. A neurosurgeon cut through the skull to treat massive head injuries caused when a metal fragment pierced McGarity’s left eye and entered his brain. As a urologist worked on extensive wounds in the groin area, two orthopedic surgeons set both arms in plaster. An ophthalmologist was unable to save either eye. The operations took eight hours.
The next day, Dr. Swan’s medical supervisor pulled him aside and told him that other surgeons had questioned the wisdom of saving a man who would have so little to live for. Dr. Swan’s action had been a horrible mistake, they said. Maybe I did the wrong thing, he thought.
When he learned weeks later that the badly maimed soldier had survived and been flown back to the States, he was again plagued by self-doubt. What kind of life have I created for this man? he wondered. A living hell?
Back home, McGarity underwent additional eye and arm surgeries and further amputations to his legs. In such excruciating pain that he was on round-the-clock shots of morphine, he eventually became addicted. Visits from his parents and friends hurt just as much as they soothed. Though he couldn’t see, McGarity sensed their discomfort. It was clear that his former life was gone forever.
Then, six months into his convalescence, McGarity reached a turning point. One night a soldier who’d lost a leg asked him jokingly whether he’d go and fetch them something to eat. McGarity had so little strength that he could barely sit up; he couldn’t see to navigate his wheelchair through the hallways, let alone find the military hospital’s PX. But by feeling his way along, by asking people for directions, he somehow managed. And after he got back to the ward, with a bag full of candy bars and crackers, Kenneth McGarity realized that there was hope. He finally said to himself, I’m gonna make it.
During the next six months, he underwent intensive rehabilitation and kicked his morphine addiction. Gradually he learned to feed himself, shave, get dressed, and bathe without assistance. In October 1969—13 months after he’d been injured—he checked out of the hospital, determined to rebuild his life.
McGarity settled in Phenix City, Alabama, where his parents lived. He was financially secure with veteran benefits. His all-consuming interest was a new CB radio, and in July 1971, he was introduced at a CBers’ picnic to a young woman with a sweet voice. Her name was Theresa Leveret.
Theresa, 19, had finished her first year of college. Although she was shy, she had no trouble opening up to this charming veteran with the easy laugh. She didn’t give his disability a lot of thought: Theresa’s grandmother had been blind, and a friend with cerebral palsy was in a wheelchair. Soon she and McGarity fell in love, and by November, they were married.
Doctors told the newlyweds that because of McGarity’s injuries they most likely would never have children. But just two years later, they were overjoyed to learn that Theresa was expecting.
Alicia was born in 1973, followed by Elizabeth in 1980. “If there were times in my life when I wished I had eyes again,” McGarity says, “it was there in the delivery room, holding those newborn babies in my arms.”
There were harsher realities too. Though McGarity had done a remarkable job of overcoming his physical handicaps, Vietnam had taken a devastating toll on his psyche. Every time a jet flew overhead, he would dive to the floor in panic. In the autumn, he would experience severe depressions that lasted for weeks. He endured terrifying nightmares, flashbacks, and mood swings. The fallout was felt by the whole family. “A day never went by that we didn’t discuss Vietnam,” Theresa says. At times she wondered whether they would ever put the war behind them.
Dr. Kenneth Swan, who went on to become a professor of surgery at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, thought of McGarity often immediately after the war. But over the years, he managed to repress the memory of the soldier he’d rescued from death. Then, one day in 1989, Peter MacPherson, a journalist, asked him, “Do you ever make mistakes?” The question brought it all back. When Dr. Swan tried once to discuss McGarity at a medical symposium and got choked up, he knew he could no longer ignore the soldier’s fate.
“I didn’t think I’d like what I’d find,” he says. In fact, he felt there was a good chance that McGarity had died. But he had to know. “I had to face up to what I had avoided for 20 years. I had to find out if my decision had been the right one and, if it wasn’t, what it had cost McGarity. I had to learn the truth.”
Locating McGarity seemed nearly impossible, however. Dr. Swan remembered many details about the soldier, but not his last name. With more than 300,000 wounded Vietnam veterans listed in the Pentagon’s archives, tracking down one soldier without knowing his surname proved an awesome task. It took two years of searching before Dr. Swan and MacPherson, with the help of the military, located McGarity.
In April 1991, the military wrote to McGarity about Dr. Swan’s request. Theresa read the letter to her husband, who was thrilled. “I knew there was a doctor somewhere who had saved my life,” he says. “I’d always wished I could meet and thank him.”
Dr. Swan was astounded when he heard about his patient. “I was told, ‘He’s married, has two children, enjoys scuba diving, and has taken college classes!’” he recalls. “I said, ‘You’ve got the wrong man. My patient has no legs, no eyes, badly damaged arms, and had head trauma.’” The Army insisted it had the right person.
Dr. Swan and McGarity spoke several times by phone before deciding to meet. Then, in September 1991—23 years and four days after the battle that nearly took McGarity’s life—doctor and patient reunited at McGarity’s home in Columbus, Georgia. During a five-hour visit, Dr. Swan talked about that night in Vietnam and his doubts about saving McGarity. “Even in my darkest moments of pain,” McGarity told him, “there was never a time I wanted to die.”
McGarity peppered the doctor with questions, hoping to fill in the holes in his memory. “I needed to find out the facts,” he says. “I wanted to know how close to death I was.”
The details seemed to help McGarity get beyond his past. The flashbacks and nightmares declined dramatically. Theresa had hoped for that for years.
Dr. Swan was also moved. He called the meeting “the most dramatic event in my career.” He was astonished to learn that McGarity played piano and trumpet, did indeed scuba dive, and had completed a year of college. The doctor refused, though, to take much credit for the way things turned out. “The older you get,” he says, “the more you realize how little doctors contribute to patient outcome. The miracles of modern medicine usually are not man-made. Doctors are 5 percent. God and the patient are the rest.”
On January 30, 1992, Kenneth McGarity was awarded medals for heroism that, because of a mix-up, he had never received. In an emotional ceremony at Fort Benning, Georgia, before 30 relatives and friends—and Dr. Swan—McGarity was presented with a Purple Heart, an Air Medal, and four other awards. It was a fitting tribute to a man who’d spent every day of the 23 years since his injuries overcoming adversity with courage and valor.
However, McGarity does not consider his achievement exceptional. “It was my job—I volunteered to do it. I believed in my country then, and I believe in my country now.”
***
Pvt. McGarity and Dr. Swan continued to be in touch via Christmas cards and notes. When McGarity died in 2007, the Swans sent flowers to the funeral. Dr. Swan died in 2014, and his wife, Betsy, says that he forever cherished meeting McGarity after the war. She shared a story her husband had written about his experience in which he said, in part: “What I had said the morning after Ken’s surgery was true: ‘I was trained to care for the sick and wounded and God will decide who lives or dies.’ But the day of our reunion I knew it was true in the depths of my being. God can work miracles in the most desolate of circumstances for those who, like Ken McGarity, have courage and faith.”
Though there is merit in saying “yes'” to things outside your comfort zone, Erica Korman, psychotherapist, psychic, and spiritual life expert, also stresses the importance of “no.” Even if you don’t know exactly why you don’t want to do something, work with a certain person, or have a specific experience—taking a risk in declining an opportunity builds character. “At mid-life it’s time to realize that life is short and there is not time to waste on things that don’t feel good or right to you,” she says. Start with learning these effective ways to say “no” without worrying that someone will think badly of you.
Devil’s Pool is a natural pool created by surrounding boulders and a waterfall that feeds it, and as beautiful as it is, people say it’s cursed. According to legend, Oolana, an Aboriginal woman, drowned herself in the pool after being separated from her true love. Still searching for him today, she lures young men to their death in the green waters. Sixteen young men have died there in the past 50 years, reports 
This article was originally written in 2001 by Ingrid Seward and appeared in the August 2001 issue of Reader’s Digest.*
Their first concern was to discover how badly injured Diana was. Initially they were told that she had walked away from the accident virtually unscathed. Then another call came through. “Sir, I am very sorry to have to tell you that I’ve just had the Ambassador on the phone. The Princess died a short time ago.”
In fact, Diana had no notion of what to expect—and from the beginning, she found royal life an extraordinary burden. She swam most mornings in the Palace pool, immersed herself in wedding plans, and took dance and exercise classes. The rest of the time she simply sat around, bored and increasingly irritable.
Queen Elizabeth was advised of these unhappy developments. She had once likened Diana to a “nervy racehorse” who needed careful handling, not harsh discipline. Despite the evidence, she convinced herself that if Diana were given the independence she claimed she needed, her self-assurance would grow and she would settle down.
Though there is merit in saying “yes'” to things outside your comfort zone,