Old-fashioned values are out with the trash
I am a 72-year-old woman.
When my father was about seven or eight years old his father died of influenza during the flu epidemic in 1917.
Several years later, his mother also died. This left my father and his two little sisters to be sent to an orphanage.
My father was then sent to live with a foster family.
After my father died in 1967, my mother shared with me that my dad thought his mother had died from an abortion. This would have been in the early 1920s.
The letter from In a Quandary brought tears to my eyes. Thank you for running it in your column.
-- Grateful
Dear Grateful: I appreciate anyone's willingness to share these extremely personal and painful episodes. They enable the rest of us to adopt some important perspective. We humans are graced with the ability to tell our stories, and so we should. Yours brings tears to my eyes.
(You can email Amy Dickinson at askamy@amydickinson.com or send a letter to Ask Amy, P.O. Box 194, Freeville, NY 13068. You can also follow her on Twitter @askingamy or Facebook.)
