For Men’s Health, Gloria Liu takes us inside a support network for school principals who have experienced gun violence, including current and retired leaders of Columbine in Littleton, Colorado; Sandy Hook in Newtown, Connecticut; and Marjory Stoneman Douglas in Parkland, Florida. It’s a club that shouldn’t have to exist, but it does. Liu describes the much-needed space these colleagues-turned-close friends have carved out for self-care and healing—and an emotional support network to lean on each time a new school shooting opens up their collective wound.
ON THE 16TH of February, 2018, two days after Thompson was pulled off a plane into a nightmare, the community of Parkland began to bury its children. Thompson attended two funerals that day, one the next, three the following, and so on. School would not resume, he decided, until all the services were held, and he went to a viewing or funeral for every victim except one, because there were two services at the same time. . . .
A day or two after the tragedy, Thompson got a call from DeAngelis, the former principal of Columbine. DeAngelis asked him, “What are you doing to take care of yourself? Your family?” Thompson doesn’t remember much of that first conversation. His head was spinning. But DeAngelis would check in on him again and again.
Another call came from Kathy Gombos, the principal of Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut, where 26 children and adults were slain in 2012. Gombos warned Thompson to get ahead of the mail; Sandy Hook had reportedly received 65,000 teddy bears. In Parkland, several carts arrived daily bearing letters, banners, and donations. Thompson organized teams to sort through the deluge. But some donations he dealt with personally, like the 30,000 cupcakes sent by a bakery.
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Oy, bida! Oy, bida bida bida A ya ba, a ya baba moloda
LYDIA KUZNICHENKO IS SINGING a Ukrainian folk song to the baby she’s holding in her arms. The tune is cheerful, although the words translate as something like: Oh, woe is me! And I’m a young woman. Lida, as she is known, is still young. She has grey-green eyes and dark golden hair, a face not meant for grief. She laughs and teases the baby: “Yes, yes, is your grandmother young?”
Sitting with Lida on the bed in her small brick house in the village of Ridkodub, Ukraine, I am wearing a heavy bulletproof vest that is supposed to protect me from the war raging outside. The baby, buttoned into a white onesie and a little blue jacket, has nothing to protect him except his grandmother’s arms. He is very small, not quite three months old.
Outside it’s a cold, pale winter’s day, December 30, 2022. We are in the Kharkiv region, about 20 miles west of the Russia-Ukraine border, and seven miles from the front line of the war between these two countries. A set of shelves in the room is piled with folded baby clothes and blankets—pink, blue, lemon yellow, white. On the veranda outside, tiny clothes and socks are pinned to a line, having been washed by hand in water heated on the old-fashioned stove. The house is a simple Ukrainian village home, warm and quiet except for the crackle of wood burning in the stove. When there’s a long, deafening roar outside that makes the windows tremble, or a series of more distant thumps, I’m the only one who flinches. The baby wriggles, then sleeps.
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Both of them do—there’s another baby in the room, on the bed. The infants have a good many adopted uncles in Ridkodub, men who wear camouflage, army boots, and bulletproof vests. They think the babies are twins at first. “No!” Lida corrects them. “They are daughter and grandson. They are nephew and aunty.” Their names are Vitalina and David, and they have seen more woe in their few months on earth than many of us could imagine in a lifetime.
If Lida were to tell these babies a story instead of singing a song, how might she start? Perhaps like this: There were three women—Liuda, Lida, and Lera. They were from two generations of the same family; they lived a few miles from one another, and they all became pregnant just a few weeks apart. But a war came between them and divided them from one another. One of them traveled 2,000 miles to come home; another was lost.
No. That story gets too sad too quickly.
Perhaps she could start like this: There is the story about David and Goliath. Little David went out to fight the giant Goliath, who threatened to destroy David’s whole nation. And everyone thought that Goliath would win in three days, but little David would not be defeated.
Yes, that’s a better way to begin.
1. FAMILY
LIDA’S FAMILY, the Slobodianyks, are a big, close clan. Arkady and Halyna moved from the Vinnytsia region, in central Ukraine, to Ridkodub, in the Kharkiv region, in 1986 with their four children. Lydia and her twin sister, Liudmyla, were still babies when the family relocated to work at the kolkhoz, the Soviet collective farm. Another daughter was born in nearby Dvorichna.
Lida and Liuda, as they were known, did everything together. Liuda was the eldest by five minutes. They studied at the local school and sang in the school choir. When they were 12, they started helping out at the farm, too, milking the cows. The twins performed together at local clubs and concerts, two girls with bright faces, harmonizing as they sang rich, plaintive Ukrainian folk songs. Lida had her first child—a son, Maksym—at 18. Liuda followed three months later with a daughter.
Maksym was a timid, serious baby. Lida bounced and tickled him, and sang nonsense songs to coax out his smile. The baby’s father left the family early on. Maksym grew up close to his mother; he had her green eyes and dark blond hair, but not her lively, outgoing temperament. A brother was born, then a sister as cheerful as Lida; Maksym remained the quiet, stubborn one.
By the mid-1990s, the kolkhozes had become private farms, but otherwise it felt as if not much had changed in their uneventful corner of Kharkiv region. Fields of wheat, maize, and bright sunflowers stretched to meet big skies, like picture postcards of the yellow and blue Ukrainian flag. The Oskil River wound past Dvorichna, between high, chalky banks overgrown with wildflowers and riddled with the burrows of steppe marmots.
As the children grew, the family gathered regularly; the farthest any of the five adult Slobodianyk siblings and their families had gone was to the regional capital, also called Kharkiv, where the oldest brother lived. Everyone else lived within a few dozen miles of one another in the district of Kupiansk. By the end of 2021, Arkady and Halyna had 15 grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and perhaps soon there would be another: Maksym had recently startled Lida by bringing home a girl he’d met at agricultural college. Her name was Valeria Perepelytsia, or Lera for short. A girlfriend! Not Lida’s shy Maksym—who, by the way, was only 17. The young couple had already started talking about having a baby.
2. OCCUPATION
EARLY ON February 24, 2022, a sound like the sky tearing in half ripped through Lida’s dream.
It was dark, not even 4 a.m. The house in Ridkodub was quiet, her younger son, Dmytro, and daughter, Uliana, peacefully asleep. It was just a horrible dream, she decided. She dozed off, then woke again to another loud noise. Perhaps someone was setting off fireworks outside.
When she looked out her window, she saw that the sky in the northeast, toward the Russian border, was on fire. It was not a dream or fireworks. It was what the United States had been warning of, the thing no one in Ukraine wanted to believe could happen: Russia had invaded Ukraine.
Russian troops had amassed along the Ukrainian border for months, as Russian president Vladimir Putin declared that the neighboring country needed “denazifying” and “demilitarizing” while insisting that Ukraine was really part of Russia anyway. Despite U.S. and EU warnings, few Ukrainians thought there would be an attack beyond the eastern end of the country, where Russia had fomented a conflict in 2014 and effectively occupied parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions. Kharkiv bordered Luhansk and Donetsk—and Russia. But no one was prepared for Russian missiles falling on civilians and destroying infrastructure all over Ukraine. On the morning of February 24, Russian tanks not only crossed the border into Kharkiv region, but advanced on Kherson and Mariupol in the south and toward the capital of Kyiv to the north.
Lida phoned Maksym, who was staying with Lera and her family in Velykyi Vyselok, about 17 miles away, across the Oskil River. The call woke him up. “How can you sleep,” she yelled, “when the war has started?”
Maksym had been watching the news closely and messaging with his older cousin in the Ukrainian army. But his cousin had not prepared him for this. Lera, however, knew exactly what war was. She had experienced it before, eight years ago in Luhansk. She remembered how her mother hid her and her younger sister in the wardrobe during the bombings, and shared with them the only food they had: half a loaf of bread per day.
Now she and her mother scrambled to dress her baby brother, Artem, and gather a few essentials. Lera’s instinct was to run, although she didn’t know where to go. Grad rockets roared right over the house. Lera’s younger sister, Alyona, had been five when the Perepelytsias fled their home in Luhansk region. Now the buried trauma surfaced. She crouched like the little quail—perepilka—of their surname, put her hands over her head, and screamed.
No one went to work that day. People hid in basements and root cellars as planes and helicopters flew overhead and columns of tanks and artillery drove through Ridkodub and Dvorichna. They were unmarked, and Lida’s neighbors weren’t sure which country they belonged to; it was only on the very last column, which came through at about 4 p.m., that they saw a Russian flag. The few Ukrainian defenses near Dvorichna and Velykyi Vyselok were quickly overwhelmed.
On February 27, the mayor of Kupiansk, the administrative center of the district, surrendered. Soon Kherson fell in south Ukraine. The remaining Ukrainian forces near Lida’s home retreated to defend Kharkiv, which for the next three months was bombarded as Russian forces sought to take the city. But in the settlements near the border, after that first day when Russian troops passed through, everything went strangely quiet.
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Therapists are seeing a growing trend in people wanting to talk about climate change. Their clients might have trouble with doomscrolling and becoming depressed over environmental news, or fight with their partners about whether or not to bring a child into this world, or feel helpless over the actions of their governments and big oil companies. But therapists don’t have training in environmental issues, and no evidence-tested treatments exist yet, which means most therapists are just winging it. Traditional therapy, too, may not be effective—climate change affects everyone and everything, not just the single individual seeking help, which challenges some of the common practices in the field. In this piece, Jarvis offers an interesting look at the relatively new field of climate psychology.
Over and over, he read the same story, of potential patients who’d gone looking for someone to talk to about climate change and other environmental crises, only to be told that they were overreacting — that their concern, and not the climate, was what was out of whack and in need of treatment. (This was a story common enough to have become a joke, another therapist told me: “You come in and talk about how anxious you are that fossil-fuel companies continue to pump CO2 into the air, and your therapist says, ‘So, tell me about your mother.’”)
The traditional focus of his field, Bryant said, could be oversimplified as “fixing the individual”: treating patients as separate entities working on their personal growth. Climate change, by contrast, was a species-wide problem, a profound and constant reminder of how deeply intertwined we all are in complex systems — atmospheric, biospheric, economic — that are much bigger than us. It sometimes felt like a direct challenge to old therapeutic paradigms — and perhaps a chance to replace them with something better.
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Looking for an earth-friendly burial for yourself and your loved ones? A burial vessel made of willow might just be the answer. It’s hand-made, natural, and 100% biodegradable.
Once Lasswell realized she wanted to weave willow caskets in 2019, she reached out to Carolina Memorial Sanctuary in Mills River, North Carolina, a conservation cemetery within 60 miles of her farm. l. They were thrilled. At the time, Lasswell said, there were only two weavers selling willow caskets in the country: Mary Fraser in Turners Falls, Massachusetts, and Maureen Walrath in Port Townsend, Washington.
Through their work, Fraser, Lasswell, and Walrath lower green burial’s carbon footprint even. Whenever possible, they grow or wildcraft their own willow. They weave their vessels for local populations, lessening the need for imported biodegradable caskets. For Lasswell, it was the willow casket that brought her to green burials, and it is the plants, the creations she makes from them, and the connections she makes with those grieving that keep her inspired.
Fraser and Lasswell also invite people to help weave. “That time between a death and a burial, you’ve got this few days where you often feel very helpless,” said Lasswell. “It’s very meditative. It’s quiet, it’s tactile, it’s beautiful.” Some people have woven their own caskets — and use them in the meantime as storage vessels, coffee tables, or even a bookshelf with removable willow shelves.
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Meet George and Nina Giavris and their labor of love: the Silver Crest Donut Shop, an icon that’s been open for nearly 54 years straight at 340 Bayshore Boulevard in San Francisco, California.
Their stretch of Bayshore is like any grungy thoroughfare in any industrial zone—greasy body shop, gloomy carpet place, growing camp of homeless people alongside a Lowe’s—but then there it is: a strikingly red building, a flash of weathered neon, an improbable promise issued since 1970. We Never Close. From the Vietnam War through AIDS and OJ and 9/11 and Iraq, the same couple from Loukas was behind the same counter, pouring the same coffee.
You’ve already eaten, but Pam gauges you need eggs. She’s new here—started a mere three-plus decades ago. She puts in the order, and you sit. The wind blows, the doors creak open, a leaf skitters in. Hard to pinpoint exactly when the clock stopped, but judging by the fonts and the color scheme and the pinball and the fried ham and the jukebox selections and somehow the quality of the air you breathe, the planet’s orbit of the sun halted in the late ’70s or early ’80s. So thorough is the effect that occasional intrusions of modernity—the chime of a phone, a person under 40 entering—register simply as glitches in the code and thus fail to break the spell.
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Sarah Hepola, author of the memoir, Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget, remembers Friends star Matthew Perry, his personal struggles, and how he worked tirelessly to help other substance users get and stay clean.
Of course, Perry’s biggest claim to fame will always be Chandler Bing. Could that be any more obvious? But by opening the door to the humiliations of his life, his failures and not-good-enoughs, he gave untold companionship to the lost and lonely, and he showed that change was possible. Fleeting at times, excruciating at others, but: possible.
Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing turns out to be the obituary he did not know he was writing for himself. As sad as that is, consider how few people get to write such an extraordinary obituary. One that doesn’t merely document a life but might save them, too.
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Since the early ’60s, singer-songwriter and Indigenous icon Buffy Sainte-Marie has claimed to be a Cree woman who was born in Canada. But this thorough, carefully reported investigation by CBC News reveals that she’s not Native at all.
A simple Google search shows that virtually every available source says Sainte-Marie was born on the Piapot First Nation in Saskatchewan.
But that was contradicted late last year when a tipster provided CBC with a copy of what appeared to be Sainte-Marie’s birth certificate, obtained from a small town hall in Massachusetts.
That record said Beverly Jean Santamaria, who started going by the name Buffy Sainte-Marie early in her music career, was born in 1941 in Stoneham, Mass., north of Boston, to Albert and Winifred Santamaria — the couple Sainte-Marie claimed adopted her.
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