If you haven’t hugged your mother today or told her how much you love her, shame, shame on you. Do it while you have the chance and while she can appreciate your love for her. Today is her day, Mother’s Day, a special day for her. A day to love your mother, to cherish all the wonderful moments you have spent with her. I wish I could, I really do. My mother, who will be 91 on June 8, suffers from extreme Alzheimer’s. I hug her every time I visit her, I tell her how much I love her, I kiss her goodbye when I leave her. Trouble is, I’m not sure she understands any of that. There are some days …

Reaction to my earlier columns about my mother, Ellen Wilno, have been overwhelming. It told me one thing about my journey with my mother and Alzheimer's: I am not alone. Everyone who dropped me an email or texted me told me a similar story, about how difficult it was to deal with a loved one with Alzheimer's. Some of the responses seemed as though they were a carbon copy of my issues. Others told a very sad tale of losing a loved one, and their experiences through the final days spent together. Some of the emails, I must admit, were difficult to read.  One or two brought me to tears because …

  I love my mother, I really do. Most days she says she loves me, and I know she does. I enjoy those moments each and every time I visit her because my mother, Ellen, who will be 91 years old on June 8, suffers from Alzheimer's. For those of you who care for a parent with such a disease, you know how special these visits can be. Every visit (she now resides at Arcadia Nursing and Rehabilitation  Center in Hamilton Township, Mercer County) is an emotional one.  One minute she seems so happy, so content, so at peace; the next minute she can be combative and angry. I'm told that's how people …

   Alzheimer's Disease puzzles me. I don't know how one gets it. I don't know why it can't be treated in its early stages.  I don't know why it can't be slowed down. I don't know why it can't be reversed. I don't understand how or why it takes away the one you love the most. It is a very strange disease. A horrible disease. A nasty disease. It comes on without notice (doctors like to call it dementia at first) and never gets any better, only worse with time. It seems so cruel, so unfair. I often question why the good Lord does this. He took my father, Jim, with cancer, and my younger sister, …

    Like most of  us, maybe all of us, Pat Buckley graduated from high school, Monsignor Donovan High School in 2003, planning to head off to college, the University of Delaware, with a major in mind, Sports Management. It was a  pretty good plan, he thought, charting a career path even at such a young age.  Impressive, to say the least. After two years at Delaware, where he admits he enjoyed the college experience, "the fraternity thing and all," he transferred to the University of Houston, where he also had family living. At Houston, he switched his major, not uncommon as you know, to …

Baby it’s cold outside. I mean, it’s cold, bitterly cold. And, quite frankly, I don’t like it. I don’t like waking up to 12 degrees, as I did on Saturday morning, and weather.com says it will be 5 (that’s 1-2-3-4-5) degrees overnight with dangerously low wind chills.  I mean, they’re talking below zero. I’m afraid we’re going to have to bundle up until we get to spring, which, at this point, appears to be weeks and weeks away. Is it possible we’re never going to come out of this frigid weather? There’s snow in the forecast every few days, the next storm forecast to hit the region on Tuesday…