Catherine Gigante-Brown

What Stephen didn’t know –– what no one knew –– was how weak my knees grew when I pushed through the swinging doors of the ICU.

My husband and I agreed: raising a child with an independent spirit who made decisions for himself was a good thing.

The santero sent us off with a shopping list of ite

In the photograph, my great-grandmother, Margarita Cirigliano, is sitting at a small table on the front porch of the family home in Borough Park, Brooklyn.

I was 21 –– a Catholic, heterosexual college student, living at home in Brooklyn and still trying to discover who I was. At the crossroads of her life, Lorde knew exactly who she was. She was waging a war against cancer and sharing an old house in Staten Island with her kids and partner. But maybe we weren’t so different after all.

"Sometimes David wore his hair spiked like a cockscomb. Others, he wore it feathery like a baby chick. He wore his Mohawk to summer camp (exchanging encouraging head chucks with another older camper who sported one, too) and even to Vacation Bible School—no judgment there."

You realize pretty soon that everything other than cancer — i.e. missing a train, being late to your dentist appointment — is no biggie compared to the suck factor of chemo.

Mindel and Maria were young teenagers when the horrors occurred—but they remembered the tiniest details with crystal-clear intensity.

A midtown Manhattan studio was recently the site of liberation-both on and offscreen-when Shenshean

I realized my father was from a generation that never said those three little words. He was saying he loved me without them. But I didn't realize it then.