Columns

This past Monday night, my boyfriend and I cooked an amazing meatball dish with garlic bread on the side. (No, I will not disclose whether I used premade meatballs and garlic bread.) We paired the dishes with a bottle of sangria we’d bought for taco night this past…

My home has been super quiet for the past several days, a silence that will continue for several more as my wife, Jill, visits our daughter on the East Coast. Jill was supposed to be gone for only four days from Wednesday to Sunday, but her trip was extended when…

When she was little, my daughter, Alexus, visited a 7-Eleven store with my wife, Jill. To reward Alexus’s wonderful report card, Jill said she could choose any treat. Our daughter said she wanted one of those scratch-off lottery tickets. Jill patiently tried to explain that no one ever really…

Thursday, Oct. 17, 2019, started off like most weekdays for me. Working in consulting, there are always ebbs and flows. Some days I’m extremely busy, other times I’m not. That day was one of the latter. I was having lunch with a co-worker when he…

I can’t stand dogs. They bark a lot. They smell. They require a lot of attention. They tend to whine when I’m on the phone. So, yeah, I can’t stand them. Relax, people! I’m just kidding! I wanted to get your attention for a couple of minutes so you could…

I wasn’t expecting to be brought to tears when I heard motivational speaker Lisa Nichols address a crowd at the Archangel Summit in Toronto last year. Nichols strode onto the catwalk-style stage wearing a long, embroidered dress, her braided hair cascading down her back. A…

This week marks a year since I started writing my column, “A Family Tradition.” Having a forum like this has provided an amazing opportunity to share about the journey my wife, Jill, and I have embarked on since her Huntington’s disease diagnosis in 2018. Honestly, I wish neither she…

For many people I know, including me, COVID-19 started out as a joke. It shares the same name as a beer, for example.  But then, the Chinese city of Wuhan was quarantined. That was when I…

Listen, do you hear that sound? It’s the sound of people panicking. The cause of their panic? The coronavirus. It’s difficult to avoid the topic as it’s constantly on the TV news, on the front pages of every newspaper, and all over the internet. It’s the subject of jokes…

Emily Zivin is a licensed clinical social worker at Northwestern Memorial Hospital’s Movement Disorders Center in Chicago, one of the Huntington’s Disease Society of America’s Centers of Excellence. My wife, Jill, and I know her from Jill’s visits there. We find her to be effervescent, highly knowledgeable,…