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Dear Clare: I am about to "celebrate" my 3rd year of membership in this weepy world of PD. I've learned something about my tears: they can and will come whenever they choose; they are particularly close if a student or colleague comes to me with a tearful problem; I am also vulnerable if a confrontation in my school takes place within ear shot; if my husband and I have a difference of opinion about the care I will need as time goes on, or how well he's coping .... then there they are, or in the grocery line, or paused at a red light. As well, my hormones play a major factor... but then they always have. I rarely find the unbridled expression of these tears liberating or a release for pent up stress. And if I do let go and really give myself over to the anguish, I'm there for a while, sobbing and gasping for air, filling the house with a wrenched and twisting voice I cannot recognise as my own. I speak only for me. I do not associate these tears which threaten to gush at a moment's notice with depression in the clinical sense. I've got a brain which is degenerating at its own independent pace as we speak. Does that depress me? make me sad? angry? thrash about in despair? yes. I've moved past many milestones on this dark highway over the last three years. But sometimes I return to a particularly hopeless moment and relive its desparate dance. Sometimes I lunge into the well of self pity, and struggle with the self destructive spirits that live down there. So, what do I do about it? I surround myself with the soft shell of healing friends in whose company I find great comfort. I pursue alternate health paths such as therapeutic massage, homeopathy, reike (but I never missing an appt. with my neurologist). And I try to see the tears as a part of this new coat I will wear for the rest of my life. Along with the slow freezing of my body, the letting go of my physical flexibility, my balance, my control in all physical functions and potentially some mental ones, the hurtful glances, the opinions of well meaning people on how I should deal with my challenges, which tend to undernine my own confidence just that much more, there will also be tears, lots of them, more than I ever dreamed I could cry. The tendency in our cinematic society is to finish this with an optimistic beat that reaffirms the gold at the end of the rainbow. The serene "Yes, but..." hovers over these sad thoughts and invites me to soften their hollow sounds. Someone else will accept that invitation. For me, for now, the best I can offer is I'll get on, tears and all. Barbara Rager