Latest Connections headlines

Adventures await a grandfather who is helping to care for his 2-year-old grandson.

Our relationship was destined to end, but walking away from my job was unexpectedly wrenching.

After a loved one dies, the presents they’ve given become vessels for both immense grief and love.

They met at college in 1969, and the resulting friendships have seen them through life’s ups and downs.

Gathering her courage for a winter ritual.

We adopted the Jamaica Plain watering hole as the boardroom for our friendship. What will we do now that it’s closing?

It’s amazing how much of what your parents said comes back to you when you have your own children.

Sharing shellfish — and making memories — with my mother.

The rocker my nearly 90-year-old mother scored at an auction has a strange hold over me.

The message-leavers always wonder: Do you remember me? This former teacher says: Always.

Following a car accident, my fashionable sister’s life changed, and I gained wisdom from her example.

Like the finches camped out on our porch, we needed to let our kids fly.

We worried that my grandmother’s 100th birthday party would draw a small crowd. How happy we were to be wrong.

Chatting and laughing, my mom and her old pals set an example that endures decades later.

The letters stashed in an old desk stirred up painful memories — and reminders of my parents’ love.

My bruised heart needed unconditional love. I found it on my phone, but not quite where I expected.

My grandmother’s spirit stays with me decades later, especially at the breakfast table.

His simple analogy helped me understand, and made having a brain that works differently seem cool.

What does it take to get an aging rocker to part with his beloved vinyl records?

After almost a quarter century, our goofy couple nicknames still have a nice ring to them.

More than half a century later, the unbreakable bond between my dad and his uncle stays with me.

We learned golf etiquette as early as we learned table manners, owned proper course attire, and mastered driving golf carts long before cars.

We had protected him and cared for him, but for his new life to truly begin, we had to let him go.

Fly fishing provided the occasional détente from the battlefield between daughter and father, and helped us nurture our precarious relationship.

Unlike everyone else, my toddler son doesn’t know I have cancer — and that’s a relief.

From a Tinder profile photo at the Marathon finish line to the altar, one step at a time.

I ask — and ask and ask — until finally, in the dark where I can’t see her face, she tells me.

Watching my son on the baseball field was frustrating — until I realized I had the game all wrong.

We’re learning about schools she’s interested in attending — and, when she looks up from her phone, each other.

This couple is still happily sharing costar billing after 35 years.

Our marriage was mired in something far worse than a rough patch.

Although he died when I was young, he lends a hand when I really need one.

My lighthearted grandfather was in pain, and out of jokes. What could I do?

I learned from my mother to be frugal with money — and affection. An unexpected expert helped me change my ways.

We were so young when he died, but my older brother is always with me.

My mother raised me to love Broadway shows. As her memory falters, can we still share that feeling?

I was only a toddler when Aunt Brenda died, but she’s never far away.

Winnowing down the possessions of a lifetime shows what really matters.

My mother was gone, but I still felt her presence. A tale of martinis and coincidences.

At 91, my mother already knew what I have only recently learned about the power of exercising in groups.

During the most wonderful time of the year, sadness sometimes, somehow finds a way to creep in.

My mother isn’t crazy about her profile, but I don’t mind mine — it reminds me of her.

Sixty years later, Mom’s Christmas tablecloth captures our family history.

Now that I am beginning to experience glimpses of the aging process, I feel the need to tell him what I’m going through.

A lifetime after a brother’s death in Vietnam, looking for him in Washington — and finding him in Maine.

Lessons from my father, a polio survivor, about living life with no regrets.

All our lives, our mother made sure we were in the right place at the right time — together.

A framed print of the composer had watched over generations of my piano-playing family. Would he ever come home with me?

It took me three years to get my driver’s license as a teen. And now it’s my daughter’s turn.

He shopped for them on his lunch break, and brought them home to expand my horizons.