Ms. Bauer writes about loss and being lost. It's not just losing her son as he disappears into himself, it's finding her way through the medical and emotional thicket of possibilities.

It is brave of her to keep searching for ways for her son to live well and for her to live with her decisions. It takes a great deal of courage to keep asking for hope at the same time one asks about consequences. Especially when there is a history of lies and when the real answer is almost always, "We don't know."

There is no way to reduce the complexities of the brain into understandable cause/effect scenarios. Human wiring has evolved by indirect means; we are not a sum of the best solutions to conditions, but an amalgam of adaptations, of responses to unknowable things. We are, in a way, nature's side effect.

Electroshock may help; it may turn out to be an overstatement of something much more subtle. An examination of its results may give a clue as to how we work or don't work. Like anything else, it may work for some, not for others.

The brain is connected to the heart, by blood, blood bond and blood line. Emotional complexity is no less daunting than physical intracacies. By telling her story as completely as she can, Ms. Bauer does what she hopes electroshock and medicine does for her son, she makes new, strong connections to the world.

I couldn't find statistics on the age differences in marriage in the US. However, the US Census bureau and the National Institutes of Health track ages of parents.

25% of mothers are under 20,

44% are 25 -29,

22% are over 30 and

9% over 40.

38% of fathers are under 30,

30% are between 30-35,

32% are over 35.

I don't know why they don't break it down in the same ages, but the if 69% of mothers are under 30 but 62% of fathers are over 30, there's a very real age gap in parents' ages.

There might be something to LW's hypothesis.

LW could be me and a heap of my friends. So, when many of the letters attack LW as bitter, ugly or as a representative of some other person or a historical incident, I have to wonder, did someone his a nerve?.

In my office there are at least a dozen women of about 50 who've been dumped by their husbands for a younger woman. There are another dozen in their 40's who've found that men their own age want to date women 15 years younger.

Maybe there's a reality that men are able to get younger women so they do. After all, Hollywood pairs teenagers with old guys all the time. Presidential candidate Fred Thompson dumped his wife of 22 years to proudly tomcat around before marrying a woman younger than his youngest child - just in time for making a run at the highest office. Salon.com's Farhad Manjoo ran an article about being disappointed at his second family and the facts of fatherhood over 50.

If an increasing number of old men with young women is the reality, it's going to be perpetuated by the children of those May-December relationships who think that's the norm. But blaming LW for wanting to be in a loving relationship even if the odds are against her is unfair and mean. Wanting intimacy is normal and healthy. What's not healthy is to focus on having a man or on having a family no matter what the prime relationship is.

That's not what LW's doing. She's got a life - as do I, as do my single over 40 friends and those now ex wives - but she's angry and disappointed. Why is that bad? Isn't that accepting reality and trying to cope?

It's easy to tell someone to build s life that supplants or goes around the need for a primary relationship, but that doesn't account for simply missing or longing for one. It takes courage not to settle for a less than loving relationship and you never know if the person you're seeing, man or woman, is capable of commitment until you get to that point.

For every young woman like the letter writer who's realized that when she's done taking care of the children she and a 45 year old husband would have together, she'll be taking care of him, there's another young woman falling for the old line, "My wife doesn't understand me...." or "Let me take care of you in style...."

And there's us, the older women, enjoying the lives we lead without having to have a relationship, but wishing for close connection just like everybody else.