You know everyone wants to be a diagnostician, don't they? They think they have some omnipotent birds eye view of you through some details in an article. But the truth many of us forget to live is that of understanding the unbelievable subjectivity which informs our way of living in the world, (including our parenting). We just don't know all of the millions of variables which form who people are and how they live. People have written poignant letters to Cary Tennis, and you'll find some comments about how the letter writer responding KNOWS they are manic depressive or some other stigmatic label they can quickly apply, a neat post-it, which makes them feel what?--feel like a savvy sleuth, like their own lives are organized, comparmentalized? It's mind boggling. To me one of the most glaring deficits in many, many societies is our lack of community. We just live in our boxy, work-driven lives, and we forget about our interconnections to people (how basic right?) I valued your story because that's your truth! let the judges judge for whatever purpose it serves them, but there are others who value people's attempts to reveal themselves, connect themselves to others. This is like swimming upstream sometimes, and maybe that's why people backlash.

Thank-you for your story, and good luck in your and your family's continued healing.

to this Letters section. Really. Don't let it bother you in the least. I would say a great portion of these letters are about the letter writers themselves... projecting their own problems/issues...spewing with little editing...and just basic nonsense.

They have very little to do with the article or the real people covered in the piece.

So don't lose any sleep about it. I think that in person, most of your harshest anonymous critics here would have something kind to say to you.

I'm sorry that your family suffered such a terrible loss.

Boy, did Louise shut up the salon shitbirds.

Louise, it must have been awful enough being interviewed for the first article. Then reading the negative responses from people who more likely than not never came close to walking in your shoes. And now feeling obligated to answer the letters.

I hope you and your family can continue to heal. The best ways you know how.

...to any of Monday's letter-writers that someone from the Yaskulka family would be reading the responses.

Of course, people are allowed to voice their opinions, but I doubt that many of those opinions would have been voiced if someone for the family had been standing in the same room with them. For better or worse, the internet is that room.

Mrs. Yaskulska, I lost my father to lung cancer in April of 2005 (he was diagnosed the month that your father passed away). I'm sorry for your loss. My family still grieves (and I say that at the risk of being accused of "wallowing").

I just wanted to say, on behalf of readers of the article on your family who found it honest, practical, loving and firmly rooted in reality, that I am sorry you were subjected to the comments of a few holier-than-thou, self-righteous readers.

I thought the most striking thing about your story was the way you were all working together toward the common goal of healing, and dealing with life as it is--no frills or oversentimentality or feeling sorry for yourselves. Yours is a family that thinks and acts for itself, taking into account what is best for each individual and the family unit as a whole. That is a good way to be.

I commend you on asserting that very point yourself in defense of your family's right to grieve and heal as you see fit. I hope the healing process continues and makes you all stronger people, and that your family takes comfort and maybe even a little pride in your unity and self-reliance.

*shakes head*

I lost my father June 2002 and my mother October 2002 from different causes, just the way it happened.

I've been asked if one can ever get over a death and the resulting pain. The answer is No; the only option is to get accustomed to it. There is never "closure", resolution or understanding. To wax metaphorically, a death creates a hole in the heart that never heals. Over time, it gets easier to negiotate around the hole. Also, we can learn the best way to climb out of the hole if we slide into it. In other words, we learn to live with it the best way we can.

As far as the criticism for the article being poorly written and the bad grammar, ignore it...unless it came Ernest Hemingway himself. However, I have good reason to believe that post did not come from Ernest Hemingway. I do suspect that person cannot be much fun at parties.

I'm sure that your disapproval has cut us all to the quick. Thanks for taking valuable time out of your day to let us know that you are shaking your head.

Frankly, I think you should have ignored those people. It takes ZERO courage to criticize someone like that in an anonymous Internet posting, and the people who posted those comments were not worthy of a response. You owe NO ONE an explanation. I'm so sorry that being profiled in a Salon.com article has only brought you additional grief. Please take care and be well.

...than with those who posted letters. Much of her response deals with things she feels were misrepresented or taken out of context.

But as someone who posted a letter after the original story, I gotta say I still feel the same way, perhaps even more so now that Mrs. Yaskulka has felt compelled to respond at length to a mere handful of letters, and Salon has inexplicably given her a forum to do so. And her entire response is basically just a laundry list of her family's problems, with nary a word about feeling part of a larger community, or being concerned about the prospect of an event such as 9/11 occurring again and tearing apart other people's families.

Perhaps having been hit with the cold water of a little dissent--and yes, that's what you open yourself up to when you put your story out there--Mrs. Yaskulka now feels she needs to say that of course, she knows that her family's experience of losing a loved one--even losing a loved one on 9/11--was not any worse than anyone else's. But that is certainly how it came across in the article. And considering that the premise of the article was how they have not let 9/11 rule them, it certainly seemed to be the focal point of their lives, seemingly to the point of perverse pride, in some cases.

I know many 9/11 families, and frankly, they are not this self-obsessed. And we've all seen other 9/11 families, notably the "Jersey Girls," who, despite their personal pain, never wallowed, but turned outward instead of inward, and strove to make the world a safer place for all of us. I'm sure they grieve terribly in private, but I've never heard any of them launch into a litany of their family's woes.

I feel for anybody who lost a loved one on that day or any day, under any circumstances. But some people do seem to feel that their loss trumps all others, and frankly, that's what the Yaskulkas seemed to be conveying. And as with a lot of self-absorbed people, every attempt to justify themselves just digs them in deeper.

Also, Salon publishes personal stories all the time, and the writers and the subjects of those stories then face the reaction, be it good, bad, indifferent, or a combination of all those things. I have never known Salon to then give the subject yet another forum to respond to the letters--especially when, frankly, there weren't even that many letters to respond to in this case. There were only 24 letters in all, for God's sake, and many were supportive. How thin-skinned is this family, and why is Salon giving them yet another forum? Why the special treatment here? Will we now have another member of the Yaskulka family responding to this next round of letters?

Sorry, Yaskulkas: If you don't want to deal with public reaction, then don't trumpet your story publicly. And deal with the fact that once something is in the public domain, you don't get "the last word." Unless Salon continues to give it to you every time someone says something you don't like.