The Last Taboos

It took the hematologist only five minutes to examine the cells he had just extracted from my bone marrow and to make the diagnosis. “You have acute promyelocytic leukemia, the rarest type,” he said in a straightforward, utterly authoritative manner.

Only six in 10 million people are diagnosed annually with the disease, but it has very high survival rates. It was a dizzying combination of dreadful and miraculous luck.

Read more from Dr. Safer’s 2-Minute Memoir in Psychology Today

I’ve had only one scales-dropping-from-my-eyes revelation in my life, but the timing was perfect because it brought my mother back to me. Minutes before my final conversation with her as she lay dying, I realized that the behavior that hurt and infuriated me all my life came not from her self-involvement and insensitivity, as I had always assumed, but from the deepest love.

Read more of the O: The Oprah Magazine article by Dr. Safer.

When Jeanne Safer met the historian and political journalist Richard Brookhiser, he disclosed straightaway that he wrote for National Review. Her initial reaction was, Uh-oh. “I thought of conservatives as the John Birch Society,” said Dr. Safer, a psychotherapist in New York City. “I’d heard of William F. Buckley but certainly never thought he’d be at my wedding.”

Read more of the New York Times Style Section article on Dr. Safer.

I imprisoned my husband in the bedroom of our four-room apartment for six weeks last fall. When, after spending hours writing on his computer at his sun-drenched desk, he emerged to relax and read the newspaper, I forced him back whence he came and, with some asperity, shut the door; evening was my writing time, and my computer is in the living room. He accepted his fate with remarkable forbearance.

Read more of the Washington Post Arts and Living article on Dr. Safer.