This month I asked ’90s, “What’s the most important thing you have learned over the last year or two and how did you learn it?” The first response is from a friend of all of ours who has asked to remain anonymous. I know that you will be including our friend and her husband in your prayers, as have I since receiving her email on October 28. Anonymous: “Until this year I was living a dream, loving everything about my life. It fell apart this summerwhen my husband did. He had a mental breakdown that I’m still struggling to havediagnosed. Unable to tolerate human contact or even animal contact, and feeling that ourhouse is the root of all evil, he moved out two months ago. I used to think that if one got a great education and made the best possible choice of spouse, career, city, house and so on, one would be set for life. I thought nothing would interfere with what I had so carefully arranged and I thought I would be happy forever. I now realize how foolish I was to imagine that I could control my future to that extent. His decisions have sparked a major financial crisis and I’m walking people’s dogs to make ends meet. While walking I think a lot about my fancy education and what I was supposed to do with it. I often feel like a failure because I don’t have the slightest idea how to earn good money. But my education did give me an indispensable tool—the ability to look at a vast amount ofdata (his behavior, our 26 years together and my ocean of feelings) and to interpret the material from many angles. This enables me to keep thinking of ways to find the answers we need.” Ted Whittemore: “I lost my mom on August 31, at age 81, due to complications from a ‘routine’ knee replacement surgery. I learned two obvious lessons: First, losing a parent is a terrible thing, and second, there are no ‘routine’ surgeries for folks in their 80s. I also learned that having a child at Dartmouth makes me really, really proud! (Paige is a freshman, class of 2020).” Geoff Coco: “I realize this sounds like a fortune cookie tweet, but it’s still true: If you think you have met the other person halfway, you are probably off by 90 percent.” David Sherwood: “Time gets increasingly scarce as we get older and so we must make every effort to get the most out of it. With a 10th-, ninth- and sixth-grader, I realize that we will have only three more Thanksgivings, three more winter breaks, three more spring breaks, etc., with all of our boys under the same roof. When the boys were in elementary school it seemed as though these events stretched beyond our horizons; now they are clearly finite. Make them matter.” Amit Malhotra: “During the past couple of years I’ve learned a lot about the college application process from applicants’ points of view. We’ve had two daughters head out in consecutive years. My takeaways: Boy, do we set these kids up good! ‘Hey, can you figure out how to come up with a list of 10 schools from the thousands out there? And start articulating your path through life for them? And bare your grades, your scores and your innermost thoughts for unseen reviewers? And compete with your dearest friends? And—even though nothing in the past 18 years has come close to preparing you for the idea of handling significant amounts of money—start thinking about how you would manage potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt?’ After successful conclusions both times—thanks far more to our daughters than to us—the one piece of advice I would impart to others going through this is: The world is going to be tough enough on these young ones, so as parents, spend all of your available energy building up their confidence.” Laurin Grollman: “A glass of wine while preparing to host Thanksgiving dinner is good for my marriage. And every problem has a solution.”

—Rob Crawford, 101 Black Oak Road, Weston, MA, 02493; crawdaddy37@gmail.com; Walter Palmer, 87 South St., Rockport, MA 01966; palmerwalter@mac.com