Our commentary section offers a broad spectrum of views on weighty subjects and timely topics. But we also publish op-eds that are personal, some bordering on transformative; they appear most often on Saturdays in print (and online the day before). They dive into the tender aspects of what it means to be human and what it means to be in community and emerge with universal truths. Sometimes, those truths make our hearts swell with compassion or quiver with sadness. Sometimes, those truths make us feel lighter than air because the joy they inspire makes us buoyant.

It is always a privilege to publish these emotionally resonant essays. We find these selections from the past year to be particularly rewarding, and we hope you find them rewarding as well.

Here is a look back in excerpts.

April 18: David McGrath, “Mourning my sister Rosie with loved ones, I felt a spiritual rising”

Author David McGrath’s father, Charlie, with David and sister Rosie in 1951 at their home on Chicago’s South Side. (Gertrude McGrath)

My old friend Orville, who had been my manager when Marianne and I worked at Jewel, came over, and we hugged it out. He said he was sorry, and we both lied about how we looked the same. Orv had briefly dated Rosie back in the day. When I thanked him for driving up from Crete, he said he considered it a “rare thing” to have been a friend to every member of our family for five decades.

Next, I was surrounded by five of the 12 Bracken kids who had lived one door down from us in Evergreen Park. Veronica and Annie were our babysitters, and Rita was Rosie’s best friend whom I knew well from hanging with Rosie’s crew when she and I were college classmates. They liked to pile into Rosie’s 1960 VW Bug for a trip to Chicago’s Chinatown and a certain spooky lounge with no cover charge. Among them was Marianne, who would become my wife, for which my sister was partly responsible.

Walking to the front of the funeral parlor, I was intercepted by Donna, Bill and Mary Kay, children of Dan Whitters, my late father’s close friend who had married his cousin Betty. The world never felt more right than on summer nights when Dan and my old man talked White Sox and the weather while sitting in lawn chairs — brown bottles of cold Drewrys beer sweating in their hands — while we caught lightning bugs with our cousins in the yard. A wave of that feeling, I swear, washed over me the instant I saw their bright smiles.

May 11: Colin Fleming, “I’ve had three mothers, and they all mattered”

Colin Fleming and his mom Barbara in Mansfield, Massachusetts, in the early 1980s. (Family photo)

My mother is an exemplar, and she has always been a reminder to me that love is not just something that happens. It’s active and perpetually put into practice.

She shared a poem that she’d found with me when I was young, the same way I’d share the stories I wrote with her. It sat in a little frame on my bureau.

The poem concluded with the line, “You weren’t born under my heart, but in it,” and not a day has passed that I have not thought of it.

My mom taught me the real meaning of being a mom, and that was relevant for me, too, in the standards I have for myself, the decency and grace with which I strive to live my life, no matter how hard anything gets.

May 30: Andie Townhouse, “I revamped a school library, then lost my job. The trauma is deja vu for my child and me.”

One of the worst days of my life was when I drove us out to Ikea. I remember this day vividly because the ice cream cones cost $1 each, like the clothes we were wearing.

I just wanted to lie down on a bed, so we skipped from exceptionally clean modern showroom to an even more exceptionally clean modern showroom like we were going to buy the whole cubicle. You know you are in a fantasy world when there are fake sky panels glued to the wall. Those were very different panes than the welfare windows we stared into for two years.

We thought about what a new life might feel like, beginning with a perfectly creased corner of a bed.

If only one of them were ours, could be ours. If only I tried harder.

When Chicago Public Schools laid me off, my daughter asked me if we were going to lose our house. She is a teenager now and restless with questions.

She stared at me with the look: “Is this really happening to us again?”

We broke eye contact.

She knows what happens when the yarn begins to fray, and the bobbin of your life spins completely out of control.

Aug. 24: Michael McColly, “I walked the length of Chicago and discovered we can knit our city together, step by step”

Chicago, as its motto boasts, is a “City in a Garden,” but you have to get out on foot to experience it. Whether I am walking along the lake or the Chicago River, through cemeteries or brownfields, down streets or under expressways, the natural world is there, pushing up through the cracks, migrating overhead or thriving in community gardens. In my walks, the city’s grand parks are impressive, but it’s the individual acts of citizens and voluntary organizations that often lead the way. The phenomenal restoration of Montrose Beach and Bird Sanctuary is a good example. For years, nearby residents came to this isolated corner of the lakefront to take walks and find comfort in the solitude and often unkept beach and weedy woodland behind it. Along with birders, locals realized that with stewardship and some plantings of native grasses and trees, they could assist in the natural rewilding of this area. Twenty-five years later, Montrose is a true sanctuary for birds and people, and all along the lakefront, other restoration projects have followed.

Walking for long stretches in the city, your perception deepens, and often, rising from the very earth below your feet, a feeling emerges. Like a revelation, you can sense the layers of history held in the land. You look at the lake and imagine it as a mile-high glacier of ice. You recognize that the street you are on was once a trail used by Indigenous peoples centuries ago. And in brick buildings that you’ve passed scores of times before, you see monuments to the workers who built them. On foot, there are no boundaries in the land, no divides, nothing but the past and the potentiality of the future.

Sept. 18: Sheila Rogers Clancy, “Jerome Gavin was ‘uncle’ to many Chicago lifeguards under his watch”

Jerome Gavin salutes the flag on the Fourth of July, circa 1998, at Leone Beach in Chicago. (Chris Serb)

Uncle Jer did not look like the other guards who were fresh off swim teams with their V-shaped physiques, bronzed skin and sun-drenched hair. Uncle Jer was a little paunchy, had dark hair peppered with gray (which he blamed on us) and skin so white it was difficult to tell where his skin left off and the sunscreen began. What he lacked in muscle mass, he made up for in heart and dedication.

He stressed the importance of staying in shape in the event of a rescue and was not above poking fun at himself. He told the story of hearing a whistle, grabbing the oxygen, running through the sand only to use the oxygen on himself before tending to the victim.

He tried to act like a tough guy to the rookies, but we all soon realized he was a big softie. He was fatherly toward the female guards, advising us to stay away from bad boys and suggesting we find good Catholics with stable job prospects. He was practical like that. As for the young men, he considered them “knuckleheads.” He shook his head when he found them sleeping under the boats after partying all night, backflipping off the cement seawall or torpedoing, the act of jumping out of the Whaler as it traveled at full speed. He might have been envious of their youthful invincibility, but he was really concerned that no one get hurt. Not on his watch.

Nov. 14: Ofelia Casillas, “I found faith at a Chicago food pantry”

After a year of volunteering weekly, my faith in the world slowly started to restore like a cup filling up again, forces for good overpowering all the sadness.

The gratitude in some of the recipients’ eyes was another reminder. And the community’s endless generosity.

A few Sundays this summer, I joined other pantry volunteers at a local farmers market booth. I saw the look on the faces of some of the market patrons when they heard “donate,” “volunteer” and “food pantry”: an immediate recognition that food insecurity in their community was their problem to help solve. They opened their wallets to give cash. They signed up to volunteer. They later donated food and clothing.

The other day, a recipient thanked me, as many do, and asked God to bless me.

As I moved to serve the next recipient, without thinking about it, without pausing to reflect, I answered: “God bless you too.”

Nov. 30: State Sen. Sara Feigenholtz, “We adoptees deserve to know our origins. Illinois law made that possible.”

State Sen. Sara Feigenholtz, D-Chicago, is emotional June 9, 2011, on the first anniversary of the Illinois law that allows adult adoptees to access their original birth certificate without a court order. (José M. Osorio/Chicago Tribune)

I still remember the day the first adoptees walked into the Illinois Department of Public Health and applied for their original birth certificates. Some cried. Others stood silent, taking in the weight of the moment. Many reached out to me afterward to say that, for the first time, they felt whole. One woman learned she had three siblings she never knew existed and had been living less than 10 miles from them their entire lives. Another woman finally understood her family’s medical history. Every story reminded me why the work was worth it.

It’s easy to see laws as words on paper, but for adoptees, this one was life-changing. It restored something that had been taken away for generations: the right to know ourselves.

When people ask me what I’m proudest of during my time in public service, I don’t hesitate. This is it. It’s my most meaningful legacy. Not because it was the most politically advantageous or newsworthy, but because it required patience, coalition-building, vulnerability and persistence when the easy thing would have been to give up.

That’s how real change happens. It happens through lived experience, through genuinely listening to people’s fears and hopes, through finding common ground where none seemed possible. It happens through a willingness to stay at the table for years until you get it right.

Submit a letter, of no more than 400 words, to the editor here or email letters@chicagotribune.com.

https://www.chicagotribune.com/2025/12/31/opinion-2025-heartfelt-humane-op-eds/