A few months ago I had a tiff with my tenant -- the one who's also my next door neighbor. With one of her two cats having kittens and then on top of that seeing a puppy appear, it seemed the house would become overrun with animals. I called to tell her that while I had given her break with the cats, I usually charged $200 for each pet. Nonrefundable.

The puppy was gone that night.

But a week later she called me with a list of complaints. I figured it was a payback -- and maybe I should have handled the 'visiting puppy' concern differently -- but when I got home from work, I knocked on her door.

Everything was pleasant: any potential hostilities seemed to have blown over. After investigating everything, I returned to speak with her in the Living Room. Just as I had always observed from the outside, she sat watching TV in the semi-dark, smoking.

The business of landlord-tenant was eliminated in short order and I wish I could remember how the conversation turned. My tenant began telling me a story.

When she was 28, my tenant was married with 3 young sons. She began experiencing panic attacks. At first it was only a little but then more intensely. She would cry frequently and she began avoiding going outside of the house. Her husband didn't notice there was anything wrong as long as he got his dinner.

For awhile she maintained an appearance of control, but things got worse. When she didn't get out of bed after 3 days, it was her sister and mother who came over and took her to a hospital. She was under observation for almost a week.

"Mrs. H," the doctor told her, "You have a borderline bipolar disorder," and they prescribed her anti-depressants. The first medicine didn't work, so they prescribed something else. Those didn't seem to work either, and every succeeding, more powerful, drug had side effects that brought other medications to counter them. Nothing seemed to be working and the tests could not find anything conclusive. She felt sick all the time, she wasn't sleeping and she was losing weight.

One day she collapsed and she was rushed to the hospital. New doctors performed a barrage of tests on her. It was not a doctor but a nurse who came in and took hold of her hand, "Mrs. H," she said, "Did you know that you were pregnant?"

"No," my tenant said, and: "'were' pregnant?"

"I'm afraid the fetus is dead," said the nurse, "I'm sorry."

It had been a girl and my tenant had always wanted a girl. "But just as well," she said, "with all those drugs I was on it probably would have been born brain-damaged or with a severe handicap."

I didn't know what to say.

"That's why I devote so much to my granddaughter," she said. "She is the center of my universe."