How love transforms challenges and obstacles

Maggie Kast has been a writer since the 1990's. In her book, Side by Side but Never Face to Face, she writes about Greta, her narrator, who has been wrenched from a long and tightly-circled marriage to Manfred, an Austrian Holocaust survivor. Coming from very different backgrounds, they sometimes abraded each other, but the friction struck sparks, and the marriage remained vital. Together they mourned the accidental death of a daughter and experienced a widening of spiritual horizons as they grieved. Today Maggie discusses coping with the pain of losing a daughter and the challenges of having a son with a developmental disability, including the stigma of his being labeled “retarded,” her journey to convert to catholicism, what drew her to the Hmong people of Vietnam and insight from her research into their unique culture, and her views on psychotherapy and philosophy.