Lights in Cold Rooms

Joan Cusack Handler, Ph.D. spent forty years as a licensed psychologist helping other people through depression. Then, in the isolation of 2020, with her own therapist unreachable and her older sister dying without the comfort of a proper goodbye, she recognized the same darkness closing in on herself.
Unable to find a clinician who was seeing patients, Handler turned to the one resource she had always trusted: writing. Unedited, on napkins and scraps of paper before she moved to a notebook and then a keyboard, she let the words come however they arrived, in prose or in verse. What surfaced was not one depressive episode but eighty years of aging and family history: a mother who carried her own losses from County Kerry, Ireland; brothers who drifted from the family; a sister whose decline reopened old wounds of guilt and rivalry; a body that kept failing her, fall after fall, surgery after surgery; and a late-life devotion to her husband, her son, and two granddaughters that gave her something to hold onto.
Lights in Cold Rooms is the record of that time: a psychologist turning her own clinical eye inward, and a poet finding words for what other explorations and therapies might not reveal.

Joan Cusack Handler is a poet, memoirist, and psychologist. She has previously published three verse memoirs, GlOrious, The Red Canoe: Love in Its Making, and Orphans, and one prose memoir, Confessions of Joan the Tall. With Gabriel Cleveland, she coedited Places We Return To, an anthology of selections from the first one hundred books published by CavanKerry Press, the press she founded in the year 2000 and where she continues to serve as publisher. Her second prose memoir, Lights in Cold Rooms: A Psychologist Reflects on Family, Aging, Love & Loss, was released through CavanKerry in 2025.