Ask Amy: Advice columnist celebrates anniversary.

Dear Readers: I’m about to celebrate another anniversary of writing this column, and — after almost 14 years — I will admit that I have already outlasted my original expectation for this experience by about a decade. When I started the “Ask Amy” column in 2003, I think I assumed that my readership would simply run out of questions.

When I started writing this column, I was a middle-aged single mother with a teenage daughter, living in Chicago. I am now married, with four more daughters and two granddaughters. Like all of you, my own life has taken many unexpected turns. Like all of you, my own journey has been crooked and fraught with challenges and complication.

Eight years ago I left my office at the Chicago Tribune, and with the generous acceptance of my employer moved back to my hometown of Freeville, N.Y. (pop 505), to be with my elderly mother.

Like the almost 4 in 10 of Americans who help to take care of an ill family member, I entered a period of challenges that I was not prepared to face. After 17 years of being (mostly) happily single, I fell in love, and, after a whirlwind courtship, I married a man I have known since I was 12 years old.

Our marriage, which was launched on the gossamer thread of a romantic fairy tale, has continued firmly grounded in real-life graces.

My two sisters and I struggled through the bewildering minefield of medical caregiving so that our mother could stay at home at the end of her life. Our mother’s death, and the deaths of other family members in quick succession, tore a hole through our family. I entered a period of deep sadness that no remedy seemed able to touch.

Through it all, I have continued to do my job (as all of you do yours, during good and tough times). Although I am someone others turn to for answers, I have often been surprised by my own frailty and failings.

Last year, I decided to try to write it all down, and today my memoir covering these years of my life, “Strangers Tend to Tell Me Things: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Coming Home” (Hachette) is published.

With the exception of my immediate family, my relationship with you has been the longest of my life. And so I have dedicated my own story to the readers of the “Ask Amy” column. You have trusted me, and have taught me so much. Thank you.