This is Life and What I Make Of It. So Far. — “The truth is, we know so little about life, we don’t really know what the good news is and what the bad news is.” — Kurt Vonnegut If we were to ask my 25 year-old self what she thinks of our life at almost 50, it would be a mixed…

As my son leaves for a service academy, I reflect on some advice from children’s author, Maurice Sendak — The past few months have marked a time of change in ways that have taken me by surprise and also some I knew were coming. My life isn’t much different in the bird’s eye view of the day to day, but the texture of my days and routines have shifted…

When a client teaches a therapist about the meaning of life On December 23, 2019, I received a call from the mother of one of my clients. This client was not a teenager or young adult — a time of life when parents are sometimes involved in their kids’s therapy…

After 18 Years Working in Death and Dying, Some Observations of Bodies and Remembrance — “The bodies of the newly dead are not debris nor remnant, nor are they entirely icon or essence. They are, rather, changelings, incubates, hatchlings of a new reality that bear our names and dates, our image and likenesses, as surely in the eyes and ears of our children and grandchildren…

What would the neon sign over your head say? — A young man I work with lost his sister suddenly several years ago; she died of a congenital medical condition, which had never been diagnosed. It is a rare and tragic death — a seemingly healthy young woman simply dropping dead. In their family of several siblings, the two were…

Why we need civics, trust, and possibly miracles — My son is applying to the U.S. Service Academies this year — the Naval Academy, West Point, the Air Force Academy. It’s his senior year of high school. During my pregnancy with him, I was one of those rare moms who did not want to know the gender of my…

How attention can transform the energy of our anger — Attention is the most basic form of love; through it we bless and are blessed. — John Tarrant When I was a young social worker, I often found myself doing some crazy tasks that I had no business doing. One of these was teaching a court-mandated parenting class to divorcing…

Poetry helps me express my inner outsider — may came home with a smooth round stone as small as a world and as large as alone from “maggie and milly and molly and may” by e.e. cummings The other day, I wrote a poem (a very mediocre, and maybe even bad poem) for the first time in a…

As summer ends, we can feel that time has a life of its own — Looking out at the road rushing under my wheels Looking back at the years gone by like so many summer fields Running on Empty, Jackson Browne Field of Dreams Nostalgia. The word is rooted in the Greek “return home” and “pain,” but personally I don’t experience it as pain only, I experience it…