My Writing

One day last month, I coughed 276 times in a day. And peed 16 times, 5 of which demanded that I rise from sleep. It was a bad day. I had...

My mom got her wish for death on April 25th, 2017, exactly 5 years and 2 hours after her eldest daughter, one of my two sisters, died....

Do you have someone who cuts your hair just the way you like it?  Or a massage therapist that you see when you need some healing touch? ...

"I wish I'd let myself be happier." One of the top five regrets of the dying is this desire for happiness.  Some people have the...

It is 13 years since my sister died. and In a few hours it will be 8 years since my mom died. In my tiny backyard, I wave to the...

So many amazing, hot women! Seventeen years ago when I went through menopause, I was hard pressed to find information about it, through...

I am not a 12-Step person but there are two 12-Step axioms that I just love. In my 60's, I think I finally get what they mean....

A woman cried in my arms when we finished her advanced care directive. "You have no idea what this means to me. I have been trying to do...

Mommy, before I was alive, was I dead like Daddy?"  Out of the mouths of babes, right?  This babe was a toddler, named Katie, asking her...

I want to have a sense of completion before I die, assuming I die slowly like 90% of us do. Dr. Ira Byock wrote about this. As we...

I started thinking randomly the other day about what I will miss seeing in my two daughters' lives when I die, whenever that is.  I will...

I did therapy on and off for a total of thirty years. I had a very high ACE (adverse childhood events) and it took me a minute. Or two. ...

Does it matter that the first evidence of a human burial rite is 100,000 years old?  By way of comparison, the wheel is only a 5,500 year...

My hero, Parker Palmer, in a recent interview with the Greater Good Science Center said something I love. He said, "I can't think of a...

Nike was wrong. Feel the fear and do nothing. I am feeling the fear.  And noticing what it feels like. Every day since Jan 20th, I...

Six hundred billion dollars. That is the shocking value of unpaid caregiving by family members in the United States.  In 2021, the AARP...

"You are not your grief. You are what the grief is moving through." Death and Dying Educator Frank Ostaseski said those words. On the...

Everyone wants to be an end of life doula! The recent uptick in calls and emails from people who want to be death doulas or end of life...

I am doulaing. As someone with a propensity for making nouns into action verbs, I am doulaing. That means that an extremely articulate...

Stand up if you are a Caregiver! Let me, let all of us, applaud you!  Family caregivers, those unpaid folks who are on 24/7 caring for...