A Friend’s Good Bye Letter

May 28th, 2013
Posted By:

Last week a childhood friend of my father’s died.  They had known each other since they were in grade school and met each other while playing recess games on the black top when they were about seven or eight years old.  They both went on to attend the same high school, playing basketball, and later both went into the insurance business working for different companies.

 

Over the years, they stayed in touch with each other as best they could.  They both worked very hard while trying to raise large Irish Catholic families.  My father and mother had six children … Read More

Angelina’s Health Decision

May 15th, 2013
Posted By:

Angelina Jolie made a powerful decision.  It’s not a decision that every woman has the opportunity to make, but I stand and applaud her courage and wish her a future of wellness. Faced with medical information from her doctors that she had an 87 percent risk of developing breast cancer and a 50 percent risk of developing ovarian cancer because she carried the BRCA1 gene, she decided to take control of her health and be proactive.  She decided at the young age of 37 to have a double mastectomy which means she had both of her currently healthy breasts surgically… Read More

Grief In the Office

May 13th, 2013
Posted By:

Even though your world probably stopped when you lost a loved one, the world around you has continued  with its usual routine. I know it’s kind of a shocker to find this out but it’s true. You are racked with pain but unfortunately, that doesn’t stop the bills and other responsibilities that need your attention from smacking you in the face.  What kind of responsibilities you may ask?  Well, for some it might include feeding, clothing and housing children, continuing to work full-time and managing to keep your wits about you as you try your best every day to stick… Read More

A Solid Sistahood

May 8th, 2013
Posted By:

When I am with my good solid girlfriends — women whom I have known for years and years and years — I know I am blessed. When we get together we may be going on about our children, our hair color, a new diet or some story we heard about on the news, but the under current of all of that warm wonderful and familiar chatter is the inner knowledge that we are sistas who have each other’s backs and always will! Through beautiful and great times, times of trauma and then those other ugly times when you need to… Read More

Widowed Fathers Reaching Out

April 23rd, 2013
Posted By:

I know a few widowed mothers and have great respect for how they handle the role of single parent.I don’t know any widowed fathers so I have always been curious about how they juggle the demands of raising children and handling their work careers. I imagine that a family member helps them; maybe a mother, a sister or even a brother.  Or maybe the fathers had already hired someone to help them when their wives sadly became too ill or were weakened by treatments. But after reading the insightful New York Times story below, I found that widowed fathers and… Read More

A Heavenly Summer Wind

April 11th, 2013
Posted By:

Happy Birthday Love today to a Special Person in Heaven. The Birthday Boy was an abrupt-on-the-outside, marshmellow-on-the-inside kind of a guy who was my husband and my friend for 17 years plus.  He was an old school kind of Dad to five talented and fantastic children and took a HUGE amount of pride in his work as an award-winning reporter/writer. He never forgot his New Jersey roots, having been born and raised in Red Bank, and was a die hard Giants and Yankees fan.  He loved everything about New Jersey: the infamous jokes about exits, the rumble tumble way of… Read More

Reflections of Nora Ephron’s Son

March 7th, 2013
Posted By:

Nora Ephron Crying is unsettling.  Especially if you are watching one of your parents do it. My son hates it when I cry and has said that when I would cry all the time immediately after his father/my husband’s death, he would feel this mix of emotions that he didn’t want to feel and so he would walk away.  I understand it and think his reaction was perfectly normal.  He was thirteen years old and dealing with something that adults find hard to handle.  He was just trying to survive. Now, at twenty two years old, my son explains his… Read More

The Loss of A Child

March 5th, 2013
Posted By:

When I have been in support group sessions and listened as people have talked about losing a spouse, I can almost feel the unspoken emotional support developing within the group; a sense of bonding, a feeling of “having been there” in the expressed feeling or thought.  A supportive dialogue sometimes follows and I’ve heard people say after the sessions that they have felt a sense of personal progress in working through their own emotions because they heard someone else express familiar thoughts and feelings. Being around other widows and widowers can be a blessing after you have lost a spouse. … Read More

Get Your S#%t Together

January 29th, 2013
Posted By:

Are you one of those people who thinks that if they prepare to write their will that they are inviting tragedy to happen to them? Guess what?  It doesn’t work that way. Chanel Reynolds If you haven’t taken care of executing your will, and/or sharing bank account numbers with your spouse or partner, then you should do it today. Not to be an alarmist, but you really have no idea what is going to happen to you and you should be prepared.  Think of it as a gift that you are giving to the people that you love.  Life has… Read More