Posts Tagged ‘hope’: 8

5 Ways Mr. Rogers Helped Us Become Better People and Parents

I’m a sucker for Mr. Rogers — always have been and always will be. In honor of his birthday this month (3/20/28), I wanted to share a few of the many ways he spoke to our highest aspirations as parents and as human beings. 1. Fred Rogers cut us some slack, acknowledging how hard parenting […]

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A Personal Farewell to Shep Nuland, the Man Who Taught Us “How We Die”

Sherwin Nuland was known affectionately as Shep by my family. He and my father were young roommates – physicians-in-training in London in the late 1950s.

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My Last Days: Meet Zach Sobiech

A couple of years ago I blogged regularly about my Year to Live project. The 365 day experiment profoundly changed the way I think about life, even to this day. Every once in a while, something fantastic and year-to-live-y grabs my attention and makes me want to jump up and share it with you.

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A New Journey (Or Two)

This month marks a year since my one year to live project came to an end. And a year since my close childhood friend Marisa died of metastatic breast cancer…. I have some good news to share. I’ve just come back from Marisa’s brother & sister-in-law’s baby shower. Marisa would have been an amazing aunt to this little one, and I like to imagine her smiling at all of us.

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When Death Is Real: A Postscript on My Year to Live

What I did not write about was the all-too-real end-of-life journey of my earliest childhood friend Marisa, who was courageously facing metastatic cancer while I went about my hypothetical journey.

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The Secret of Life

Unbelievably, I’ve arrived at the end of the Year to Live project. I’ve learned from others that the “dissolution of the body” meditation which symbolically closes the class is a powerful one. Frankly, I’m scared of it. One person I know who experienced it said that this exercise is so visceral that he actually lost control of some, ah, bodily function when he did it.

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On Finding My Favorite High School Teacher

I wanted to ask if she might like to have lunch someday. I felt nervous and 17 again. Thankfully she beat me to it. That’s how I came to be seated in the dining room of her orderly, yet cheerful, northern NJ condo.

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A Classic on Grief and Healing

When a person dies, there are many things that can be said, and there is at least one thing that should never be said. The night after Alex died I was sitting in the living room of my sister’s house outside of Boston, when the front door opened and in came a nice-looking, middle-aged woman. When she saw me, she shook her head, then headed for the kitchen, saying sadly over her shoulder, “I just don’t understand the will of God.”

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