Getting rid of someone’s stuff after they die is tough. It is an admission. For some people, it is the ultimate act of reconciling the permanence of a loss. A lot of “stuff” – baseball cards, the shirt from the family portrait, a picture they painted or a [...]
“How do I fully live when life is full of hurt?” Are you down today? Perhaps grief and loss have derailed you and you are finding it hard to get back to a standing position, let alone getting any forward motion. Maybe some other disappointment has temporarily sucked [...]
I was recently browsing through the new gift shop at Mission San Juan Capistrano, admiring the jewelry and slowly making my way to my favorite corner of the store; the book section on Grief. I'm always finding new and intriguing titles there and this time, I stumbled upon [...]
Last year I had never heard of a Celebrant. A what? What do they do? Sounds weird. Last week I walked into a room with 20 strangers, all there to learn about how to make a funeral personal & each life meaningful. When I was told that on [...]
A Father's Day Tribute When I thought about writing this blog for Father's Day, I wracked my brain to come up with that quintessential father-figure. People like Walt Disney & Abraham Lincoln came to mind, but when I remembered Atticus Finch, the humble hero of Harper Lee's [...]
Journey Mercies . . . Alzheimers: Walking Into Oblivion In her book To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee beautifully wrote . . . Via Pinterest I found this to be the case as I learned more about Barry Petersen. November is National Alzheimer Awareness Month and our [...]
Have You Knocked At Every Door? I'm reading Les Misérables by Victor Hugo. Do you ever begin a book & realize you were destined to read it at just this time in life? That's how Les Mis feels. Yes, it's a huge, thick book but I like those the [...]
Blindsided a book you should read. A few months ago I received an email from a gal named Arlene Blix. I didn’t know her, she didn’t know me. She told me she had written a book chronicling her husband’s battle with terminal cancer and she wanted to send it [...]
Do you believe in lies? I have – and I probably still do. This concept of "believing lies" is fairly new to me, something that I feel is just dawning as a realization. I have believed lies about myself for a long time. I began to realize this when [...]
