Dealing with Grief and Fears

With nearly a year under my belt of being a divorced 65-year-old, mother of four grown children, I have had time for reflection. The divorce was my choice. I sought and embraced it after years of apathy, contempt and hostility. I couldn’t change…

Have you noticed that sometimes people don’t speak to disabled or ill persons because they don’t really know what to say? The same is true about caregivers. If friends don’t know exactly what to say to us, sometimes they say nothing at all…

Recently, a client was telling me she’d had some bad health news. Thankfully, on further tests and following check-ups the news wasn’t so bad, but, it began a conversation on what she had learned. We discussed the possible situation of having…

I was devastated. A few days before I turned 60, I was suddenly a widow. But really, I was typical. Surprisingly, the average age at which a wife becomes a widow is 59.4. About 1 million women a year in the U.S. experience what may be the most stressful event…

It was a plaintive voice. From someone who knows they are dying, but whose family can’t accept the fact. Perhaps that’s your situation – when you are 60+, because we have lived more years than we are probably going to live, it does happen that people…

If daily skirmishes with anxiety leave you frustrated and worn out, you are certainly not alone. I was a worrier for many years. Back then I thought anxiety was just the way things were. If you’re alive… you worry. My mother worried and so I worried…

I recently agreed to be a guest on a podcast. Although repeatedly encouraged to do podcasts by my marketing manager, up to this point I have resisted. Why? It’s very simple: Fear! There have been times in my past when I felt that I did not respond…

Stress and anxiety need no invitation to hassle us and invade our day-to-day lives. Very few of us are immune. If we are fortunate enough that the underlying causes are less serious, it would usually be a great help if we could do something…

Perhaps because my late husband was a pastor, some people thought they were helpful after Tom’s death to tell me, “God needed another angel in heaven.” (Wrong! I needed that angel beside me, not gone away.) Or they said, “I know exactly how you feel…

Have you ever had a great idea about something new you wanted to try or place you wanted to go and then immediately thought, “I can’t possibly do that.”? We are very creative with our excuses…