Dealing with Grief and Fears

My son died unexpectedly in December of 2018. After the flurry of activity and visitors surrounding his funeral service, I found myself alone in the house we had so joyfully shared. I was still in the throes of trauma, not capable of deciding or doing much. It was the dead of…

Some call it “the happiest time of the year,” but it can feel like jingle hell for others. The holiday season has always been a time of joy and celebration, when families come together to share laughter, love, and create lasting memories. But for those who have lost a…

I don’t know about you, but somewhere along my life’s journey, I picked up and carried with me a belief that I needed to be able to rely solely on myself. And somewhere along my path, that message morphed into an even more warped version of itself as if it stood…

There are two kinds of losses in this life: clear loss, such as the death of a loved one where there is a body, and ambiguous loss, where the person is there – but not there. Examples of ambiguous loss can be divorce, mental illness, dementia, addiction…

I want to change some habits, but then again, I don’t. I set out to change my exercise routine many times over the years. I have the best of intentions. I try getting up early, walking when the weather is nice, lifting a few weights throughout the day…

A week has crawled by since we made it home after Hurricane Milton. Until this year, I considered myself storm-seasoned, living 35 years in Florida and most of it on the coast. I researched local history and published my first novel this year about…

In the past months, I have been navigating the rough and turbulent waters of dementia, trying to cope with the changes I observe in my mother’s behavior. I was oblivious at first – or perhaps I overlooked the signs. I hoped the dementia…

Elderly people face all of the same scams as everyone else, but some scams disproportionately affect the older generations. Many of these fall under the umbrella of elder fraud – the misappropriation or abuse of financial control…

Eugenie was telling me how wonderful she felt. This was unusual and unexpected because she was in her early 70s and had several health challenges, but on this day she told me: “Something has shifted, and it’s all because I did something…

They say that time is a healer, but it is you who learns to heal, through time. You become a master of how to avoid the pain that seems to be in every cell in your body. You slowly learn that crying all day leads to constant headaches, fatigue…