

Trauma Memoir
In January 2018, I started writing a death memoir, a brutally honest one. The first days were so dark I ...
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Learning to be a Widow
When all was overturned into widowhood, my entire world collapsed on itself. Everything fell through. My husband David and I ...
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Mountain Women
When I moved back to DC, searching for a place to live, my made-in-heaven basement apartment turned into a disaster ...
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The Isolation of Grief
Funerals are totally acceptable. As long as a widow doesn’t audibly cry, tears are allowed to come down her face ...
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The Death Room
I had to reenter David’s death room to finish this book. Being inside David’s death room again intensifies all the ...
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Dark Writing
A trauma memoir nearly destroys, certainly changes, the author. The best of the genre have been written with extreme anguish ...
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Shopping for Funeral Clothes
David’s palliative care doctor had just predicted that his funeral would be in 3 to 6 months. That brought us ...
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Being a Death Coach
Everyone understands the term “midwife,” but there is no term for describing the person who travels with the terminally ill ...
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A Morning at Garth Newel
August 7, 2018 Tuesday afternoon, and I just returned from Garth Newel. I arrived there around 11 AM and watched ...
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The Ultimate Choice
No matter how we would like to deny it, we all will die. But, unless we have a heart attack ...
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Records of Dying
We received the deadly diagnosis on September 23, 2013. By the next month, I had started recording our conversations. In ...
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The Death Date
Today, May 18, 2018, is David’s third death date. The term “death date” assumes huge proportions. The first year, I ...
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Yes, Roz, Death Is Not Pleasant
When The New York Times published an early excerpt from Roz Chast's Can’t we talk about something more PLEASANT?, I ...
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Dying, Slowly
People do not understand dying at all. In our case, dying was very, very slow. Knowing you’re going to die ...
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Beginning Again
I stayed in the retirement home where David had died until the first anniversary of his death. After having a ...
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The Death of Dom Philip
My husband, Dom Philip, died on May 18, 2015, of a very rare liver cancer. For 26 months, 2.2 years, ...
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