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My sister-in-law thought she’d beat the odds. She had glioblastoma, an inoperable brain tumor that took the lives of Teddy Kennedy and Beau Biden. If she persevered, she’d live and would be the exception.  She was not.  It all began with a voice message from my brother-in-law. It was on my landline when I returned home to St. Louis from New York City. My late husband’s only sister, with whom he had been extremely close growing up, had fallen and broken her leg.  I called back my brother-in-law. “Where is she?” I asked before he had a chance to speak. ...

We’ve followed Margery Leveen Sher’s blog posts almost since she started her “The Did Ya Notice? Project” and published her book, The Noticer’s Guide for Living and Laughing (available on Amazon). And she certainly has made us notice and think about almost everything far more. And in reading all, we share many of the same sentiments including our mixed feelings about technology: We gotta have many of the latest tech toys to do our work and stay in touch but we hate how tethered we often feel to being so in touch. So we certainly found ourselves shaking our heads...

It’s never easy to move forward after loss, but take baby steps & cover the essentials to ease the transition.  Most of us are not comfortable speaking about death and dying (which we addressed in a March 9 blog). But even more challenging is the conversation focusing on what to do after you lose a loved one. For ourselves, despite our different scenarios of divorce after 31 years of marriage and death after a 42-year marriage, we found a set of steps that helped us return to the land of the living after being blindsided by our losses.   In...

We know from experience that one of the toughest parts of being single, especially after a long-term relationship or marriage, is coming home to an empty house. Empty rooms. Empty dinner table. Empty kitchen. Empty bed.  It’s lonely enough when you enter your house during the day and nobody’s there, but it’s far worse at night when it’s dark. It can be scary wondering if anybody got into your home and is hiding in a closet, under your bed or behind the curtain shower. Remember the Alfred Hitchcock movie, Psycho?  You open the door from the garage or the street...

“The owner of truth” or in its native Portuguese tongue, “Dono da verdade,” has become one of our favorite new expressions. Folks who possess the trait know how to wait without becoming frustrated or even angry when everything doesn’t run as smoothly as a Swiss timepiece. They shrug, are mildly amused, heartily laugh it off or even rationalize that it doesn’t matter in the great scheme of life. If only we could all think this way and all the time.   We’d like to think we’ve become more patient as we’ve aged, and in some instances, we have. Barbara has...