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We know you’ve experienced the floodgates that open when someone you know and haven’t seen for a while shares everything that’s happened recently to them, even if you’ve read it on Facebook. It’s going on all around us. You run into them accidentally. You feel so happy initially to connect. The first question that politely pops out of your mouth is: “How are you doing?” It’s great to hear the person’s news but wait. That’s when pleasure may turn to surprise and then possibly exasperation or even annoyance as you stand there—maybe in the middle of the produce aisle at...

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...