Saturday morning I was flipping stations on Sirius radio when I discovered a conversation discussing a book about grief. Amy Welborn’s husband had died from a heart attack and she subsequently wrote, Wish You Were Here: Travels Through Loss and Hope.

I didn’t hear anything earth shattering in the conversation until she said that she believes this life, the one we are experiencing here on earth, is “incomplete” because we experience so much loss in this life.…

I read recently that Christmas is a time of rebirth. As one year ends and another begins, I see this as a time of reflection of where we’ve been this past year and where we’re going in 2012.

In 2011, I worked on my ability to let go. I had some rough paths to travel this past year, and a friend noted to me the other day how much he has seen me grow in this time as I navigated them. That’s not to say that I’m perfect because I’m definitely not. Today I was reminded that Lent…

My younger sister Denise and I often discussed the overuse of the word “love.” We felt that people said it too much because often they didn’t really mean that they loved someone especially when they finished a letter with “Love,” and then their name. Instead, we stuck to “Always,” before our names. At a church retreat during high school, she had to write a letter to someone so she wrote me and told me that she loved me. She said she did it because we never said we loved each other. When she…

The end of a relationship, whether we are 16 or 60, can be devastating although not always for the same reasons. This morning I sat on the phone with a friend of my husband who is trudging through the breakup of what was a short marriage. It’s easy to think that we messed up and made a big mistake when something we thought would last forever doesn’t. And while I’m not standing in his shoes, what I do know is that he has an opportunity to learn from this relationship and make himself stronger…

A friend’s wife died suddenly a week ago. She was just a few years older than me and, as far as I knew, she wasn’t sick. When I called him to find out what happened, I was stunned to learn that she had an addiction, one that took its toll last weekend. He said it was something she had battled for a long time, and obviously he battled right alongside her.

This couple had an amazing love for each other, yet outwardly there was no sign of the struggle they endured…

Recently, I sat at dinner with my friend Fred discussing a writing project that involved using my high school journals and the lessons I learned from my years of running competitively in cross country and track. I said something about the difficult relationship I had with my dad and how I debated including that. Fred looked puzzled and asked, “I thought you and your dad were good buddies?”



At that point, I realized that Fred didn’t know about those years with my dad, the…

On my second trip to Australia, I was in a Melbourne restaurant with several friends for dinner when one of them, an Australian, went with me to pick out a dessert. There was this gloppy mess of a cake and I asked Susan what it was. “Oh, that’s very Australian,” she said. “It’s sticky date pudding.” As she would later say, it’s mostly made up of butter and sugar (plus some dates). While looking quite like a messy cake, and obviously very sticky, it’s a wonderful dessert that I…