I have a 20-year-old homemade DVD that I have watched on one occasion. The DVD contained footage of my daughter Jeannine’s last 10 plus months on earth. Jeannine died on March 1, 2003, at the age of 18 of a rare and aggressive connective muscle tissue sarcoma. Watching these carefully…
There is a memorable passage from a song by Rush titled Bravado:
“We will pay the price, but we will not count the cost.”
In their Roll The Bones Tourbook, Rush’s late, great drummer and lyricist, Neil Peart disclosed that this line is from a novel called The Tidewater Tales…
The title for this story was taken from a song called “Can You Help Me” by Vertical Horizon. To me this passage beautifully captures the occasions in our lives when for a moment in time, we so deeply empathized with someone’s challenges that we became one with that person. It…
Ted Andrews writes of deer and her teachings in his book, Animal Speak:
When deer shows up in your life it is time to be gentle with yourself and others(Andrews, p.264)
I first learned of the Native American teachings of animals in November of 2010 in North Babylon, Long Island…
Recently, my thoughts gravitated to a day in mid-February of 2002. I was walking briskly, anxious to get to the oncology unit where my daughter Jeannine had received one of her last chemotherapy treatments. As I was walking, my eyes darted to a hospital room on the left. In there…
Mystic River is a movie that premiered in 2003 and featured an all-star cast of Sean Penn, Tim Robbins, Marcia Gay Harden, Lawrence Fishburne, and Kevin Bacon. What follows is a plot summary from Mystic River’s Wikipedia page:
In the first scene of the movie, three boys — Jimmy Markum…
After my daughter, Jeannine’s death in 2003, all of her favorite things were meticulously placed in several storage bins, which can be found safely tucked away in the lower level of my home. Whenever I am feeling nostalgic and yearning to connect with the essence of my daughter in new…
I have danced with death for as long as I can remember. The first encounter that I had with death, compared to my overall experiences was relatively minor. During the past couple of days, the memories connected to this event seemingly came out of nowhere. But in recent years, I…
Recently, I was listening to a song called Tai Shan by Rush. The lyrics, written by their drummer, the late Neil Peart, was about his climb to the top of Mount Tai, a sacred mountain in China in 1985. …
When my daughter, Jeannine, was twelve years old, she went through what I called “the wilderness phase” in her growth and development. She began to act out behaviorally, testing limits and boundaries that me and my wife, Cheri, had established in our home. Because of my background in human services…
