Dying and Death

As a mentor and grief counselor, I hear a lot about people’s deepest beliefs and fears and how they are challenged when life gets hard. I am particularly fascinated by how those who profess a [...]

An email I received from a reader provoked this article. She wrote “I’m 50 years old, sitting in a hospital room with my 43 year old husband, who is trying to recover from surgery for [...]

Is there anything we take more for granted than life itself? We are alive – what a miracle! But here’s the question – What are you doing with your life? Are you living it on the surface checking [...]

I have far more I’d like to say on this topic than can be contained in a single post. So I will summarize my top five here and do follow-up articles on each of the five in the future [...]

If you had to plan a funeral for a loved one tomorrow, would you know what to do and what not to do?  Most of us are woefully unprepared when faced with this task and must do so while grieving [...]

Steve Jobs’ last words, spoken with great delight, were, “Oh wow! Oh wow! Oh wow!” What was he seeing? Perhaps what those returning from near-death experiences consistently [...]

There’s been a big push in recent years to educate the public about Advance Healthcare Planning (AHP). The focus has been primarily on the forms you need to fill out and why they are so [...]

This is a picture of my mother, Grace Mundy, six months before her death in 2006. We shared a home during the final nine years of her life. Being her friend and caregiver through to her death was [...]

The centerpiece of the American culture of death is a taboo that inhibits our ability to encounter the territory of dying, death, and bereavement with wisdom, competency, and discernment. We are [...]

While I am not a Buddhist, I find the Tibetan Buddhist teachings on death a source of great wisdom and potential liberation – particularly for those still under the influence of the death taboo [...]