A while back, right before the holiday season, a member of the national staff at AARP called to ask me to write a special column for their website. “Thanksgiving, Chanukah, Christmas…all these special occasions are coming,” Susan said, “Since this is such a difficult time for those who have experienced loss, we would like you to write a piece that might be useful to people who are grieving.” I was happy to say yes to AARP’s request because I knew, both from my own personal experience and from the research I had done for my books Seven Choices and Tough Transitions, that the holiday season is a specific kind of challenge. All of these holidays celebrate family, togetherness, light, peace, joy, and miracle…and for those of us grieving it is the very absence of all these things that make the days especially long and the nights empty. (more…)

Walking through the Mauritshuis museum in the Haag in the Netherlands a couple of years ago, I came upon this jovial painting by Jan Steen (1629-1679), a Dutch painter from the 1600s who is considered a national treasure in the Netherlands. I have enjoyed Steen’s paintings for years, especially his scenes of family life and household activities. There always seems to be a joke hovering somewhere around a Steen picture…but, interestingly enough, there is usually—if one looks closely enough to see it—a serious message offered to the viewer also. (more…)

One afternoon this week, while walking on the treadmill, I clicked the television channel for the Oprah show. What good fortune: the program that afternoon included a twenty-minute segment of Oprah’s interview with the author Cormac McCarthy. Most of us have heard of, if not read, at least one of McCarthy’s ten novels, All the Pretty Horses. Perhaps we caught the recent news that McCarthy’s latest novel, The Road, just won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for 2007. The interview with Oprah was the first (and last, he said) television interview the author has ever done.

I was struck by several things that Cormac McCarthy said in his conversation with Oprah. They talked a lot about his years of poverty…the time he got put out of a $45 a month hotel in New Orleans because he could not pay the bill, for instance, the time he didn’t have any toothpaste and no money to buy any but found a sample tube of toothpaste in his mailbox the next time he went to get his mail. And about his choosing poverty over publicity…not taking, a $2000 speaking engagement once although he really needed money. But he needed his privacy more. McCarthy’s most thought-provoking line during this part of the interview, I thought, was when he said: “All a person needs are food and shoes.” (more…)

Inspiration and insight come, sometimes, from the strangest places.

Yesterday I was reading an article on trends in the creation of new scents in perfume. The article ended with instructions on how to wear perfume. (New instructions that I had not read before: put perfume on upper arms because that’s the part of your body you move the most, on neck so that people smell the scent when they hug you, and a big quirt down your back so that perfume lingers!)

The author instructed that spraying perfume in the room and then “stepping out into it” is definitely not the way to put perfume on. I smiled about this because it would never have crossed my mind to spray something as expensive as perfume into the room and then to try to “step into it” as a way of wearing the scent.

I suppose the discussion about “stepping out into a spray of perfume” was still resonating somewhere in my consciousness this morning when I got up. I looked outside into the spring-green tree tops around the back side of our house, saw the sunlight dappled in lovely patterns on the wood planks of the deck, and heard the birds sounding out into the breeze.

My next thought?

“I’m going to take every opportunity I have this morning to step out into the day.” Then I wondered, “What do we mean when we say step out into the day?” Is the day an envelope of beauty to step into? A bubble of light and pattern? A contained space of some sort that is filled with temperature and color and sound? (more…)

Elizabeth Tashjian, age 94, just died.

Elizabeth was an expert.

She was an expert on nuts.

The headline of her obituary in The Sunday New York Times read:Elizabeth Tashjian, 94, An Expert on Nuts, Dies.

I laughed out loud when I read that headline, laughed with happiness for this woman whom I had never heard of who had focused her life on something she was absolutely crazy about studying: nuts. (more…)