I’ve waited my whole life to give someone a good death. Presence grows out of absence. As I lay dying as a teenager, my family reacted like marionettes with their strings cut. I was dying but I was much more alive than the stiffs who surrounded me, people who loved me but who could not act on their love. So it is with a fierce energy, a tremendous passion, that I approach the sickness and death of others. What I was not given, I give in spades. I have the words, the actions,

Looking back, it seems obvious that what happened to me that summer was traumatic. I was a fifteen-year-old receiving chemo for Hodgkin’s...

There are women who taught me how to live. How to listen to myself and others. How to ask questions and stay curious. How to explore. How...

The single lesson of decades of talk therapy was communicated to my husband by a naked, elder colleague in the close quarters of a men’s...