Here is a little known fact about me. I was adopted as an infant. My adoptive parents raised three of us in a wonderful loving home. I wish that I had been able to share with my parents, Dolores and Vincent, the profound sense of gratitude that I feel for the life that they [...]
I’m often asked how I can be joyful and live the life I am living when I’m doing it without my daughter’s presence in my life. I’m asked if I have gotten over her death, or if I’ve healed and accepted her death. I will never get over Leah’s death. I’ve had a 20-year [...]
When I was preparing to move from Raleigh to St. Paul in the fall of 2020, there was a lot of purging of things we no longer needed. Some of these were easy to pack in boxes and take to places that were accepting donations. Then I came across my journals. In the course [...]
As a young man, I was raised in a Catholic household. I attended Mass and was even an altar boy during my grade school days. Aside from my great grandmother’s wake, the funerals that I served as an altar boy was my primary exposure to how people grieved. Somewhere around the 5th grade, maybe 10 [...]
Self-care is a hot topic these days. Taking care of ourselves is important. One of the things I’ve discovered is that self-care is necessary for us to step fully into who we are meant to be in this world. This was an important lesson for me as I excavated the life I was meant to [...]
It’s been 8 months since we’ve moved to St. Paul from Raleigh, NC. We moved here to be closer to my son and his family. Our granddaughter Ayra was born in July of 2020, and after we met her, we knew that we wanted to be a part of her everyday life. One of the [...]
Over the past twenty years that have elapsed since our daughter, Leah died, I have had the privilege to work with children who have experienced loss. Children’s grief can be simple or complicated like much of the grief that adults feel. Children have not accumulated the experience that adults have. Therefore, it can be [...]
I’ve been having a lot of conversations lately about how we are feeling as we emerge from the absurdity of the last year. The way we showed up in the world changed in an instant. The way we did business shifted, maybe forever. The way we socialized was distanced. From the first time I [...]
I promised more on the idea of sharing grief in your marriage. How is this type of grief a different case from learning to handle loss and pain when an individual experiences a tragedy? Vulnerability plays an important role in this situation. When it is your own pain there are many ways of dealing [...]
I’m often asked if I am an intuitive or an empath when I ask a client a sacred question, one that hits the heart of the matter, or that cuts to the core of what they have been working on. A questions that brings clarity to what they thought of as chaos. As a [...]
