You can pre-order Sam’s book!
Greetings, loyal readers. It is time that I stop procrastinating and start with the most ambitious makeover of the Gap Year After 60 era. It is time that I become a self-promoter. At Peace: Choosing a Good Death After a Long Life is in production with my publisher, Hachette / Grand Central Life & Style. […]
Amazing and Wondrous: Four-Generation Total Eclipse
Thanks to my 86-year-old father’s planning, two dozen members and four generations of my immediate family flew from Maine to steamy Athens, Tennessee for the day to see the Aug. 21, 2017 Total Solar Eclipse. It was the first since 1918 to cross the entire U.S. Given our ages, and the logistics required to get to the path […]
Considering Your Options When Lethal Injection Is Not Available
Lethal injection is not the only way to assert some control over how you die when you are old and suffering from a terminal illness. You might not know that if you read the recent piece by Catherine Porter in the New York Times: At His Own Wake, Celebrating Life and the Gift of Death. […]
Year Five: Words Have Power
Today is day eight of Year Five of this gap year experiment. If there’s a theme, it’s one of gradual acceptance of aging along with an increasing appreciation of the power of words. If there are surprises, perhaps it’s that Sam and I are still happily married after so much time in each other’s company – […]
Why Aging Mindfully Fits Right In With Admitting to Depression
I was tucking my five-year-old granddaughter into bed the other night when, to prolong the moment, she plied me with a blizzard of existential questions: “Wait… granny, who are you married to?” “Who is mommy married to?” “Who will I marry?” And then a quick segue… “Are you old?” “When will you die?” “Will you […]
Up and Down in Liguria, Fueled by Ibuprofen
I’ve sent the final draft of my manuscript to the publisher and it has been accepted for publication. With that behind me, Debbie and I “snuck away” recently for a trip to Italy – a walking tour of the coast of Liguria and the hills of Tuscany. It proved to be a delightful and illuminating […]
A First-Time Author Embraces the Impostor Phenomenon
It turns out that I am suffering from my first episode of the Impostor Syndrome. Mighty uncomfortable it is, too. I suppose that I felt “impostorish” to some degree on my first day of my medical internship, but I don’t have a clear recollection. Certainly, there were many other emotions and concerns to crowd out […]
The Only SECRET to Writing Well
My favorite journalism professor, a retired war correspondent, was definite about this one thing. The secret to becoming a great reporter? Quantity. Write a lot. Then write some more. There is no other secret, he told us aspiring reporters at the University of Wisconsin-Madison back in the 1970s. Being a perfectionist, and also lazy, I […]
My 65th Birthday
I dreaded it for months. But my 65th birthday came and went a week ago and life is still good. Grand, in fact. Despite recurrent depression, despite self esteem issues, despite everything about myself that I’d like to change, I am so looking forward to what lies ahead. Why do artificial milestones hang us up? […]
Finally, a Book Deal and Publication in the WaPo
It has been a long summer. I have been watching a pot that has refused to boil. Doing so has sucked some of the wind out of my sails. Treading water through June, July, and most of August was wearing me down – but that ends today with this link: Mission creep doesn’t benefit patients […]