Journalism & Writing Process
Transitioning From Passive Mourning to Active Remembering Is Key to Building Resilience After Loss
If you’re lucky, like me, soon after your loved one dies, a swarm of friends will embrace you in all sorts of meaningful ways. They’ll pack the funeral home, attend the wake or shiva, and a few may even leave homemade meals wrapped in tin foil by your front door so you won’t have to cook for a while. Rituals surrounding loss tend to kick into gear automatically and I benefitted from being the passive…
View Blog Post
5 Ways Spring Cleaning Can Help You Build Resilience After Loss
After my parents died, I felt a responsibility to hang on to nearly all their belongings – my father’s neckties, my mother’s scarves, their mortgage records, car titles, passports, books, home videos, photographs, and more. For a while, keeping these possessions made me feel closer to my mom and dad. But years later, doing so became a burden and certainly didn’t bring me pleasure. Over time, I figured out that repurposing objects, or simply parting…
View Blog Post
Gilding the Gutters
MONTCLAIR – JESSICA de KONINCK knew that when she put her home of nearly 21 years on the market, she would need some help. “If I ever have any free time, the last thing I’d ever want to do is spend it decorating,” Ms. de Koninck admitted. Lack of time and interest had indeed taken a toll on her house. Ms. de Koninck had never redecorated while raising her two children, now grown, and her…
View Blog PostHow New York Changed After the Worst Tragedy Too Few Remember
Thirty years ago, an arson fire at the Happy Land Social Club left 87 people dead. The effects are with us still. Before the fire was out and the smoke had lifted, Ruben Valladares was already in the emergency room with second- and third-degree burns covering half his body. The ambulance call report, handwritten at 3:47 a.m. and updated several times over the next hour, detailed the locations of this injuries.
View Blog PostRejecting the Name My Parents Chose
I was named for the main character in “Little Women.” Changing my name may be the most Jo March-like decision I could have made. Despite the byline you see on this article, the name my parents gave me was Jo. Not Josephine, just Jo. Inspired by the main character in “Little Women,” they dreamed I’d grow to become every bit as norm-bashing as Louisa May Alcott’s fictional character, Jo March….Continue Reading
View Blog PostPandemic Grandparenting, Beyond the Dreary Video Calls
As a veteran television journalist, Sally-Ann Roberts knows how to tame an unsteady landscape and will it into submission. She survived 40 years reporting and anchoring the news for WWL-TV in New Orleans, covering 10 races for mayor and in 2005, Hurricane Katrina, a storm that submerged four-fifths of the city in water and left her rebuilding her home for nearly two unforgiving years. But as far as grandparenting during the coronavirus pandemic, she says…
View Blog Post
My Favorite Poem
After my mother died, I found this typewritten poem stashed in a book that had belonged to her. Reading it, so deep in my grief, I felt equal blows of tough-love and compassion. My mother’s parenting style was steeped in that dichotomy: She loved me so fiercely, so unconditionally, she’d sooner let me fail than rescue me. Reading the poem that day, attributed to Elsie Robinson, it was my mother’s voice that filled my ears….
View Blog PostThe Grief Crisis Is Coming
For each person who dies of Covid-19, experts say there are at least nine newly bereaved. We must begin to address the toll.
View Blog Post
Huzzah! My New Book Cover!
Here she is!! The cover of my new book, Listen, World!: How the Intrepid Elsie Robinson Became America’s Most-Read Woman. The book comes out September 27, 2022.
View Blog Post
Opinion: Dr. Ruth taught us not only about sex but also chosen family
Dr. Ruth, the trailblazing sex therapist, spent a lifetime of creating something from nothing, including a family to call her own. Continue Reading
View Blog PostDr. Ruth Saved People’s Sex Lives. Now She Wants to Cure Loneliness.
Taking the lessons of pandemic isolation — and her adolescent diary — Dr. Ruth Westheimer, 95, decided she should be New York’s Loneliness Ambassador. And so she is. Continue Reading
View Blog PostLong After ‘Sexually Speaking,’ Dr. Ruth Taught Me About Friendship
Even when she was talking about sex on her late-night radio show, Dr. Ruth Westheimer was focused on human connections. Continue Reading
View Blog PostTop Sex Professor Looking for Love: A world-renowned expert on human sexuality, celebrated for his expertise in intimacy and connection, finds himself navigating the tender and uncharted territory of dating after loss
Want to have great sex? For world-renowned human sexuality professor Dr. William Yarber, now in his 41st year of teaching at Indiana University, there’s no big secret. Continue Reading
View Blog Post