“Tony wears fucking espadrilles now!”, she said to me as the three of us huddled together at the after-party, her voice laden with humor and frustration, and sadness. Lydia Tenaglia and Chris Collins were the ones who put Anthony Bourdain on television. They were the ones who brought “No Reservations”…

Imagine being pushed into a pool. Perhaps a memory you have of childhood summers, that frozen moment in time when you are suspended between air and water. Between two places, the ground where control seemed possible and the absence of it where you learned it was not. Did you feel…

No one tells you what it’s like to put your dog down, to lay with your best friend as they take their last breath. No one tells you how it feels to go through the final years by their side, to watch their body weaken against their will. To run…

The beginning of the actual divorce long predated the beginning of the legal one. You could say it started when his business sank into oblivion, and like a determined sea captain refusing to abandon ship, he submerged with it. But really, the divorce began long before that. Starting his own…

Everything changed for Gabriela Reyes Fuchs the day she got that phone call from her Father. A physician who saved many lives during his long and successful career, now his own life was at stake. He had been diagnosed with Leukemia, and things didn’t look good. Gabriela hung up, and…

In my high school class, I was the only white O’Brien. My Aunt Judy had adopted seven children from Brazil many years earlier, two of whom were black Afro-Brazilians. When the teacher took attendance, she struggled to pronounce their names correctly. In our yearbook photos, they’re pictured surrounded by a…

She helped me survive with a new understanding of the world around us — The day I almost died, my dog was at my side. Now in her final stage of life, I pay tribute to her by sharing what she did as I lay dying, in hopes it helps others find meaning through these, and all, difficult times. Virginia changed my life. She…

“This is Major Tom to Ground Control I’m steppin’ through the door And I’m floating in the most peculiar way And the stars look very different today. For here am I sittin’ in a tin can Far above the world Planet earth is blue And there’s nothin’ I can do… …

It wasn’t until I almost died that I began to understand death. After surviving a massive pulmonary embolism that the E.R. physician described as “a miracle I’ll be talking about for the rest of my medical career”, an inexplicable switch flipped in my consciousness. …