On April 1, my daughter Maya went skiing in the Sierra Nevada mountains. She was 19, home on spring break from community college. She went to a resort outside of Truckee with her friends for a day of fun. It was 1992. When she arrived home early that evening, I had...
I've discovered that love trumps grief. Today is the anniversary of my daughter Maya's death 31 years ago. What sustains me in moments of grief is “love in the trenches,” the kind that demands fortitude and commitment – not the easy breezy romantic ideal. Just as the...
What I know is that love overcomes grief. It will be 30 years since my daughter Maya was declared brain dead on April 6, 1992. She was only 19 then. This is the year she would have turned 50. How mind blowing is that? What keeps me going is “love in the trenches,” the...
Maya’s blond pageboy gleamed in the early October light when she came bounding into our apartment. She was about to turn 19, at the beginning of her sophomore year in 1991 at Santa Barbara City College. She had come home for her birthday. She was on fire with her love...
“When we focus on our gratitude, the tide of disappointment goes out and the tide of love rushes in.” Coined by Kristin Armstrong of the Happiness Project at UC Berkeley, this aphorism captures the power of appreciation. If you’ve ever kept a gratitude journal or...
Mass killings are happening at such an alarming rate that most of us can’t even remember when – or why – the most recent killing spree filled our Twitter feeds or our TV screens. Grieving faces, flowers and candles left on street corners, and empty rhetoric about...
“Don’t worry about anything – or anyone,” my grandmother said, and thumped her cane emphatically, underlining her words. She was speaking from the “other side,” a world where I could not hear her directly, but a gifted psychic could translate her words to me. I don’t...
Maya began drinking young - she was binge drinking by the age of 15 at weekend house parties in Walnut Creek. I was a young, naive, overstretched single mom with no concept of the party culture in the wealthy suburbs of Contra Costa County where we lived in the late...
On this day 46 years ago I gave birth to a baby girl. We named her Maya. She arrived three weeks early so she was was tiny, just 5 lbs. 4 oz. For the rest of her life, Maya was in a hurry. Friends called her "Barbie" because of her white-blonde hair. She had dark...
I don't need research studies to prove the healing power of keeping a journal. My journal was my lifeline during the most difficult years of my life. On April 2, 1992 I got the call every mother dreads. My nineteen-year-old daughter Maya had fallen from a horse and...