Trust Your Gut How to Tell If Someone Close to You is Suffering from Addiction The all-important question this raises is how to determine if someone close to you is using or suffering from addiction.  Most of us know by now that addiction is a disease and, tragically, that it can be a terminal one. Like any serious disease, catching addiction early in its progression can head off its most devastating effects and help the person suffering from it get healthy. While this might seem like an enormously complicated, even intimidating challenge, the truth is three simple steps can help
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Happy Holidays? What are the grieving to do at this time of year?  Every feeling is magnified during the holidays.  Emotions swing from being able to make it through, to no I can’t do it. When I look at this photo it makes me happy.  The family all together celebrating each other and loving traditions, to how I feel to have Jack’s seat empty.  I am so sad, and all I can do is share my suffering so others know they are not alone. It is a desperate feeling, this grief. I am including the link to an editorial piece I
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Stand in your truth   “She invited me, when Jack was struggling, to a prayer breakfast in Norwalk.  The speaker was a man named Gary Mendell.  He began the organization Shatterproof after his son died, gripped by addiction, after he was one year clean.  I listened and ate breakfast, but didn’t grasp that this was where Jack was headed.  I should have been more attentive.”   Dear Jack, a love letter I was kindly asked to write a blog for Shatterproof, I jumped at the chance.  After completing Jack and my book, Dear Jack, a love letter I was thinking, what
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What the F@#!K While writing my book Dear Jack, a love letter, I used my own style of writing, which is the way I speak. There is no fan fare, my vocabulary is average, my descriptions are perhaps not as flowery and refined as an experienced writer/author. So, I just wrote like me, problem is I swear a lot! When my editor read her first pass, it was obvious she didn’t think it was necessary to swear throughout the book in every chapter, sometimes in every paragraph. I have come to a place where I have no filter. I say
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“April 1, 2015. It was a day like any other. Standing at my kitchen counter, I was making my coffee, breakfast underway for Grace. “Five more minutes,” she said. She always wants five more minutes to sleep.” “The phone rings. I hate the phone, it scares me.” Dear Jack, a love letter. April 1, 2018. This is a day like any other. Three years since Jack’s death and everyday feels the same. Waking up to the thought that I have lost my son. All my fears have been realized, now I’m not afraid of anything. My regret and grief is part
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  “With Kali energy, I lifted Jack into the front seat. That’s what it had to be. Jack was two hundred and twenty pounds, and I lifted him into the car. He was so messed up. He couldn’t walk. I didn’t know what to do. I was distraught. I drove him home.” Dear Jack, a love letter. Depicted in statue and illustration, Kali is dark blue or black. She is a fierce force of nature. She holds the bloody head of a demon in one hand while the other holds her knife. She is stepping on Shiva lying in a
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regret |rəˈɡret| verb (regrets, regretting, regretted) feel sad, repentant, or disappointed over (something that has happened or been done, especially a loss or missed opportunity) Certainly grief is the deepest emotion I thought. It cannot be described. It is like pain but it has no physical origin. If there was, perhaps it could be surgically removed, cut out for a minute of relief. But no, we have to live with it and there is no relief. One would think it is the absolute worst emotion to bear. In fact, it’s not. Regret is worse. Through the practice of yoga and meditation
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“And when we go back to the sea, whether it is to sail or to watch – we are going back from whence we came.” John F. Kennedy I know for certain that I need to be in the presence of water. I have lived by the water where I raised my family across the street from the Long Island Sound for thirty years. I now live on Martha’s Vineyard, an island surrounded by water. Ocean, sounds, rivers, streams and ponds the presence of water is everywhere. Water is calming, it helps ground me. Walking on the beach toes in
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I’ve Got Your Back I have found myself in areas so foreign to me. I decided to chronicle my and Jack’s life in a book, Dear Jack, that releases hopefully, April 1.  April 1 is significant as it will be three years since my twenty one year old son, Jack, died from an overdose. Our lives hurled into grief and desperation. Unfortunately, this is not unfamiliar. The publishing industry is foreign to me, rights, copyrights, optioning the book, all of this terminology that I never used. I would have been happy to take this manuscript and keep it to myself.
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Alone we are a drop, together an ocean. Ryunosuke Satoro There is so much to stand up for, to fight for. It is different for all of us.   What is it that will push us from our comfort zone, to rise up and make a difference? The causes go on and on. Fighting for health reform, rising up against addiction and its stigma, fighting for gun control, standing up against bullying, the good fight against global warming, no GMOs, equality in the work place, #nomore #metoo. Well, alone we are only one drop. But every drop counts! How do we unite
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