The older we get, the more meaningful and significant the opportunities and inherent power of being able to choose become. I have found that the loss of a loved one challenges the very nature of my capacity to choose. Miriam-Webster defines choice as, “the act of picking or deciding between two or more possib...

Ihate waiting! I have protested. I have asked to speak to the manager. I have even been known to make a scene and scream. Ask the folks at our local Humboldt Medical Eye Associates or the over-worked and underpaid people at our Walgreen’s Pharmacy. Because of my disdain for being kept waiting, I always arrive...

Some three days after my wife, Janet, died and my four-year stint as her carepartner ended, I — barely knowing who I was now — emailed my friend Mara to ask about dogs that might need adopting. Whoever I was now, or would soon discover I was, after 24-hour-aday carepartnering for Janet, I was reaching out for...

The title of my Ph.D. dissertation is “Transgressive Gender Performance — An Act of Personal and Cultural Transformation” (2013). The idea behind the research was that if I could get a group of heterosexual men to experience gender as something they do (perform) and not something they were, then they would be...

I don’t know who I am! For the first two weeks or so after Janet died, I felt like I was floating. Something in my mid-section kept me afloat — off the ground. I mean, I knew that in one reality I was walking, but in this new after-her-death reality, it was like my feet never touched the ground. I wasn’t walk...

In the coming year, I will turn 80 — a reality I sometimes find unfathomable. But given our national discourse, I find many of today’s realities unfathomable. What I find most troublesome however, is how I am coping with these realities. Among my circle of friends, concerns surrounding aging, death and dying ...