In the weeks and months after my father died, “How are you?” became my least favorite question. It was always benign and well-intentioned, but it also inevitably reminded me that I felt like shit. I’d rather have given a gruesome blow-by-blow account of how my father died than talk about how I felt. But talking—or,…
Lesson: Don’t go to the club without making sure you’ve insured all your valuables. Or, don’t bring items you need to insure to the club.
When Joe and I adopted Cheddar, a scared, three-year-old blonde terrier mutt who looked like a small, fat, elderly lion, I was excited to have our first shared responsibility. It was a first step toward a long life of joining forces and making real, living things happier and healthier and stronger than they would…
This Father’s Day, as with every Father’s Day, Facebook is going to become a cascade of carefully chosen, lovingly captioned dad photos. Many will be painted over with the static of age. A “dad bod” joke or two will worm its way in. And several posts will inevitably be dedicated to those dads that have passed, who…
Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg has written a pretty extraordinary Facebook note about observing the first 30 days following her husband David’s sudden death. In Jewish tradition, that 30-day period is known as sheloshim. Sandberg observes, “I have lived thirty years in these thirty days. I am thirty years sadder. I feel…
People are comfortable sharing almost any kind of news on Facebook these days—from "I am so wasted right now" (good to know, bro) to "My dog/father/hairstylist/favorite physicist died today"—but there's one area that remains complicated, difficult to navigate Facebook territory: miscarriages.
Remember when you were born, you got that memo that all girls get that outlines the rules of how we must behave, like how we all have to be obsessed with shoes and we have to be scared of spiders? Then you probably remember rule #36, on the subject of chocolate. It dictates that we're all required to ooh and ahh at…
Anyone who's ever watched Dr. Oz at work knows that he is a hack of the first order. He'll happily push whatever magical berry or miracle elixir will pay him, passing it off as essential to keep you from dying—or worse, getting fat. He's a women's magazine with a mouth. So we were not shocked when a tipster alerted us…
When someone you know has a miscarriage, it can be hard to know what to say. We have some tips for responding sensitively in this difficult situation.
Ana Renteria saw a billboard advertising 1-800-Get-Thin. Ten days after her operation, she died. The saddest part? A little digging reveals lots of shady details about the place where Renteria had her surgery.
