Today is the first yartzeit (anniversary of the Hebrew date of one’s death) of a beloved teacher, mentor, writer, reluctant modern prophet and a unique voice for humanity that can’t be replaced. It’s the first yartzeit of Professor Elie Wiesel of blessed memory. Our hearts are aching today. Last night I was privileged to participate…
The headline on a recent Forward interview with Sheryl Sandberg asks if Sandberg can help Americans learn to grieve. Sandberg has certainly done all of us a great service by opening up a conversation about the way American do –- and don’t –- deal with death, dying and grief. In the essay that follows this…
Sheryl Sandberg may be the most famous widow in America right now. Before her husband, Dave Goldberg, died suddenly two years ago, she was already famous as the second-in-command of Facebook, the best-selling author of “Lean In” and a globe-trotting speaker and influencer — who did all this while raising two children in an equitable…
Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg has published her latest book, “Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy.” Structured as part memoir and part how-to, Sandberg describes her and her family’s efforts to overcome her husband Dave Goldberg’s unexpected death last year and how people can cope with loss and help bereaved friends. In a…
When life is full of ease, spirituality is like cotton candy: fluffy, airy and unserious. It’s easy to mock the privileged, entitled yuppies in their yoga clothes, or the perpetually processing privileged New Agers at their endless, fruitless seminars. Not to mention the reactionary flocks in churches and synagogues, with their absurd, prescientific beliefs. And…
Scanning her inbox last fall, Becky Benson happened upon an unusual request from a pregnant friend, Emily Rapp: Would she mind if Rapp gave the baby a middle name to honor Benson’s younger daughter, Elliott? If the proposition sounded weird to her, the email went on, she should just feel free to forget it. “I…
In her essay “The Love of My Life,” Cheryl Strayed writes about losing her mother when she was a young woman, and returning to college to tell peers she had gone to Mexico over spring break. She wished to protect others from her own deep pain. Only later did she realize how unnatural this modern…
● The Guardians: An Elegy By Sarah Manguso Picador, 104 pages, $20. American Jewish author Sarah Manguso’s “The Guardians: An Elegy” is a strip map of a memoir about Manguso’s grief at the suicide of a close friend, a klezmer musician who suffered from recurring psychosis. Lean, elliptical and beautifully written, her book, recently released…
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