The five stages - denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance - are a part of the framework that makes up our learning to live with the one we lost. They are tools to help us frame and identify what we may be feeling. But they are not stops on some linear timeline in grief.

Dying is something we human beings do continuously, not just at the end of our physical lives on this earth.

According to my parents, I was supposed to have been a nice, churchgoing Swiss housewife. Instead I ended up an opinionated psychiatrist, author and lecturer in the American Southwest, who communicates with spirits from a world that I believe is far more loving and glorious than our own.

The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of those depths.

How can we condemn those who are truly blinded by evil? We can't. We shouldn't. How do we bring about conversion of those living in blindness? By love. By truth in charity. By offering forgiveness. By offering mercy. With prayer.

My first experience on public radio still ranks among the most embarrassing episodes of my relatively short life.

My own life is wonderful, but if I had to live the life of someone else, I'd gladly choose that of Julia Child or Dr. Seuss: two outrageously original people, each of whom fashioned an idiosyncratic wisdom, passion for life, and sense of humor into an art form that anyone and everyone could savor.

It is not about finding a work-life balance, but, rather, it's about work-life integration. I've learned to integrate my work and life so that the two exist as harmoniously as possible and priorities can be set.