Crossroads

A year ago today, Debbie and I became first-time grandparents to Sydney Reagan Streett. Some of you met our daughter, Carolyn, through the article for GriefPerspectives she wrote several weeks later as she reflected on the grief of saying goodbye to her corporate career as she transitioned to the role she has loved: full time wife and mom. Today, on Sydney's first birthday, Carolyn has reflected again on the amazing changes this year has brought. Since it made me cry to read it, I thought I would share it with all of you (with her permission, of course). The days go slow, but the years go fast. The sudden onset and escalation of preeclampsia that brought Sydney a month early, a year ago today, was not part of the plan. I’m forever grateful we had that extra month, though, because time is already flying. Nothing could’ve prepared us for the adventure that started a year and 30 hours ago. Nothing could’ve prepared us for the endless nights—or the endless laughter. Nothing cou

Last spring when the board of the Association for Death Education & Counseling met just before our annual conference in Atlanta, my friend and colleague Louis Gamino, ADEC president last year had arranged for our board to visit the King Center . It was a moving, poignant afternoon. Having grown up in the deeply divided and segregated south of the 1960s, the visit to the King Center rekindled some emotions long buried. Some of us stood in the rain in front of Dr. & Mrs. King's tomb. One stirring moment for many of us came as we sat together in the old Ebenezer Baptist Church where over the PA system, docents regularly replay the audiotape of the last sermon Martin Luther King preached in that church just weeks before his death. It was the same sermon--one in which he retold how he hoped he would be remembered, almost as if foretelling his death just weeks away--that Mrs. King had replayed at his Palm Sunday with friends funeral. The following Sunday morning, a few of us fro