At 9:52 tonight my dog's heart stopped ( Read more... )

A couple of weeks ago, I caught an episode of "How It's Made" on television and they were making coffins. It showed how the wood was selected and then hand-carved to make the edges round and then specially crafted so the top was in two pieces and could open halfway for viewing. It showed how wood shavings were packed in the bottom before the satin ( Read more... )

It sounds odd, but death caught me by surprise today. In an age of modern medicine the whole, "one minute she was here, the next she was gone" concept seems to be more and more a thing of the past ( Read more... )

My dog will be 14 on Halloween. He is deaf, blind (we think because he walks into walls) and today, we found out he needs a hip replacement ( Read more... )

I have often heard about people having "near death experiences". After a critical incident many years ago, my mother had one and swears to this day that she temporarily passed to "the other side" and was sent back ( Read more... )

For the second time in less than a month, I found myself at a funeral. But for the first time in my life, I didn't know the person who lay in the casket before me. I did not cry. I did not cling to those around me for comfort ( Read more... )

It’s amazing how tenuous life is. We take for granted the fact that we go to sleep and wake up ( Read more... )

As a single person, I think one of the scariest things is fearing something going wrong and having no one near you to assist. On Sunday, I was out working in my yard and this white Suburban comes tearing around the corner and jumps the curb. There are small children in the neighborhood and so to see someone driving so carelessly was cause for ( Read more... )

When I was in the sixth grade, I attended an open-concept school. This meant that the school was designed like a bicycle spoke, with no doors and moveable walls. In the center of the spoke stood the library, and shooting out from it in all directions, were classrooms housing students in all subjects, in all grade levels. There were no desks, only ( Read more... )

Over the last twelve years, I have lost ten students. Some were victims of gang warfare, others suicide, murder, war or car accidents. If I think long enough, I can mentally bring up a picture of all of them, as I had them in my class. Except one ( Read more... )