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.

My dad taught me everything. It's been fun walking in his footsteps. He played for his whole life and traveled the country and had a great career. He taught me everything about life and playing golf and how to act. Just everything. I learned so much from him and those days hanging around the driving range.

Remarkable contributions are typically spawned by a passionate commitment to transcendent values such as beauty, truth, wisdom, justice, charity, fidelity, joy, courage and honor.

The only real life is the collective life of the race; individual life has no existence except as an abstraction.

Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.