The Woman who Made the Yellow Ribbon an International Symbol
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“I just wanted to give people something constructive to do,” Penelope Laingen said about her decision to tie a yellow ribbon around an oak tree in the yard of her Bethesda, Maryland home. It was December of 1979, a month after her husband, Bruce, and 51 others had been taken hostage at the American Embassy […]
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Understanding Funerals, Cremations, and Grief in 2021
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When the CDC issued “Practical Covid-19 Guidance for Funeral Directors” in late February, 2020, it was apparent that the world had reached an inflection point. Seemingly overnight, “business as usual” became “how we do business today and maybe tomorrow.” Dr. David Berendes of the CDC said that the purpose of the protocols was to “encourage alternative […]
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Facing the Uncertainties of Aging
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“Aging isn’t a battle, it’s a massacre,” Philip Roth wrote. “The inevitable onslaught that is the end of life…it’s the commonness that’s most wrenching, the registering once more of the fact of death that overwhelms everything.” True, physical diminishment is an inescapable element of aging — but research indicates that growing old is […]
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Exploring the Nature of Evil: The Nazis and the Inkblots
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In August of 1945, Major Douglas Kelley secured the prize assignment for a psychiatrist in post-World War II Europe. The United States Army selected him to evaluate the mental status of the Nazis awaiting war crime trials. These were the highest ranking German commanders who had been captured alive, a coterie who oversaw the worst atrocities in human […]
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The Denial of Death: Why we run from the inevitable
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The chief embalmer of a busy funeral home recently remarked, “No matter how often I do this procedure, I am always struck by how we end up here on the table by ourselves. We are in a single file line, we all die alone.” The cornerstone of human existence is its temporal nature. “None of […]
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