My grandmother, Florence Wolff Landesman, would have turned 100 on October 1. Unfortunately, she passed away this year, eight months shy of becoming a centenarian. As I sat down to read the news online that day, with my grandmother in my thoughts, various reports reminded me that October 1 marks the beginning of Breast Cancer Awareness Month. One article I came across featured Robin Steinberger, a young mom whose breast cancer battle included having to tell her five-year-old daughter that she was “still her mommy, with or without hair.” As I read......
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Inspiring People, News & Politics, Wisdom Warehouse |
August 24, 2015
Heroics on a Train Yield Lessons in Courage
What’s your definition of a hero? Of course, there are lots of ways to describe heroes and acts of heroism, but today, three names really stand out: Stone, Sadler and Skarlatos. Like so many others, I watched the recent media reports as Spencer Stone, Anthony Sadler and Alek Skarlatos described taking down a heavily armed gunman with help from other passengers (Chris Norman of the U.K. and Mark Moogalian of France) aboard a train full of people headed from Amsterdam to Paris. All three young Americans were remarkably modest and unassuming in......
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How do you live well? And when the times comes, how do you die well? There is no single or simple answer to either of those questions, but there is real wisdom that can help us all to answer those questions better. This story in the New York Times and its accompanying video (see below) describe, with exquisite poignancy, different patients’ experiences in a long-term care hospital, i.e., a place where people may reside for years, but very few of whom will ever recover from the terminal diagnoses which brought them there.......
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I recently wrote about Palestinian professor Mohammed Dajani’s visit to Auschwitz with 27 of his students. On Holocaust Memorial Day 2014, Dajani spoke on “Breaking Holocaust Taboos in Palestinian Society” with some 100 faculty and students of Hebrew University-Hadassah Medical School. In his speech, he described how his feelings and ideas evolved from the day when a member of his family received medical treatment at Hadassah Hospital, not as an Arab but simply as a patient and human being. Dajani is the founder and director of Wasatiya, a movement to study and......
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