Welcome. I'm so glad you're here, and hope this space offers you something more than information—steadiness, reflection, and a sense that you're not alone in what you're facing.
It's not unusual for people to ask me how I have spent my career walking alongside people and communities as they endure and grow in the aftermath of painful and unexpected challenges — 9/11, Haiti, Hurricane Katrina, the COVID-19 pandemic. Through my clinical work, teaching, writing, and public speaking, I have tried to help others find language, stability, connection, and meaning when the ground shifts beneath them.
In January 2025, the Southern California wildfires brought that work to my own doorstep. Evacuating my home, witnessing the devastation of my community, and living with survivor's guilt asked something new of me. That year was further marked by significant personal and professional losses, and grief became a major part of this journey, deepening the questions I was already carrying about meaning, fragility, and presence.
Writers such as Vivek Murthy and Henri Nouwen, along with friends and colleagues, helped me move through that season of uncertainty with greater clarity and humility. In the process, I came to understand what it means to be a wounded healer — not as an abstraction, but from the inside out.
I have learned that stories and storytelling are essential to healing — a conviction that shaped my book Courageous Well-Being for Nurses. Recently, I have felt even more strongly how stories can help us live with trauma, uncertainty, and renewal. They continue to inform my clinical and educational work, my mentoring, and the writing I am doing now.
These days, I'm most drawn to work that allows for depth, reflection, and genuine connection — facilitating weekly support groups, leading webinars and seminars for those affected by fires and other disasters, developing educational materials, mentoring healthcare professionals, and writing about grief, mattering, and what helps us remain human in difficult times.
My work is grounded in years of education and practice.
· Graduate programs at Teachers College, Columbia University, and Rutgers University, and a doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania. I later returned to Columbia University School of Nursing faculty for fourteen years, twice named a Presidential Teaching Award Finalist
· Author of The Seasons of Grief: Helping Children Grow Through Loss and Courageous Well-Being for Nurses: Strategies for Renewal
· Faculty, International Trauma Studies Program; advisory board member, Families of September 11
· Co-Facilitator for the NJ-New Virtual Schwartz Rounds and Don’t Clock Out
· Fellow of the American Academy of Nursing
· Recipient, 2021 APNA Award for Excellence in Practice — APRN
I'm also volunteering to help my community rebuild after the fires — supporting an elementary school now operating out of trailers, donating my children's book collection, and helping another school with their T.R.E.E.A.M.s project, co-founded by Jane Goodall.
Even amid the devastation the fires brought to my community, the sun and the Pacific Ocean still offer me a sense of calm, awe and beauty — and I hold on to that, along with busy weekends watching swim meets and lacrosse games with my grandchildren.