Quotes from Laurie Nadel

Producing obituaries is a way of creating a legacy to remember important people of our times and their contributions. No matter whose obituary it is, I look for something inspirational about each person.

Flip a coin. Life or death. Heads or tails. You never know.

If there's a takeaway from working here, it's an understand that, as bioorganisms, we are a walking time bomb programed for cellular self-destruction. Not if, when.

Lucid dreams often feel like this—as if you are observing yourself from a point over your shoulders-arm flexed, hands curving around the boom, breathing, in three dimensional silence.

Soul-to-soul contact sweeps through, like a tsunami, leaving in its wake just this: unconditional surrender and overwhelming gentleness.

Barely halfway back, exhaustion sets in. What if I don't make it? An edge of panic gets intercepted by a calmer inner voice: Look behind you.

A wide-angle view of sails sparkling white against a cobalt sky as light dances, silver on the water. Like art, it soothes the edge, allowing you to see something simple from a different perspective.

I took up windsurfing to explore my own courage.

Every misfortune is a blessing in disguise.

My former identity was lying around, somewhere, fragmented and buried, like shards from an earlier civilization.

Unraveling life lessons from just the past few years would take many more years. Lessons unlearned would pass with me, when I went through that door, to be completed in some future lifetime.

The human psyche is a self-correcting mechanism.

You won't find the Five Gifts on anyone's wish list but when your emotional tank is on empty, they will be there to help you replenish your energy.

We need to unlearn the habits of impatience and take stock of those beliefs about life that no longer hold true.

Humility helps us come to terms with what we cannot know. Patience takes the edge off when the hurt continues. Empathy is the gift that connects us with others. Forgiving ourselves for having such perfectly human reactions is harder than forgiving whatever caused them.

The three cycles of loss center on our sense of control, safety, and identity.

With the Five Gifts, we can solve our problems without shooting each other.

There is no such thing as "it can't happen here.

The unrealistic belief that we are somehow entitled to go through life unmoved by other people's suffering further limits our ability to cope with our own.

Humility—the first gift—can help us surrender to an event outside our control, one we couldn't prevent and was not our fault

Our capacity to disregard and discount viscerally painful experiences is so ingrained that we have come to believe that "moving forward" means not allowing ourselves to be moved at all.

It's impossible to predict how the heart heals or how long it is going to take.

Like breaking a leg, a serious injury to the psyche often gets us benched while the regular game of life goes on. It may seem strange that forgiving ourselves for having such perfectly human reactions is harder than forgiving whatever caused them.

Intuition is a gift, an inner power that you can turn to whenever you need it.