Heartwood is about hope, resilience and finding strength. It’s a love letter from the soul of a social activist.

DM: What inspired you to write about death and dying?

When my earliest childhood friend was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer, I went on a journey to explore the meaning of loss and love. While she made the absolute most of her remaining time, living out the last year of her life, I became completely absorbed by questions like~ What happens to those of us who are still here, who are going about our day-to-day lives? Can we live our lives more fully knowing some day we will die? Can we too live with a more heightened sense of what matters most by taking on death as a teacher?

I discovered that wise people throughout time have advised us to live with the end in mind, from the Dalai Lama to the Prophet Muhammed. So I tested whether this wisdom that they pointed to could would uphold within the context of a modern life.

Ultimately, Heartwood is a book about truly living, fully acknowledging that we will die.

DM: What is your current state of mind?

Tender. As I approach the first year anniversary of my aunt’s death who was in a nursing home on lock-down at the height of the Covid pandemic. My goodbye with her was over the phone. I’m thinking about all the others around the world who had hard goodbyes like that…millions of them.

DM: What is your idea of perfect happiness?

Sauntering in an old-growth forest. Feeling the cool morning dew, knowing the fog will burn away as the day gets warmer. So visceral, so ever-changing. 

DM: What lesson do you wish everyone could acquire, long before the end?

I wish that everyone could experience deep, unconditional love from at least one other person. As the poet Hafiz said, “Even after all this time the sun never says to the earth, 'You owe me.' Look what happens with a love like that. It lights the whole sky.”

DM: What are you reading, what’s on your bedside table?

The Spiritual Emerson…next year I’m going to be teaching a workshop on The Visionary Spirituality of the American Transcendentalists with my favorite teacher from my seminary days.  We’re reading Thoreau and Emerson and Peabody and Fuller together. A way of bonding that helps take away from not being able to have coffee face-to-face and chat.

DM: What is one thing people never imagined about you?

In high school, I was literally the person who fainted at the sights and smells of illness. That put an end to my desire to become a doctor myself. But as time went on and I entered the so-called sandwich years, caring for my elderly parents and young children at once, I knew I was going to have to find a way around my queasiness. For all the thinking I had done about death in an abstract way, I was terrified of losing my parents someday. So I swallowed my fears—and, yes, my squeamishness over ailing bodies—and did the most counterintuitive thing I could do—volunteer on a dedicated hospice floor at one of the busiest public hospitals in the country, Bellevue Hospital. There I made hundreds of visits with patients and family members at the end of their lives.

DM: What book would you like to be buried with?

The 1000 Year-Old Linden Tree, a self-published book that my dad, with the help of my sister-in-law, pulled together about our family’s genealogy going back as far as they could find records. It’s named after the oldest tree growing in Germany. It only dawned on me after I wrote Heartwood, in which I talk about the metaphor of the tree’s heartwood, that I had been thinking of trees and family and connection in the same way my dad had.

DM: What is your exit plan? How would you like to die?

However it is that I die, what’s most important to me is that I’d like to be aware enough of my final moments. I don’t want to be in deep pain, but I’d really like to be conscious enough to experience my transition out of this lifetime into whatever is next.

DM: Do you have a favorite writer or book?

I love the spiritual writer Mirabai Starr. Her newest book, Wild Mercy: Living the Fierce and Tender Wisdom of the Women Mystics. For thousands of years, religion has been taught from the masculine point of view. Mirabai Starr is out to rebalance this!

DM: If you were to die and come back as a person or a thing, what would it be?

I’d be happy to sweep the floor of Rumi’s tomb in Konya, Turkey or at the Ghats in Varanasi, India.  Places imbued with spiritual energy.

DM: If heaven exists, what would you like to hear when you arrive at the Pearly Gates?

My friend Catharine DeLong is a harpist who is trained to play for those who are dying. I shadowed her when she played on the hospice floor where I volunteered. And when my father was dying, she put her harp in the back of a cab and crossed the George Washington Bridge to play for him and my family. I also asked her to play for my son’s bar mitzvah, so she does joyful celebrations too! In a heartbeat, I would opt to have Catharine play at the Pearly Gates (without jeopardizing her life, if she weren’t yet dead, of course! ;)

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Exit Interviews Are Edited for Clarity.