Stan Goldberg

When you can't let go

Whenever I hear about the importance of letting go of the past, I think about a conversation I had with my mother more than thirty years ago. She emigrated to the United States from Poland when she was six years...

Want enlightenment? Think Less, do more

When I gave a workshop on change in the San Francisco Bay Area, one participant told me that this was the tenth week-long workshop he attended in the past five years.“Why so many?” I asked.&ldquo...

How do you take care of a disagreeable person?

If you are not already a caregiver for someone with a chronic or terminal illness, statistics say you will be. It’s estimated that there are at least 45 million family caregivers in the United States and that number...

A dying man's question: A Turkish answer

I was reluctant to tell my new hospice patient in San Francisco that I would be traveling in Turkey for the next two weeks. Two weeks for me was a short amount of time. For him, it would most likely...

Reflections from New York, September 18th, 2001

“Daddy, please come,” my daughter said on September 11th. Together, we watched the towers fall. Me, from the safety of my San Francisco home. She, from an office building in Rockefeller Plaza, wondering if her friend survived...

Understanding Alzheimer's, clearing the air of harmful misconceptions

A friend of mine recently said to me, “When my friends learned I had Alzheimer’s, many looked at me as if I had some kind of contagious disease. Then, they just stopped calling or coming around. Don...

Shoot me, please: The right to die

He pleaded with me to shoot him and the request wasn’t figurative. He was my first patient as a hospice volunteer in San Francisco. That moment, eight years ago, still haunts me. Not because I was confronted with...

My Brain is Fried: Inside Chronic Illnesses

Many people believe that everyone lives in the same world. At an event, we all see, smell, taste, or touch the same things, and therefore, our experiences are identical.But when we crunch the information into something that goes beyond...

Caregivers: We're not Mother Teresa

I’d been a bedside hospice volunteer for more than five years in San Francisco; sitting with dying patients and their families once or twice a week for up to four continuous hours. Sometimes I stayed with patients overnight...

From Selma to Montgomery:A personal history

Within a few days, We'll be celebrating Black History Month in San Francisco and throughout the country. Most of the people who will be celebrating know the events of the civil rights movement in the 1960's...

Currently in Los Angeles