If you tell your own story to your children - that includes your positive moments and your negative moments, and how you overcame them - you give your children the skills and the confidence they need to feel like they can overcome some hardship that they've felt.

After a while, a surprising theme emerged. The single most important thing you can do for your family may be the simplest of all: Develop a strong family narrative.

The way to tell a really big story, I think, is to tell a really small story.

I had always believed that I left a bit of me wherever I went. I also believed that I took a bit of every place with me.

Cancer is a passport to intimacy. It is an invitation, maybe even a mandate, to enter the most vital arenas of human life, the most sensitive and the most frightening, the ones that we never want to go to - but when we do go there, we feel incredibly transformed.

I'm a fifth generation Jew from the South, and I would say that I felt this connection to my religion, but it wasn't a spiritual connection.

One day, my daughter Tybee came to me, and she said, ‘I have so much love for you in my body, Daddy, I can’t stop giving you hugs and kisses. And when I have no more love left, I just drink milk, because that’s where love comes from.’