I didn't fully realize it at the time, but the goal of my life was profoundly molded by this experience - to help produce, in the next generation, more Mother Teresas and less Hitlers.

The five stages - denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance - are a part of the framework that makes up our learning to live with the one we lost. They are tools to help us frame and identify what we may be feeling. But they are not stops on some linear timeline in grief.

There is no problem that is not actually a gift.

Should you shield the canyons from the windstorms you would never see the true beauty of their carvings.

If we could see that everything, even tragedy, is a gift in diguise, we would then find the best way to nourish the soul.

I've told my children that when I die, to release balloons in the sky to celebrate that I graduated. For me, death is a graduation.

We run after values that, at death, become zero. At the end of your life, nobody asks you how many degrees you have, or how many mansions you built, or how many Rolls Royces you could afford. That's what dying patients teach you.