I wish  you and yours a merry Christmas

I wish and yours a merry Christmas ..........

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  Finding peace in the midst of uncertainty

  
  

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A recurrent theme in the blog comments is loss. Some people are dealing with the loss of loved ones or the loss of relationships. Others deal with the loss of a dream. What do these have in common?

Need more help?

If the stress in your life is more than you can cope with, get help right away. National Suicide Prevention Lifeline 1-800-273-TALK (8255) Go to the nearest hospital or emergency room Call your physician, health provider or clergy National Alliance on Mental Illness www.nami.org 1-800-950-NAMI (6264)

Philosophers, theologians and scientists have struggled with these issues for a thousand years. As palliative care and oncology specialists, my colleagues and I witness the loss of health and the loss of vitality every day. One reader commented that things never get back to "normal" after a loss, and that we are in a state of constant change and recalibration.

As we reflect on our lives, it's clear that we do have resilience. We can bounce back from adversity.  If we couldn't, we wouldn't be here.

So we must accept that life is not fair. Bad things do happen to good people. But we still need to take care of ourselves and recognize that we are not alone. There are others to hold our hands and walk with us as we stumble through the darkest days.

I'm reminded of a scene from a movie. It took place in a grimy pub in Liverpool, England, in the early part of the 1800s. In one corner of the pub were several dozen seamen who were morose, grumbling at the thought of another voyage. On the other side of the pub were the captain and his officers who were having a wonderful evening together, seemingly indifferent to the threats and the dangers that lay ahead. So what was the difference?

The difference is simply that the officers accepted the element of uncertainly. They recognized that although they had no control over the weather or the wind, they could control their attitude.

So it is with all of us. When faced with adversity, we can whine and wallow in our misfortune. Or we can be grateful for what we have and try to find peace and serenity even in the face of uncertainty.

5-Yr Old Brought Food to Starved 4-Yr Old Sister’s Funeral “So She Can Eat in Heaven

“Monster mom” Carlotta Brett-Pierce was just sent to prison for 32 years for one of the most heinous crimes imaginable.   She was given 32-years-to-life after her four-year old daughter Marchella died after being beaten and starved to death.   The little girl was covered in bruises and open wounds and she weighed only 19 pounds when police picked her up.

The little girl was drugged, beaten and tied to her bed at the time of her death.  The little girl was force fed allergy pills and beaten in front of her brother, Tymel.  When the boy came to his sister’s funeral, he brought food, so that his baby sister “can eat in heaven.”

The boy is now deeply traumatized by what he saw his sister go through.  He is now 7 years old.

The prosecutor in the case, Jacqueline Kagan said, “he brought with him food because he knew she didn’t get enough. And he told his foster mother, ‘I hope that she gets enough food and water in heaven,’”

The trial lasted a month, and ended on May 9.  The jury only deliberated for one hour before sending the mother to prison.   Calotta Brett-Pierce was given 32 years to life, and her mother Loretta was given up to 15 years for manslaughter.

The mother was defiant to the end, refusing to take responsibility for what happened to her child.

“I heard what you said,” she told the judge.

Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Patricia DiMango said to the mother: “This child, at her tender age, was subjected to a h**l that no one should have to endure.  What kind of person could do this to a child, let alone their own child?”  she asked.

Brett-Pierce’s attorneys argued that the mother had a sick child that she didn’t know how to care for.  But prosecutors got her to admit that in all those years of her daughter being sick, the mother never took her to the pediatrician.

The mother denied referring to her daughter as “that b*tch” during jailhouse phone conversations, instead referring to her as “my baby.”  But there was a recorded call during which the mother said, “That b*tch wasn’t that f*cking light.”

Child Protective Services got involved with the family when the mother gave birth to a boy who tested positive for drugs.   Two social workers have also been charged with criminally negligent homicide for failing to prevent the little girl’s death.

Love

9 Ways to Love Yourself

The focus of my work is helping people to stop abandoning themselves and learn to love themselves. One of most common statements I hear from my clients, as well as from my workshop and intensive participants and from members of my website, is, "I don't know how to love myself."

Of course they don't -- they had no role models for loving themselves. Few of us had parents who role modeled personal responsibility for their own well-being.

Yet often when I ask these same people what a child needs to feel loved, they have no problem articulating what this would look like. They may even have children to whom they are loving parents but can't conceive of what it would look like to love themselves -- to love their inner child.

Below are nine actions that, if they come from a genuine place in your heart, will make you feel very loved.

1. Listen within to your own feelings.

Many people easily tune into others' feelings yet have no idea what they feel. If you ignore a child's feelings, that child will feel unloved. Ignoring your own feelings has the same result -- your inner child feels rejected, abandoned and unloved by you.

2. Be compassionate with your feelings.

If you judge your feelings, telling yourself you are wrong for having them, your inner child will feel rejected and abandoned by you. If you are kind, gentle, tender, understanding and accepting of your feelings, your inner child will feel loved by you.

3. Open to learning about what your feelings are telling you.

Just as an actual child feels loved when you are compassionately interested in why he or she is hurting, your inner child will feel loved when you explore what your feelings are telling you. All feelings are informational. Just as physical pain alerts you to a problem that needs attention, so does emotional pain. Painful feelings are telling you that you are abandoning yourself, or that someone is being unloving to you, or to themselves or to others, or that a situation is not good for you. Compassionately attending to your feelings, learning what they are telling you, and then taking action to remedy the situation, will make you feel loved. 4. Create a solid connection with a spiritual source of love, wisdom and comfort.

Love is not a feeling we generate from our mind. It comes from the heart when our heart is open to our source of love. When you open to learning with your higher power about loving yourself and others, love flows into your heart and you feel loved. 5. Choose to be around loving people.

We don't always have a choice -- such as in work relationships -- but when we do have a choice -- such as in personal relationships -- choosing to be around caring, supportive and accepting people will make you feel loved. If, when you have a choice, you consistently engage with unkind, judgmental or abusive people, the message you are sending to yourself is that you are not worth loving. 6. Take loving actions for yourself around others.

When you are around someone who is being unkind, speak up for yourself, letting the person know that you don't like being treated that way, and then either open to learning about what is going on, or lovingly disengage from the interaction. Allowing others to treat you badly sends a message to your inner child that he or she is not worth loving.

7. Take care of your body, your time, your space and your finances.

You will feel loved and lovable when you feed yourself healthy food, and get exercise and sleep. When you ignore your health, you are giving yourself the message that you are not worth loving.

If you are always late and disorganized regarding your time and your space, again you are giving yourself the message that you are not worth taking care of. When you respect your own and others' time and space, you are letting yourself know that you are worth it.

When you overspend, putting yourself in unnecessary debt, you are not taking loving care of yourself, and your inner child will feel scared, alone and unloved. Just as an actual child needs to feel safe regarding the necessities of life, your inner child needs to feel the same way.

8. Find work you love

Since work takes up a big part of your day, finding or creating work that fulfills you is vitally important. If you continue to force yourself to stay at jobs you hate, the message to yourself is that you are not worth doing whatever it is you need to do, to create a fulfilling work life.

9. Create balance

All work and no play, or all play and no work, creates inner anxiety rather than inner peace. We need balance in our life to feel loved and lovable. We need time to work and time to rest and rejuvenate. We also need time to nurture our body and soul through activities that bring us joy.

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Expecting others to make you feel loved while you are abandoning yourself will never lead to feeling loved and lovable. When you learn to take responsibility for yourself emotionally, physically, financially, spiritually, organizationally and relationally, then you will feel loved and lovable. Taking responsibility for loving yourself fills your heart with love, which you can then share with others.

Sharing love is the most fulfilling experience in life, but you need to be filled with love in order to have love to share. Learning to love yourself is what fills you with love.

Margaret Paul, Ph.D. is a relationship expert, best-selling author, and co-creator of the powerful Inner Bonding® self-healing process, recommended by actress Lindsay Wagner and singer Alanis Morissette, and featured on Oprah. To begin learning how to love and connect with yourself so that you can connect with others, take advantage of our free Inner Bonding eCourse, and join Dr. Margaret Paul for her 30-Day at-home Course: "Love Yourself: An Inner Bonding Experience to Heal Anxiety, Depression, Shame, Addictions and Relationships." Discover SelfQuest®, a transformational self-healing/conflict resolution computer program. Phone or Skype sessions with Dr. Margaret Paul.

Connect with Margaret onFacebook: Inner Bonding, andFacebook: SelfQuest.

Dying girl's wish granted by 10,000 carolers

10,000 carolers respond to girl's wish

 - Eight-year-old Laney Brown will never see Christmas again. Her doctors say leukemia will take her soon.
Laney loves music. Loves to dance, loves Taylor Swift, loves Christmas carols.
As her dying wishes, she asked to meet the country superstar and for some people to come by her house for a night of caroling, CNN affiliate WFMZ reported.
On Friday -- her birthday -- Laney and Swift video chatted through FaceTime, a software application that allows callers to see each other on Apple products.
Saturday night the singers came. At first it was hundreds of people, then thousands. Then it was 10,000.
They came to her home in West Reading, Pennsylvania, and even though she was too weak to go to the window, she heard the wonderful music.
"I can hear you now!!! Love you!" she said through a photo her family posted to a Team Laney Facebook page showing the girl, two thumbs up despite a breathing mask, lying in bed.
Laney was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia seven months ago. Last week doctors told her family that she has 70% cancer cells in her blood. She came home from the hospital on Thursday and said she wanted to hear Christmas carols.
So two days later people came from all over. Her dance team was there to honor her through one last number. Even Santa showed up.
Many of them held back tears.

"I can't even express how I feel," Krysta Rebe, who has a daughter Laney's age, told WFMZ.
It was only an hour of singing, but it lifted the spirits of everyone who jammed the block outside the Browns' home.
On Facebook one woman wrote that she had seen and taken part in a miracle.
"As much as I want that miracle to be saving the life of an 8-year-old little girl, Laney, the miracle was an 8-year-old little girl teaching an entire community, town, city and the whole country the true meaning of Christmas," Marianne Franken wrote.
Laney's parents issued a statement Thursday thanking the public for its support and asking for privacy in the difficult days ahead.

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Beautiful

Two years after her death, woman gives
family wonderful .....,.....A woman who died more than two years ago
has given her family an incredible post-humous Christmas gift. Brenda Schmitz, wife and mother of four,
passed away in September 2011 after a battle
with ovarian cancer. She was 46. A month before she died, Schmitz wrote a letter
addressed to a Des Moines, Iowa, radio station
and instructed a friend to wait to mail it until her
husband, David, had fallen in love again. The station, Star 102.5, invited David, who
recently got engaged, into the studio last week
to share the letter with him. “When you are in receipt of this letter, I will have
already lost my battle to ovarian cancer,”
Brenda wrote in the letter. “I am writing this
letter to be sent to you by a dear friend who has
instructions to do so when it was the time. I had
to type this because I can hardly type anymore because of my shakiness. I told her once my
loving husband David had moved on in his life
and had met someone to share his life with
again, to mail this letter to all of you at the
station.” "As I was thinking about my last months on
earth," she continued, "I told David my wishes
after I was gone that I believed he'd follow
through with the attitude and courage I know he
possesses, what a great husband and father he
is. I know all of this is extremely hard on him. He is the one making the best decisions from
here on out for my family and ultimately finding
a caring and compassionate woman in time to
help raise the boys. She must be quite a lady." Every year, the radio station solicits Christmas
wish letters from listeners, picks the best and,
with the help of sponsors, grants them. Brenda's first wish for "David's new lifelong
partner" was "a day, or better yet, a week of
pampering, in all aspects of her life. ... She
deserves it." "Thank you," she added. "I love you, whoever
you are." Brenda also asked for a "magical trip" for the
family of 8, and a "night out full of drinks, food
and fun" for her cancer doctors at Mercy
Medical Hospital. Local businesses chipped in to help the station
grant all of Brenda's wishes, including the trip —
a four-day vacation in Disney World. "In more than 20 years of granting Christmas
wishes, we’ve never received a wish quite like
the one we received from Brenda Schmitz," the station wrote on its website. “There wasn’t a dry eye in the room when we
got [the letter]," station manager Scott Allen told the Des Moines Register. “It’s not surprising," David said of his wife's
posthumous surprise. "The last year and a half
she’s shown so many signs that she’s [here]."

Father drops toddler from high-rise, jumps to his death

A man reportedly tossed a toddler from a high-rise then jumped. Picture: Warzer Jaff.

A FATHER tossed his toddler from a 14th floor window of a Manhattan high-rise apartment building and then jumped - killing them both, law enforcement sources said.

The unidentified 35-year-old dropped his 4-year-old child then leapt from an open window just after noon at the 52-story South Park Tower at 124 W. 60th Street. They both landed on the roof of John Jay College next door.

Police say the man was pronounced dead at the scene. The child was taken to the hospital, and pronounced dead there.

The building where the incident occurred. Picture: Google

A witness said the boy was wearing Christmas pyjamas.

"They were pumping his chest and working on him, and nothing," said Luis Ortiz, who was at St. Luke's Roosevelt Hospital, a block away from the scene, when paramedics rushed him in.

"You could tell he was slipping away. They said the father was up there, but they didn't bring anyone else in. It was just heartbreaking. I have two kids of my own. They tried to do the best they could."

A source said the boy and his father did not live in the building.

Lunatic

Johannesburg — A Mozambican Airlines
captain had a "clear intention" to crash an
airplane that went down in Namibia killing 33
at the end of November, according to a
preliminary investigation reported Saturday. Flight recorders showed flight TM470 went down on
November 29 while Captain Herminio dos Santos
Fernandes manipulated the Embraer 190's autopilot in a
way which "denotes a clear intention" to bring the plane
down, said Mozambican Civil Aviation Institute (IACM)
head Joao Abreu. "The reason for all these actions is unknown and the
investigation continues," said Abreu. The plane went down in torrential rains in the swamps of
Namibia's Bwabwata National Park on November 29,
killing its six crew and 27 passengers. It was flying from the Mozambican capital Maputo to
Luanda in Angola. Abreu told a news conference that Dos Santos
Fernandes locked himself inside the cockpit, ignored
warning signals and did not allow his co-pilot back in
moments before the Embraer 190 hit the ground. "During these actions you can hear low and high-
intensity alarm signals and repeated beating against the
door with demands to come into the cockpit," he was
quoted as saying by state news agency AIM. The altitude was manually changed three times from
38,000 feet to 592 feet -- below ground level -- and the
aircraft's speed was also changed manually, according to
the preliminary report. Airbrake parameters showed the spoilers, aerodynamic
resistance plates on the wings, were deployed and held
in that position until the end of the recordings, which
proved the throttle was manually controlled. "The plane fell with the pilot alert and the reasons which
may have given rise to this behaviour are unknown. At
the time, the co-pilot had left the cockpit and was absent
while everything happened," said Abreu. The black boxes retrieved from the crash site were
analysed at the US National Transport Safety Board in
Washington. '''Newest plane in fleet
''' These indicated the aircraft was operating at normal
cruising altitude, and had good communications with
the control tower in the Botswana capital Gaberone. The Brazilian-manufactured aircraft was the newest
plane in the Mozambican Airlines fleet. The team of investigators includes experts from
Botswana, Angola, Mozambique, Brazil, China, the US
and Namibia. Namibian investigators said earlier this week they had
detected "no mechanical malfunction" that could have
led to the crash. Three weeks after the incident forensic experts have
identified only seven of the 33 victims. The passengers were from Mozambique, Angola,
Portugal, Brazil, France and China. Dos Santos Fernandes had 9,053 flight hours, of which
1,395 as a captain. His licence was renewed in April
2012 and he underwent a medical exam last September,
according to Mozambican Airlines. The accident is the deadliest for Mozambique since a
plane carrying then-president Samora Machel crashed in
1986 in South Africa en route home from an African
leaders' summit. That crash, which claimed at least 34 lives, remains a
mystery, but speculation has lingered that it was linked
to tensions with the then-apartheid regime in South
Africa. The European Union banned Mozambican Airlines (LAM)
and all air carriers certified in Mozambique from flying in
its airspace in 2011, citing "significant safety
deficiencies".

Burglar steals video tapes of child abuse hands them over to police

-A burglar turned part of his haul over to police after discovery the video tapes he had taken depicted graphic scenes of child abuse....... If you doubt there's an unwritten code of honor among criminals --
governing certain behavior that's just not permitted
-- consider this: Police say a burglar in southern Spain who stole
an old Super 8 camera and tapes from a home
discovered to his horror the graphic video content
of a man sexually abusing boys. The burglar put three tapes in a brown envelope,
hid them under a parked car, and then called
police from a public phone, directing them to go
find it. Inside the envelope, police found a note with the
home address of the suspected pedophile and a
message from the burglar: "I've had the misfortune that these tapes have
fallen into my hands and I feel obligated to turn
them in so that you can do your job and put that
(expletive) in prison for life." Spanish national police confirmed Thursday they
arrested a 64-year-old suspected child molester
this week at his home -- the one that had been
burglarized -- in the southern provincial capital of
Jaen. The suspect is a local football (soccer) coach who
lived alone. He lured some of his young players
into watching pornographic videos together, and
then sexually abused them, police said. Police have identified four minor boys who were
victims of the alleged abuse, including a 16-year-
old who may have been abused for six years. The suspected pedophile had reported the burglary
at his home to police, listing various electrical
appliances that were stolen. But he didn't mention
the camera or the tapes, police said. At his home, police said they found other tapes
with graphic content of sexual abuse of boys. And yes, they're still looking for the burglar, the
one "with a conscience," said a police officer in
Jaen.