Stan Goldberg

Stan Goldberg is a Professor Emeritus of Communicative Disorders at San Francisco State University. For over 25 years he taught, provided therapy, researched, and published in the area of information processing, loss, and change. Stan has published seven books, written numerous articles and delivered over 100 lectures and workshops throughout the United States, Latin America and Asia. He is currently working on a novel and a book on loss. He also consults on issues of personal, institutional, and corporate change. He has served as an expert legal witness in high-profile court cases and is a consulting editor for Oxford University Press. Stan leads workshops for adults whose lives were suddenly and traumatically changed. He serves at the bedside hospice volunteer in San Francisco for Pathways Home Health Care and Hospice. and is a featured columnist in the Hospice Volunteers of America quarterly magazine. His published magazine articles, essays, poems, and plays have received numerous national and international writing awards. Written with humor and sensitivity, they have appeared in magazines ranging from Psychology Today to Horse and Rider. His latest book is Lessons for the Living: Stories of Forgiveness, Gratitude, and Courage at the End of Life http://lessonsfortheliving.blogspot.com. It’s a memoir of his six years as a bedside hospice volunteer; an experience that taught him to accept his cancer and live fully, no matter how long that might be. He can be contacted at stan@stangoldbergwriter.com. Numerous downloadable articles appear on his website www.stangoldbergwriter.com

Articles:

Prostate Cancer, Research Funding, and Male Vanity

As someone who’s living with prostate cancer, I applauded Louis Gossett Jr.’s testimony in Congress on the importance of prostate cancer research funding. If Congress was listening, maybe I’ll live long enough for something else to kill me. But according to the American Cancer Society statistics, I shouldn’t hold my breath. Fifty times more money is spent on research for breast cancer than is spent on prostate cancer. Does that mean there are 50 times more women dying from breast cancer than men dying from prostate cancer? Hardly. Every year 40,000 women die of breast cancer and 34,000 men die […]

Dying Stands Logic on its Head

We often harshly judge behaviors we don’t understand. They can involve someone’s ingratitude or anger, or actions we label as foolish. I recently was guilty of the same thing here in the San Francisco Bay area with one of my hospice patients. Her ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), also known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease, left her unable to move any part of her body except her eyes. She lived alone, other than her caretaker, and had no family. When I arrived for my weekly visit I saw workmen retiling her hallway and bathroom. She knew that she would be dead within […]

’60 Minutes’ Deserves Praise for Challenging Culture’s Denial of Death

The 60 Minutes segment on end of life expenses did more than highlight inappropriate medical costs. It spoke to the role of medical technology in our cultural denial of death. As medical technology becomes more sophisticated in forestalling our inevitable end, we mistake “prolonging life” for “immortality.” Instead of treating death as a necessary price for living, we hide it as we do an embarrassing blemish. Rather than accepting it, we pretend it doesn’t exist. With every new life-stretching achievement, our gratitude to the medical community increases, their wealth grows exponentially, and our denial of death becomes easier. So easy […]

The Faces of Grief: Mourning Those We Never Knew

Although there are many approaches to grief counseling, most focus directly on the grief we experience over the death of a loved one. But what about the unexplainable, and often embarrassing, grief experienced over the death of someone we never knew? The pop star whose life was unexpectedly ended, the child brutally killed by a pedophile, or the massacre of 13 young men and woman on an army base. I’m not referring to the normal amount of sadness felt when an great tragedy occurs. But rather that very deep sense of loss that is usually reserved for the death of […]

Six Things to Do for An Easier Death

People who were dying in the Middle Ages said their goodbyes, gave away the furniture, and just stopped breathing. The non-event was witnessed by friends and family, who, at the moment of death, absconded with anything of value. Later, they might gather to either celebrate or deride the person’s life. Today, although we rarely fight over furniture, we do something worse. We layer death with a multitude of screens, hoping to hide the elephant in the room. Unfortunately, the delusion is easily shattered by words, events, and thoughts that despite our best efforts to the contrary, reassert the role of […]

When Behaviors Don’t Make Sense

More than 10 years ago, I saw a black and white photograph by Richard Avedon that I still vividly remember. It was taken of a young boy in 1947 in Sicily. He was in the foreground smiling broadly and wearing a suit that was too short in the arms and too tight in the waist. In the background—softly out of focus—was a tree with a symmetrical oval canopy and a fence that defined the boundary between sky and water. A seemingly bucolic scene unless you looked carefully at the boy. After starring at it for a while, I realized that […]

Caretakers: Dealing With Our Own Needs

I’ve been a bedside volunteer for more than five years, sitting with dying patients and their families once or twice a week for up to four continuous hours. Sometimes I stay with patients overnight. Regardless of how demanding my responsibilities are, I know that when I leave the bedside, I’ll have to take three to six days to “recover.” It’s a time to prepare myself for the next week’s bedside activities that can range from conversing about life to witnessing a friend’s active dying. My downtime –something that allows me to recharge my batteries — is a luxury many caregivers […]

When the Ground Shakes: Why Many Ill Patients Need Structure

I was concerned when I came home and couldn’t find my mother. The back of the house has a steep incline off the deck that leads to a forested area. When I saw that the gate leading down the stairs was open, concern turned to panic. At that time, she was in her mid-sixties and often became confused when situations or discussions were anything other than linear. I raced down the stairs expecting the worst. There she was, emerging through a stand of trees, carrying a handful of leaves and twigs, smiling as if she just solved a complex puzzle. […]

What’s Wrong With My Underwear? Adjusting to Aging and Grieving

I was rummaging around in a kitchen cabinet while my wife was in the living room. Since both of us have hearing problems, when we speak to each other in different rooms, our conversations can become the basis for a sit-com on aging. “Is that old wok under here?” I asked. Wendy came into the kitchen looking bewildered and said, “Why do you think something’s wrong with my underwear?” But what if we couldn’t laugh at our miscommunications as something that injects humor into our lives? What if I became angry because I thought my wife didn’t listen closely enough? […]

Learn to Die and You Will Learn to Live

By Stan Goldberg — My life is tethered to a number that few people have ever heard of: a Gleason score of 7. It’s a measure of prostate cancer severity that ranges from a forgettable 1 to a terminal 9. My lucky 7 places me on the cusp of living and dying. Not a particularly comfortable neighborhood to take up residence, but one in which I’m forced to live. During the operation to remove the prostate, my surgeon found that the cancer spread beyond the prostate gland and into one of the lymph nodes. Three weeks after the operation we […]

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