Author: sharonafoley

Today we celebrate St. Brigid a woman who played a critical role in Irish history.  Her feast day marks the end of the darkness of winter and heralds the new season of hope and growth.  Along with St. Patrick, Brigid is the co-patroness of Ireland.  She is also the patron saint of poets and is […]

Frederick Buechner in his memoir The Sacred Journey says that God speaks to us in our personal lives and he believes that “(his) life and the lives of everyone who has ever lived, or will ever live, as not journeys through time but as sacred journeys.”   I’m reminded that journeys often have unexpected happenings that […]

The universe is made of stories, not atoms.— Muriel Rukeyser On October 9, 1996, I gave my brother Robin a kidney. Twenty years of diabetes had worn out his renal system. Several months of research and soul-searching led to my decision. In the process, I learned about strengths in myself and my family, and about […]

The wait for kidney transplant recipients is often long. About 76% of transplants are done using a kidney from a deceased person, and waiting times of four to five years for a deceased donor kidney are common, according to Anne Paschke, media relations specialist for the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS), a private, nonprofit organization that manages the […]

By Jack Perry/Providence Journal Dr. Stephanie Krusz has dedicated her adult life to healing the ill and injured, treating 20 patients a day in a Cranston primary-care practice. But she went beyond even that high calling on Sept. 7 at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston when she gave one of her kidneys to the brother of a close […]

Recently my poem My Best Friend Leaves the Convent was accepted for publication by the literary magazine Speckled Trout Review, Fall 2022.  The editors also featured me in their online preview.   You can read my poem and by going to this website.  Just click on the link above.  I have a chapbook ready for publication, […]

By Dana Hedgpath, Washington Post, 12/25/2022 Md. woman donated kidney to stranger after seeing request on internet mailing list Liza Porat glanced at her phone while sitting in her car at a stoplight and saw the request posted on an internet mailing list for her Silver Spring neighborhood. “Needed,” it read, “A kidney for a […]

Today is the anniversary of my father’s death.  He died in 1968 on Christmas Eve when I was age 21.  He had artistic and engineering talent and used these skills in his work in the textile mills in Pawtucket, Rhode Island.  Dad designed the silk fabrics that were sent to New York and used to […]

….I am washed and washed in the river of earthly delight– and what are you going to do– what can you do about it— deep, blue night?

The above cartoon is used with permission from the website A Kidney for Cathy.