We all face multiple, major transitions throughout our lives, times when our identities dissolve and we have to re-form and become someone new. The transitions can be delightful or they can be wrenching. Sometimes, they are both. Here’s how to survive the passage.

My eggs have all hatched. This is what I thought last week as I sat on the porch in the morning, my children back in school. I thought about them being gone, and about my book being finished, and my mother entering the last chapter of her life. I sat and I thought about a lot of things that have to do with the period of seemingly empty time between the end of one thing and the beginning of another.