Heart To Heart With Michael

Grief isn’t an ending; it’s a relationship that changes. Judy Tashbook Safern joins us with a story that stops the clock: cascading surgeries, pneumonia, and a coma that opens into an enveloping light and a felt encounter with God. She returns with a message—“you are necessary”—only to learn that her father, a larger-than-life psychoanalyst and professor who built Jewish community in West Texas, has been diagnosed with advanced liver cancer and passes within days. The timeline feels like a switch, a mystery that begs hard questions about fate, faith, and why one life continues while another concludes.We explore the details that make this more than a headline. Judy paints her father through action: freezer trucks of kosher meat hauled across states, hand-typed holiday invitations posted around a university and an Air Force base, and a seven-hour drive to Dallas and back for Passover staples. When she wakes, pain floods back; survivor’s guilt arrives fast. Grounded in Jewish mourning practices—shiva, shloshim,