Donald Allen Moses, MD

Psychiatrist and author Donald Allen Moses, MD, 88, of Bridport, Vermont, passed away on Thursday, August 13, at Helen Porter Rehabilitation Center in Middlebury. Don lived an expansive life, governed by intellectual curiosity, devotion to his patients and family, and love of the natural world.

He was born in Brooklyn in 1938 to Edward Moses and Evelyn Roberts, and spent boyhood summers at Eagle Mountain Camp on Lake Champlain, where his love of Vermont began. He skipped two grades and entered Bates College at sixteen, intending to study medicine, and met Sarah Moseley Dean of Wellesley Hills, Massachusetts. His family was Jewish, arrived from Ukraine around 1900; hers Episcopalian, in New England since the 1600s. Only nineteen and still students, they eloped on December 6, 1957, and were married for sixty-eight years.

He earned his medical degree from New York Medical College in 1962 and, against everyone's advice, moved with Sarah and their four-year-old son Richard to Hawaii, where he interned at The Queen's Medical Center in Honolulu.

Back on the mainland he served as an Air Force flight surgeon at Andrews Air Force Base. In 1965 the family moved to Glen Cove, New York, where they would live fifty-four years.

For more than four decades he practiced psychiatry on Long Island, specializing in adolescents and young adults and working in psychoanalytic and psychodynamic psychotherapy. He consulted to adolescent substance abuse programs and was affiliated with what is now Northwell Health. He was tenacious and not easily discouraged, staying the course with people for as long as needed. Patients who found him decades later told his family he had changed the course of their lives.

He wrote captivating books that outlined his therapeutic philosophy, focusing on young people and their complex developmental issues. Are You Driving Your Children to Drink? appeared in 1975. Forty years later, he wrote two books with Wendy L. Moss, PhD: The Tween Book in 2015 and Raising Independent, Self-Confident Kids in 2017, both published by the American Psychological Association. The latter won a 2019 Royal Dragonfly Book Award and, this past spring, the 2026 Eric Hoffer Book Award in the Nonfiction Legacy Category.

While he practiced in Greenvale, Sarah ran Moseley Art Galleries in the same town, dealing in nineteenth and twentieth century American oils and watercolors, and later started an interior design business.

Outside the office he fished, skied, and sailed with Sarah and their sons; late in life the two of them earned their licenses to skipper a yacht around the world, and never quite stopped intending to go.

He read across every genre and period - Marcel Proust twice - loved the classics, classical music, opera, and the jazz of the forties and fifties. Beside his nineteenth-century paintings he kept a row of solar-powered plastic hula dancers. He took life seriously and himself not so much.

His grandfather came up to Vermont from Brooklyn in the early 1900s to buy marble for a stone and tile business; the family's connection to Manchester and Winhall runs five generations. Donald and his own father bought the family's first ski house in Winhall, where he skied with his family at Stratton Mountain from 1967 to 1988.

He is survived by his wife, Sarah; his sons, Richard Moses of New York City and his partner, Omar Perez, and Erik Moses of Winhall, Vermont, and his wife, Glauke Cooijmans; and two grandchildren, Tijsen and Heike.

A private memorial service will be held Friday, August 21 in Manchester, Vermont.