Halloween?
Hallo-ween?!
It hasn’t always been Halloween.
It used to be called Samhain, pronounced sow-inn and it originated from (some say) Celtic Paganism.
The dying of the season was thought to be the time of the year when the Veil between the living and dead was at its thinnest.
The time when relatives and friends who had passed were invited to share in the festivities.
Food was left around in case the dead were passing through. It was a time of honoring the dead, a time of the celebration of life and death and the link between the two….
"The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern.
Beautiful people do not just happen."
~ Elisabeth Kübler Ross
Book: Death: The Final Stage of Growth
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
(July 8, 1926 – August 24, 2004) was a Swiss-American psychiatrist, a pioneer in near-death studies, and author of the internationally best-selling book, On Death and Dying (1969), where she first discussed her theory of the five stages of grief.
The book outlines the five stages that dying patients experience: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.
“When I wanted to know what it was like to be schizophrenic,” ( Dr. Kübler-Ross told the " Time " earlier in 1969 ) , “I spent a lot of time with schizophrenics. Why not do the same thing? We will sit together with dying patients and ask them to be our teachers.”
The dying are living too, bitter at being prematurely consigned—by indifference, false cheerfulness and isolation—to the bourn of the dead. It is not death they fear, but dying, a process almost as painful to see as to endure, and one on which society—and even medicine—so readily turns its back.
Kübler-Ross’s seminars lifted terminally ill patients out of their isolation, at least for a time, and gave them a platform to share their fears and their hopes. (Even those who made it to the acceptance stage rarely gave up hope, according to TIME.)
Filling in for a colleague one time, Kübler-Ross brought in a 16-year-old girl who was dying from leukemia into the classroom. She told the students to ask the girl any questions they wanted. But after receiving numerous questions about her condition, the girl erupted in anger and started asking the questions that mattered to her as a person, such as what was it like to not be able to dream about growing up or going to the prom, according to an article in The New York Times. Later Kübler-Ross stopped teaching at the university to work privately on what she called the “greatest mystery in science”—death.
She was a compassionate woman who not only studied Death as a conversation starter but also worked with the terminally ill and their families.
Art by Night Cafe Creator
In memoriam of a beloved, this October let me also share a popular wise short story " Blood of a Mole"
The short story by Bulgarian writer Zdravka Evtimova, translated into English, was included in a 8th-grade literature textbook years ago in the United States. It won numerous awards in literature and the link below will take you to the… Blood of a Mole
Shared with joy
And respect
A A
Stob, Bulgaria