"Coming back from the dead'

Mourners left stunned when 'dead' waiter, 28, wakes up at his own FUNERAL

Mourners at a funeral in Egypt swapped tears for cheers when the 'dead' body they were burying woke up.

Hamdi Hafez al-Nubi, a 28-year-old waiter from Naga al-Simmanm, near Luxor was declared dead after suffering a heart attack at work.  His body was being prepared for burial when a doctor, sent to sign his death certificate, discovered he was still warm.  Family members were so convinced Mr al-Nubdi was dead they had already washed his body, according to Islamic tradition, and were preparing to bury him on Friday evening.

After finding he was still warm, the doctor checked his vital signs and discovered he was still breathing.She quickly revived Mr al-Nubdi - along with his mother, who had fainted when she heard her son wasn't dead.

Rather than cancel the funeral, mourners turned the party into a celebration of Mr al-Nubdi's 'resurrection'.

It's not the first time someone has come 'back from the dead' at their own funeral.

Just last month a 95-year-old Chinese woman climbed out of her own coffin six days after she was thought to have died following a fall.

Li Xiufeng was found motionless and not breathing in bed by a neighbor two weeks after tripping and suffering a head injury at her home in Beiliu, Guangxi Province.

When the neighbor who found her could not wake the pensioner up, they feared the worst and thought the elderly woman had passed away.  She was placed in a coffin which was kept in her house unsealed under Chinese tradition for friends and relatives to pay respects.

But the day before the funeral, neighbors found an empty coffin, and later discovered the 95-year-old, who had since woken up, in her kitchen cooking.

Near-death experiences scientifically inexplicable

Rod Dreher on Life After Death, Really

Neuroscientist Mario Beauregard writes that more and more research indicates that something inexplicable by the standard materialist model of human consciousness is happening with Near Death Experiences. Here’s an excerpt focusing on a medically well-documented case that cannot be explained as the bizarre firing of neurons in the mind of a dying patient:

Beauregard says the theory that NDEs are caused by a decrease of oxygen to the brain cannot be sustained. He points out too that people who have been born blind have the same NDE experiences as those with sight.

Dreher's update:

Forgot to say that I somewhat knew a Texas guy who claimed this happened to him after a near-fatal car crash — except his was a pretty dark story. He had been living a pretty bad life, and went to hell, or an approximation thereof. He claimed that Jesus Christ came to him there, told him it wasn’t his time yet, but that he should change his life, and turn to the Light. He said Jesus also told him “your days are numbered” — meaning that he didn’t have much time left. He had a dramatic, instant turnaround in his life, and became a far more peaceful and even saintly man. Sure enough, not long after this happened, he learned that he had a terminal illness. He’s dead now, but he spent the rest of his days serving God and doing good for others. Interestingly, after this experience, he had an almost preternatural spiritual sensitivity. I did not know the man before his alleged NDE, so I have no way of knowing if this was true. He was an exceptionally humble and gentle man when I met him, by the way, and didn’t like to talk about all this (I only found out about it because he’d told a friend of mine at his church, who asked.) FWIW.

More from the Beauregard piece

The scientific NDE studies performed over the past decades indicate that heightened mental functions can be experienced independently of the body at a time when brain activity is greatly impaired or seemingly absent (such as during cardiac arrest). Some of these studies demonstrate that blind people can have veridical perceptions during OBEs associated with an NDE. Other investigations show that NDEs often result in deep psychological and spiritual changes.

These findings strongly challenge the mainstream neuroscientific view that mind and consciousness result solely from brain activity. As we have seen, such a view fails to account for how NDErs can experience—while their hearts are stopped—vivid and complex thoughts and acquire veridical information about objects or events remote from their bodies.

NDE studies also suggest that after physical death, mind and consciousness may continue in a transcendent level of reality that normally is not accessible to our senses and awareness. Needless to say, this view is utterly incompatible with the belief of many materialists that the material world is the only reality.

At the bigamist's funeral where two wives meet for the first time

'I should get the flag not her': Battle between two wives of bigamist soldier as they meet for the first time at his funeral.

The two wives of a fallen soldier sat in the front row at his today funeral after it came to light following his death that he was married to both of them at the same time.

But the relationship between the two women has turned ugly after the soldier's first wife received the folded flag for Army Specialist Moises J Gonzalez - and the second accused her of coming forward just 'for the benefits'.

The 29-year-old soldier was killed in a road accident in Afghanistan on April 25. He leaves three sons - one by each of his wives and a third by another woman.





The wives sat together in the front pew at Saint Matthias Catholic Church in Huntington Park yesterday.

They exchanged no more than a glance and did not try to comfort each other but sat at opposite ends of the row, tending to their sons.
--
The soldier's folded flag was presented to his first wife, who will also receive his Army benefits.

The Great Legacy of Roy Campbell, who hid St John of the Cross’s letters from Spanish militiamen

Joseph Pearce recalls the extraordinary life of Roy Campbell, who hid St John of the Cross’s letters from Spanish militiamen,

The poet who saved a saint's priceless letters

It was March 1936. A series of anti-clerical riots swept through Toledo. Churches were burned and priests and monks were attacked in the streets. During these disturbances several Carmelite monks, disguised in lay clothes, sought shelter in the home of the South African poet, Roy Campbell, who had moved to the city with his wife, Mary, and their two young daughters in the previous year. Four months later, on July 21, republican forces advanced on the city. Under cover of darkness, the Carmelite monks once again called on the Campbells. This time, however, they were not seeking refuge for themselves but for their priceless archives, which included the personal papers of St John of the Cross. Campbell agreed to take possession of these precious archives and that night a heavy trunk of ancient documents was delivered secretly from the Carmelite library to the hallway of the Campbells’ house.

During the following day republican forces advanced through the city, forcing the defenders to fall back towards the Alcazar. Without the soldiers of the garrison to defend them, the priests, monks and nuns fell prey to the republican militiamen. The 17 monks from the Carmelite monastery were rounded up, herded into the street and shot
--

During this search of his home, as he revealed in a radio interview several years later, Campbell had prayed to St John of the Cross, making a vow that he would translate the saint’s poems into English if his family’s lives were spared. Campbell fulfilled his obligation to St John, translating the poems to great critical acclaim. The poet and critic Kathleen Raine, writing in the New Statesman, encapsulated the critical consensus that Campbell’s translations represented a superlative achievement in English verse: “Of all living English poets Roy Campbell is the most masterly in his use of rhyme, and he is able to use metro so as to convey a sense of intense passion. He has reproduced the Spanish rhymes and metros as closely as possible, and yet his English versions have the freshness of original poems.”
--
Tired of the brief interlude of urban life, the Campbells moved to the village of Altea, near Alicante, in May 1934. It was here that the whole family was received into the Catholic Church. “I don’t think that my family and I were converted by any event at any given moment,” Campbell wrote later. “We lived for a time on a small farm in the sierras at Altea where the working people were mostly good Catholics, and there was such a fragrance and freshness in their life, in their bravery, in their reverence, that it took hold of us all imperceptibly.”
--
In April 1957, Roy and Mary set off in their tiny Fiat 600 from their home in Portugal, destined for the Holy Week celebrations in Seville. En route they stopped off for several days in Toledo, “this heavenly place which means more than all the world to me”, as Campbell described it in a postcard sent to a friend. Throughout the week of processions in Seville, Mary noticed that her husband was unusually quiet and particularly serious in his devotions.

On April 23 they set off back to Portugal, crossing the border in the early afternoon. A front tyre burst, and the car swerved out of control and hit a tree. Mary survived but Roy died at the scene of the crash. Thus ended, at the age of 55, the life of one of the finest and most controversial poets of the 20th century, a poet who counted George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, T S Eliot, Evelyn Waugh, J R R Tolkien and C S Lewis among his friends.

As regards his friendship with Tolkien, it is one of Campbell’s intriguing claims to fame that he was part of the inspiration for the character of Aragorn, who was played by Viggo Mortenson in the movie version of The Lord of the Rings.

She watched her husband die on Skype. Was he shot?

'He looked alarmed and fell out of the picture': Moment army medic died in Afghanistan during Skype chat with wife

The family of a Texas-based Army medic serving in Afghanistan says his wife witnessed the officer's death, which happened as the two were video chatting via Skype.

Captain Bruce Kevin Clark suddenly looked 'alarmed' and disappeared from his wife's computer screen during a conversation on Monday, according to an Army spokesman.

'Mrs Clark was Skypeing from the family home here in El Paso with her husband when he all of a sudden fell away from the computer keyboard and fell out of sight,' said Colonel John Modell.

'He assumed an alarmed look and fell back out of the picture,' he continued.

A spokesman at the William Beaumont Army Medical Center told MailOnline that Capt Bruce Kevin Clark's death on Monday came from natural causes and was not combat-related or suicide.

Family said: 'Although the circumstances were unimaginable, Bruce's wife and extended family will be forever thankful that he and his wife were together in his last moments'

Was he shot? Wife of Army captain who died on Skype with her says she saw a bullet hole behind her husband after he collapsed

The wife of a US Army captain who died while he was on Skype with her says she saw a bullet hole in the closet behind him after he collapsed.

An Army spokesman says medic Bruce Kevin Clark died of natural causes while he was serving in Afghanistan.

His wife, Susan Orellana-Clark, made a statement on Sunday saying she doubts that assessment.

'(Capt) Clark was suddenly knocked forward,' Mrs Clark said in remarks released by her brother.

'The closet behind him had a bullet hole in it. The other individuals, including a member of the military, who rushed to the home of Capt Clark's wife also saw the hole and agreed it was a bullet hole.'

Mrs Clark sat in in El Paso, Texas, and watched the computer screen helplessly for two hours on Monday as she frantically tried to contact her husband's colleagues 8,000 miles away in Afghanistan to get him help.

Finally, two Army personnel arrived in Capt Clark's room and checked his pulse. They did not, however, tell Mrs Clark what had happened to her husband, the family said.

A spokesman at the William Beaumont Army Medical Center in Texas, where Capt Clark was stationed, told MailOnline on Friday that the officer's death came from natural causes and was not combat-related or suicide.

New Info on the case

Susan Orellana-Clark said she was revealing the details of what she saw “to honor my husband and dispel the inaccurate information and supposition promulgated by other parties.”

An Army spokesman had initially said Clark’s death appeared to be from “natural causes” but later said he misspoke, CNN reported.

The Pentagon has since said Clark’s death is under investigation.

Newest info..  Army investigators release statement:  ‘NO BULLET WOUND, NO TRAUMA’

"After hearing his sweet grandmother's last words, he decided against killing his aunt and called 911"

I can tell Barbara Denmark was a remarkable woman for the brave and loving way she faced her death.

'I love you': The last words from grandmother as grandson 'stabbed her to death in the bath because she made him come home early from party'

The last thing a dying Florida grandmother said to the 23-year-old grandson who stabbed her was 'I love you'.

Police say Christopher Chase Whaley of Lake Wales stabbed his grandmother Barbara Denmark more than 25 times after a heated argument.

Whaley, who had lived with his grandmother for five years, was charged with first degree murder for slashing Denmark in the tub.
--
'Chris is angry because he's been forced to come home and couldn't stay with his new best friends and party so he decides, 'I'll just kill grandmother. Not only her but I'll kill my aunt,'' said Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd to Tampa Bay Online.

After hearing his sweet grandmother's last words, he decided against killing his aunt and called 911.

'Come get me,' he said to the dispatcher, according to police reports.

Emergency responders found Whaley inside the mobile home, leaning over his grandmother and cradling her head.

'The family is distraught in all ways that can be imagined,' David Alexander, Ms Denmark's nephew, said.

He called her death a 'tragedy.'

'Her whole life was children - she always took care of them, no matter what,' Mr Alexander said.

Condolences to all her family.

The fear of suffering prior to death

"Death with Dignity" or physician-assisted suicide will be on the Massachusetts ballot this fall.  The Massachusetts Medical Society has come out against, saying that it corrupts medicine and the doctor-patient relationship.  I'm against it and one of the reasons is my  strong intuition that such a death robs the patient of what is most valuable in dying.  That is the opportunity for forgiveness and the mental, emotional and spiritual growth that comes with the dying process.  That said, all medical efforts should be directed to alleviating physical suffering.

Dr. Ty Meyer, a  palliative care physician, makes this argument in  Palliative Care vs. Physician Assisted Suicide

As the reality of approaching death sinks in, it brings with it many uncertainties and certainly fears. Many of my patients are naturally scared, but when investigated further this fear is of suffering prior to death and not death itself. This may lead to requests for hastening of death or physician assisted suicide. Dr. Ira Byock in his book The Best Care Possible notes that “any serious request from a patient for help in ending his or her life must be seen as a red flag that signals either that a patient is suffering or fears uncontrollable suffering in the future.” Requests for physician suicide can be seen as a plea to provide reassurance of relief of pain and suffering and reassurance that they as patients will not be abandoned as they are dying.

Too many patients have heard, “I’m sorry. There is nothing more that can be done,” as they approach the end of their lives. The reality may be that the medical options for cure or extending life are exhausted, but there remains much that is available medically to afford patients comfort and to improve the quality of their lives. By receiving high quality palliative care, either while undergoing curative/life-prolonging treatments with significant side effects or through a hospice program at the end of life, patients and their families are able to both deal with the current circumstances of their medical condition and begin to prepare for the future.

As a Catholic physician, I am often struck by casual comments indicating the justifiability of physician assisted suicide in situations of patient suffering and prolonged dying. It strikes me because I believe the final stage of life is vitally important to the dying person as well as to their family and is the natural consequence of living. The days and weeks leading to death can be very fruitful and in many instances are a healing time. In finding relief from physical suffering, patients are able to address the emotional, psychological, and at times spiritual areas of their lives that go unnoticed when physical symptoms are poorly managed. Imagine the difficulty of healing a broken relationship with a family member or God if every breath causes a stabbing pain in your chest or if your nausea is so bad that the thought of food induces vomiting.


Our goal in Hospice and Palliative Medicine is to provide the best experience for patients and families prior to death, to diminish suffering and allow a peaceful passage into the next world, but never to expedite death as a means of relieving suffering. By helping patients and families understand their illness and what to expect as it progresses and by managing physical suffering, they regain some sense of control and are able to focus on what is most important to them at the end of their lives.

In reassuring patients that they will not be abandoned at the end of life, their symptoms will be properly managed and their fears of suffering are addressed, hospices utilizing quality palliative medicine skills can help negate the desire by some to pursue physician assisted suicide. It helps turn a scary and unknown time in a person’s life into an opportunity for emotion and spiritual growth and allows for healing of the fractured relationships that are a part of life.

Cody Green, Honorary Marine

Sometimes people are just wonderful.  Like these Marines.

12-Year-Old Boy Made Honorary Marine Before Succumbing To Cancer-Related Infection, Local Marine Stands Guard At His Hospital Door Entire Night Before He Passed Away…

12-year-old Cody Green has always admired the strength and courage of the marines. At 12:35 Saturday afternoon, it was the Marines admiring the strength and courage of Cody.

Cody had leukemia since he was 22 months old, but beat the disease three times. Although he was cancer-free, the chemotherapy lowered his immune system and Saturday afternoon, he died from a fungus that attacked his brain. Members of the Marines decided to step in and do something.

"They decided Cody, with the strength and honor and courage he showed through the whole thing, he should be a Marine," said Cody's father David Snowberger.

Cody was given Marine navigator wings and was made an honorary member of the United States Marine Corps. For one Marine, that wasn't enough, so he did even more.

"The night before Cody passed, he stood guard at Cody's door at the hospital all night long for eight hours straight," said Snowberger.

"My death has become my life. And my life has gained a kind of intensity and power that it had never had before."

Philip Gould wrote I'm enjoying my death.  It's the most fulfilling time of my life

Philip Gould was the brilliant Labour Party strategist who helped bring Tony Blair to power in 1997, and was awarded a peerage in 2004. Here, in the first of two extracts from his new book serialized in the Mail he describes movingly the journey from being diagnosed with esophageal cancer in 2008 to being told he had three months to live. He died at 61 last November, with his wife Gail and their daughters, Georgia, 25, and Grace, 22, by his side.
--
Recurrence is a very different thing from the original diagnosis. My immediate response to being told I had cancer had been that I would battle through and win. I had a vision of a dark road leading to a light.

But the diagnosis of recurrence had a very different effect — the road ahead just collapsed, and I was left effectively with nothing, just the kind of fuzzy picture you get if your television stops working.
--
We spent Christmas out of London in the snow. Just us and the kids. There was no hiding here, we all knew the situation. The family was under strain, but we were close.

My relationship with my children was deepening all the time. We implicitly decided to bring the future forward, to compress ten years or so into one.

The kids sucked me dry. Georgia wanted to know all about the way I thought. How did I develop a concept? What were my values? Why did I believe what I believed?

Grace wanted hard, usable, practical advice. She asked me to write down every likely eventuality that might befall her and supply a satisfactory answer. Facing the possibility of my departure, she wanted a handbook for life.

For Gail it was different. She did not want intensity, or purpose, or accelerated living, she wanted quiet and normality — not the future brought forward, but the present extended. She had always envisaged a future free from work where we would just potter around, grow old as companions.

--
It is only when they said: Philip Gould, you are going to die. Get used to it. This is going to happen in months or weeks, but it is going to happen. Only then do you become aware of death, and suddenly life screams at you with its intensity.

I have entered the Death Zone.
--
But when cancer came, bringing with it a great deal of fear and pain, I found I could deal with it. Time and time again I found the courage to deal with this acute and terrible pain.

And so my death has become my life. And my life has gained a kind of intensity and power that it had never had before.

You can go for a walk in the park and have a moment of ecstasy. I go to the Frieze Art Fair in Regent’s Park opposite our house. I go to the exhibition tent and I sit there and have a coffee and I feel ecstasy after ecstasy after ecstasy.

This is built upon this feeling of certainty, of knowledge, of death. There is ecstasy because I am not dead yet.
--
What good is it to me to think in terms of conventional time? Six months or nine months no longer exist for me. So I am trying to make sense of the world not through time, but through emotion, through relationships, through feeling.

'He’s going to get a drive-by, see mom two hours, and that’s how you end a 46-year marriage.'

You have to wonder how some health care workers can be so inhuman that it takes a desperate battle to reunite dying husband and wife who had not been apart for 46 years.

Husband, 71, dies next to wife of 46 years after desperate battle for the pair to be reunited in hospital for his final days

A 71-year-old man who had battled to die next to his wife of 46 years has passed away in their shared hospital room.

Matt Monschein died from pancreatic cancer at 1am on Tuesday - six days after he was reunited with his wife Pat, who was in hospital after having both legs amputated due to diabetes.

In March, doctors told Mr Monschein that nothing else could be done for him in the final stages of his cancer and added that he might be restricted in the time he spent with Pat due to her operation.

The couple, from Lorain, were left devastated that they might not be able to spend their last moments together at Grace Fairview Hospital in Cleveland, Ohio - as it did not offer the hospice care that Mr Monschein needed.

Yet Mrs Monschein could not be looked after at a hospice as she required round-the-clock care including dialysis.

One of the couple's two sons, Mike Monschein, told Fox 8: 'He’s going to get a drive-by, see mom two hours, and that’s how you end a 46-year marriage.'

Mike had appealed to local politicians, authorities and media outlets in the hope of bringing his parents back together.

After being helped by a local TV station to navigate the bureaucracy, the elderly couple were  allowed to spend Mr Monschein's final few days lying in beds side by side at the hospital.





Both remained in the same room and according to cleveland.com, the hospital chaplain renewed their wedding vows. 

But on Tuesday, Mr Monschein lost his fight with pancreatic cancer.

His son Mike told The Chronicle Telegram: 'Seeing my mom again has meant the world to my dad and has put smiles on both of their faces.

'Dad will be missed greatly. Mom will go on with the support of family and friends.'_

Gateway to Heaven

The gates of heaven? Hubble telescope captures extremely rare picture of dying star emitting ethereal beams of light

It looks like the gateway to heaven - but this stunning image taken by the Hubble Telescope has captured the dramatic phase of a dying star's lifespan when it runs out of nuclear fuel and emits beams of light like searchlights.

The Daily Mail dubbed this the 'gateway to heaven'.  To me it looked like the cross. 

Proposed Virginia law offers a tax break to residents buried in space

Virginia law would offer tax breaks to residents buried in space

Looking for a really awesome way to lower your taxes? Virginia residents may want to consider having their cremated remains blasted into space. The state is considering a law that would give folks who want to mingle their ashes with the debris of space up to $2500 a year in deductions, with an $8000 cap.

If the measure passes, the final pitstop for folks who take advantage of the tax break will be the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport. The purpose of the law is to increase revenue for the spaceport, which is looking to expand in response to the cancellation of NASA's space shuttle program.

" The obituary can be a powerful device to educate us about history, culture or simply the way the world once was."

Obituaries as an educational tool by Cory Franklin

Journalist and humorist Russell Baker once reminded us that the obituary can be a powerful device to educate us about history, culture or simply the way the world once was. The way we lived then, how we live now and in the future have all been affected by people who make one final appearance in an obit.

Two of the last main characters in the Watergate scandal recently died within a month of each other. The first, Henry Ruth, was a special prosecutor for the Watergate investigation and helped prepare charges that ultimately led to President Richard Nixon's 1974 resignation. The second was Charles Colson, a Nixon aide who served seven months in prison for obstruction of justice.

With the median age in the United States now 37, a majority of Americans have no practical memory of these two men or of the "third-rate burglary" that morphed into a genuine threat to our nation. Today, most students' knowledge of Watergate comes from our current crop of history books, many of which are poorly written, or from the Internet, rife with political bias from the right and left. How frequently do we hear Democrats, Republicans and journalists resort to specious Watergate analogies, as if any recent political scandal equaled its gravity?

Baker noted the vacuum created by death was not simply historical, but also cultural. He wrote: "The older one becomes, the more aware he grows of his culture collapsing and another culture, increasingly alien to his own, replacing it. … As youth turns to middle age, and middle age into grayness and failing vision, the cultural collapse accelerates. It becomes routine to arrive at the obituaries and find another part of your past has been moved out during the night."

‘I feel so lucky that my parents wouldn’t take no for an answer.’

Dad rescues ‘brain dead’ son from doctors wishing to harvest his organs – boy recovers completely

LEICESTER, England, April 25, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) - According to the Daily Mail newspaper, a young British man owes his life to an insistent father who would not allow his son’s organs to be removed from his body, despite assurances from four doctors that his son could not recover from the wounds he had suffered in a recent car accident.

Here's the Daily Mail story:  The boy who came back from the dead: Experts said car crash teen was beyond hope. His parents disagreed

They were told there was no chance of their son surviving after he suffered devastating injuries in a car crash.
But Steven Thorpe’s parents refused to give up hope – despite four specialists declaring that the 17-year-old was brain dead.
Convinced they saw a ‘flicker’ of life as Steven lay in a coma, John and Janet Thorpe rejected advice to switch off his life support machine.
They begged for another opinion – and it was a decision that saved him.

A neurosurgeon found faint signs of brain activity and two weeks later, Steven woke from his coma. Within seven weeks, he had left hospital.
And four years on, the trainee accounts clerk says he owes everything to the persistence of his parents.
From his home in Kenilworth, Warwickshire, Steven, 21, said: ‘I feel so lucky that my parents wouldn’t take no for an answer.’

Ghoulish as it is, people in hospitals are looking for fresh organs to transplant.    If a loved one of yours is ever in this position, insist upon a brain wave test before agreeing with the person is brain dead.  Even then, insist on pain-killers to be administered during the harvesting.

You should put this in your end-of-life  instructions as well.

If you haven't read What You Lose When You Sign That Organ Donor Card, you should

Chuck Colson, A Man Redeemed R.I.P.

I remember hating Colson when he worked for Nixon.  His famous quote, "If you grab them by the balls, the hearts and minds will follow" seemed to summarize his politics first learned in Massachusetts.  I distrusted his seemingly too easy conversion.  But in the years that followed his conversion, my admiration for his work grew the more I learned about it.
His life began again with his conversion and he to me is the perfect example of a life redeemed by grace.

The Denver Post Chuck Colson, political saboteur for President Nixon, dies at 80.

The New York Times, Charles W. Colson, Watergate Felon Who Became Evangelical Leader Dies at 80

Charles W. Colson, who as a political saboteur for President Richard M. Nixon masterminded some of the dirty tricks that led to the president’s downfall, then emerged from prison to become an important evangelical leader, saying he had been “born again,” died on Saturday in Falls Church, Va. He was 80.
---
In 1956, Mr. Colson went to Washington as an administrative assistant to Senator Leverett Saltonstall, a Massachusetts Republican. He met Nixon, who was then vice president, and became, in his words, a lifelong “Nixon fanatic.” The two men “understood each other,” Mr. Colson wrote in “Born Again,” his memoir. They were “prideful men seeking that most elusive goal of all — acceptance and the respect of those who had spurned us.”
--
A sympathetic biography, “Charles W. Colson: A Life Redeemed” (2005), by Jonathan Aitken, depicts him in these years as a hard-drinking, chain-smoking, amoral man with three young children — Wendell Ball II, Christian and Emily Ann — and a failing marriage. He divorced his first wife and married Patricia Ann Hughes in 1964.

On Chuck Colson:Can Reports See Past Watergate?

It’s pretty interesting to read the obituaries of Charles Colson by those who were alive during Watergate and those who weren’t. It’s clear that some reporters are stuck in the 1970s, apparently unaware of how the state of evangelicalism was shaped by Colson’s complex life and legacy.
---
Part of what seems to complicate the media’s relationship might be that the Washington Post’s Woodward and Bernstein are the real heroes for journalists coming out of Watergate. Someone like Colson, who had a conversion experience and spent time in jail, does not fit the narrative of who was on right side at that time

Chuck Colson found freedom in prison writes Michael Gerson

Following Chuck’s recent death, the news media — with short attention spans but long memories — have focused on the Watergate portion of his career. They preserve the image of a public figure at the moment when the public glare was harshest — a picture taken when the flash bulbs popped in 1974.
--
Many wondered at Chuck’s sudden conversion to Christianity. He seemed to wonder at it himself. He spent each day that followed, for nearly 40 years, dazzled by his own implausible redemption. It is the reason he never hedged or hesitated in describing his relationship with Jesus Christ. Chuck was possessed, not by some cause, but by someone.
--
It is the central paradox of Christianity that fulfillment starts in emptiness, that streams emerge in the desert, that freedom can be found in a prison cell. Chuck’s swift journey from the White House to a penitentiary ended a life of accomplishment — only to begin a life of significance.

From Watergate to Redemption

After Chuck Colson passed away on Saturday, obituaries naturally remembered him first and foremost as the lawyer and Watergate conspirator who went to jail for obstructing justice.  They also noted that, while in prison, he found Christ and dedicated himself to prison ministries.  Alas, the mainstream media can be so dismissive of faith that many saw him only as a political warrior of the religious right, instead of a man who lived his faith and bridged the chasm between parties with his message of forgiveness and redemption.
--
Colson took literally Christ’s command to visit and comfort those in prison, a ministry that middle-class congregations had previously ignored.  He got prisons to set aside wings or buildings for inmates who wanted to live in a structured, faith-based environment.  He got congregations to see it as part of their mission to partner with prisons and individual inmates, leading prison programming aimed at turning men’s lives around.  Most of all, he got law-abiding citizens on the outside to encounter inmates, face to face, not as nameless, faceless threats but as their brothers to be redeemed.
--
Concern for prisoners used to be the exclusive province of the left and the whipping boy of the right.  By the end of his life, Colson had laid the foundation for the left and religious right to come together to endorse restorative punishment followed by forgiveness.  He brought Christian forgiveness and mercy into discussions of criminal justice, helping to break the ratchet that inexorably jacked up sentences and permanently exiled wrongdoers irrespective of need or public safety.

Symposium on Colson's Life and Legacy

Charlotte Allen
Charles Colson’s 35-year career as an unabashed Christian and evangelizer to prisoners won my profound respect. He combined compassion for the incarcerated with a refreshing lack of sentimentality, and he refused to blame “society” for the self-destructive habits that landed criminals behind bars. Colson also had to take a lot of guff from the mainstream media over his supposedly opportunistic conversion in 1973, and he bore that with admirable patience and charity.

William Bennett
It may not be possible to count the ways mean-spirited liberals hated Chuck Colson. His muscular Christianity was one. His fortitude on behalf of “the least of these” made him a true servant-leader. He used his strength and conviction to speak out and work in behalf of the weak and defenseless outside prison and the stunted souls inside prison.

Michael Cromartie
My very first job out of college was working for Chuck Colson. He had just been released from prison and was starting a prison ministry. I was his first “research assistant/travel companion.” Chuck had been humbled and broken by his experience in prison and vowed when he left never to forget those he left behind. And he did not. Despite job offers that would have paid him seven figures after prison, he turned them all down to start Prison Fellowship Ministries.

Chuck Colson and Second Chances

Still, for nearly four full post-Watergate decades, Colson, who died this past Saturday at age 80, steadfastly practiced what he preached about prisons, prisoners and penal reform. Where criminal justice was concerned, he was God's good man, not Nixon's bad man. He gave his ministry most of his adult life and almost all of his money, including royalties on about two dozen books, speakers' fees, and the $1 million Templeton Prize for spiritual endeavors that he won in 1993. While maintaining his Break Point radio show, he worked endless hours raising the tens of millions of dollars a year that supported the ministry's operations.

In the 2000s alone, Colson's Prison Fellowship mobilized more than 10,000 volunteers to work in 1,329 prisons from coast to coast and also mustered nearly 15,000 volunteers each year to purchase Christmas gifts for more than 350,000 children of prisoners. Recognizing that about 700,000 prisoners are released each year, the Colson ministry created eight InnerChange Freedom Initiative prisoner re-entry programs across five states, and found jobs for about 60% of all IFI parolees.

But Colson's most consequential criminal-justice legacy is still in the making. He nearly single-handedly put America on a bipartisan path to zero prison growth. With another born-again ex-prisoner, former California state legislator Pat Nolan, he led the charge against states' mandatory-minimum sentences for nonviolent offenders and for the federal government's Second Chance Act, which gives grants to nonprofit organizations that help ex-prisoners find jobs, get drug treatment, and reconnect with loved ones.

Actor playing Judas in Passion Play dies from accidental hanging

A terribly tragic death.

Brazilian actor playing Judas dies in accidental hanging

A Brazilian actor has died after accidentally hanging himself while playing Judas in an Easter Passion play.

Tiago Klimeck, 27, was enacting the suicide of Judas during the performance on Good Friday in the city of Itarare.

The actor was hanging for four minutes before fellow performers realized something was wrong.

Klimeck was taken to hospital suffering from cerebral hypoxia but died on Sunday.

---
Klimeck was re-enacting the scene in which Judas commits suicide in repentance for his betrayal of Jesus Christ.

Police are investigating the apparatus that was meant to support Klimeck. It appears the knot may have been wrongly tied.

May he rest in peace.

Researchers Explore Psychedelic Drugs for the Dying

Just in time for the boomers, the New York Times reports  How Psychedelic Drugs Can Help Patients Face Death.

Researchers acknowledge that it’s not clear how psilocybin reduces a person’s anxiety about mortality, not simply during the trip but for weeks and months following. “It’s a bit of a mystery,” Grob says. “I don’t really have altogether a definitive answer as to why the drug eases the fear of death, but we do know that from time immemorial individuals who have transformative spiritual experiences come to a very different view of themselves and the world around them and thus are able to handle their own deaths differently.”

“On psychedelics,” Halpern says, “you have an experience in which you feel there is something you are a part of, something else is out there that’s bigger than you, that there is a dazzling unity you belong to, that love is possible and all these realizations are imbued with deep meaning. I’m telling you that you’re not going to forget that six months from now. The experience gives you, just when you’re on the edge of death, hope for something more.”

Levon Helm, R.I.P.

The Band, Woodstock, N.Y.  From left, Richard Danko, Levon Helm, Richard Manuel, Garth Hudson and Robbie Robertson

Levon Helm, Drummer and Rough-Throated Singer for the Band, Dies at 71

Levon Helm, who helped to forge a deep-rooted American music as the drummer and singer for the Band, died on Thursday in Manhattan. He was 71 and lived in Woodstock, N.Y.
--
In Mr. Helm’s drumming, muscle, swing, economy and finesse were inseparably merged. His voice held the bluesy, weathered and resilient essence of his Arkansas upbringing in the Mississippi Delta.

Mr. Helm was the American linchpin of the otherwise Canadian group that became Bob Dylan’s backup band and then the Band. Its own songs, largely written by the Band’s guitarist, Jaime Robbie Robertson, and pianist, Richard Manuel, spring from roadhouse, church, backwoods, river and farm; they are rock-ribbed with history and tradition yet hauntingly surreal.

After the Band broke up in 1976, Mr. Helm continued to perform at every opportunity, working with a partly reunited Band and leading his own groups. He also acted in films, notably “Coal Miner’s Daughter” (1980). In the 2000s he became a roots-music patriarch, turning his barn in Woodstock — which had been a recording studio since 1975 — into the home of down-home, eclectic concerts called Midnight Rambles, which led to tours and Grammy-winning albums.
--
Mark Lavon Helm was born on May 26, 1940, in Elaine, Ark., the son of a cotton farmer with land near Turkey Scratch, Ark. In his 1993 autobiography, “This Wheel’s on Fire: Levon Helm and the Story of the Band,“ written with Stephen Davis, Mr. Helm said he was part Chickasaw Indian through his paternal grandmother. He grew up hearing live bluegrass, Delta blues, country and the beginnings of rock ’n’ roll; Memphis was just across the river.
--
His voice strengthened, and the core of his Midnight Ramble bands became a touring and recording group; it performed in 2009 at the 40th anniversary of the Woodstock Festival on its site in Bethel, N.Y., although Mr. Helm was unable to sing that night. Mr. Helm’s 2007 and 2009 studio albums, “Dirt Farmer” and “Electric Dirt,” won Grammy Awards, as did his 2011 “Ramble at the Ryman,” recorded live in Nashville and broadcast on PBS.

Nearly to the end, Mr. Helm spent his life on the bandstand. “If it doesn’t come from your heart,” he wrote, “music just doesn’t work.”

A wonderful video appreciation from the Wall St Journal's Jim Fusilli

London Telegraph obit

Regarded as one of rock’s greatest drumming polymaths — he also played mandolin, rhythm guitar and bass — Helm laid down a warm, dry “thuddy tom-tom” beat that drove The Band’s rootsy sound. With their stories of medicine shows and moonshine, many of his songs recalled his Deep South upbringing, notably The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down and Up on Cripple Creek.

Chicago Tribune obit

Levon Helm was the rarest of musical multi-taskers: an unflappable drummer and a singer who wrung soul out of every note. He also was a terrific team player and bandmate; he made the people around him sound good.

Helm was "the only drummer who could make you cry," critic Jon Carroll once wrote.

"It's nearly impossible to sing so smoothly and hit that hard at the same time," singer Neko Case wrote on Twitter this week.

In the Atlantic, Jack Hamilton says Levon Helm Was Perfect

Levon Helm, who died Thursday at age 71, might have been the greatest drummer to ever play rock and roll, a player of such boundless musicality and invention that his kit seemed to build and rebuild whole worlds. He was born in Marvell, Arkansas in 1940 and displayed astonishing talent from a young age. Upon graduating high school he joined the Hawks, a band fronted by rockabilly singer and fellow Arkansan Ronnie Hawkins. In 1959 Helm and Hawkins moved to Canada, and by the early 1960s had reassembled the Hawks with a collection of youngsters from southern Ontario: bassist Rick Danko, pianist Richard Manuel, organist Garth Hudson, and guitarist Robbie Robertson.

Gerard Vanderleun of the  American Digest appreciates the man who sang , 'Vergil Caine is the name and I served on the Danville Train.        Do not miss the first clip.

The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down

Death by Coca-Cola

Mother-of-eight died suddenly 'because she drank 18 pints of Coke a day'

A mother-of-eight died suddenly because she drank 18 pints of Coca-Cola a day for years, an inquest has heard.

Natasha Marie Harris would go 'crazy' if she ran out of the fizzy drink which she guzzled by the bottle.

The 30 year-old died suddenly at her home in Invercargill on New Zealand's south island.

Her partner, Christopher Hodgkinson claimed it was a result of drinking too much Coca-Cola.
--
Mr Hodgkinson told the court that she had been unwell up to a year before her death, including vomiting six times a week, but they believed it was caused by the stress of looking after her eight children and gynecological problems.

'She drank at least 10 litres a day,' he said. 'As a family we would buy four 2.5 litres a day, the maximum on special.
---

An autopsy showed Miss Harris had a diseased liver but the cause of death was undetermined.

Her partner said he had been told she had a heart aneurysm caused by too much Coke.

Medical evidence stated that the main finding of death was from a cardiac arrhythmia.

Dr Dan Mornin told the court Miss Harris probably had severe hypokalemia, a lack of potassium in the blood, relating to excessive consumption of soft-drink.

He said although it was difficult to confirm this from postmortem tests, it was consistent with her symptoms of tiredness and lack of strength and other cases of heavy soft-drink consumers.

Actress beheaded by fellow actors

Aspiring Bollywood actress beheaded and thrown into a tank 'by actors she befriended on film set'

Meenakshi Thapa, 26, was kidnapped and beheaded last month by Amit Jaiswal and his lover Preeti Surin in an attempt to receive a ransom payment.

She had met the pair on the set of Madhur Bhandarkar's yet-to-be-released film Heroine, where she had a bit-part role.

Thapa's mother is believed to have paid 60,000 (£730) Rupees for her release, but never saw her daughter again.

A detective told The Telegraph: 'They wanted to extort money from her family. They have confessed to the crime. She was strangled in a hotel and her body was hacked into pieces and thrown in a water tank.

'They threw her head from a moving bus while traveling back to Mumbai.'
---
Jaiswal and Surin confessed the crime to the Mumbai Police after their arrest on Saturday night and said they were taken in by Thapa's pretentious stories about her 'affluent family'.

Fakhra Younus who gave a face to thousands of Pakistani women disfigured by 'honor' attacks

The Telegraph has a powerful and moving obituary of Fakhra Younus who committed suicide at 33 after 39 major operations to save her face after she escaped the sustained abuse by her husband to return to her mother.  Feeling dishonored, her husband found her and attacked her with acid.

Fakhra Younus, the face of thousands of Pakistani women who are disfigured by men who want to restore their family honor.

May she rest in peace.

Death by Swan

Killer Swan Blamed for Man’s Drowning

An angry swan is being blamed for knocking a man out of his kayak in a Chicago pond and then continuing to attack until the man drowned.

Anthony Hensley, 37, of Villa Park, Ill., worked for a company called Knox Swan & Dog which used swans and dogs to keep geese off the condominium’s properties.

Hensley was in a kayak on the condo’s retention pond checking on the animals Saturday morning when one of the swans swam at him, causing him to fall out of his kayak into the water.

Frank Bilecki of the Cook County Sheriff’s Department, told ABCNews.com that Hensley struggled to stay above water.  Two witnesses saw Hensley resurface a few times in the pond and called police, but by the time crews arrived he had been fully submerged. He was not wearing a life vest, Bilecki said.


The Chicago Sun Times reported that while Hensley struggled in the water, the swan continued to harass Hensley.
Dive teams pulled Hensley, a husband and father of two, from the water, but he was pronounced dead at a hospital shortly after.

Investigators believe Hensley had traveled too close to the swan or swan’s nesting area, prompting the attack.  Family and friends are puzzled.

Four perfect questions for doctors when discussing the end of life

4 perfect questions when facing an end of life situation

She told Dr. Gawande that there are four questions she mentally carries around that guide her through the difficult but important conversations. And those conversations are not about sophisticated hard choices or last minute “epiphanies.” Instead, they are about the process of understanding hopes and fears.

Here are her four questions:

Do you understand your prognosis? What are your fears about what is to come? What are your goals as time runs out? What trade offs are you willing to make?

From atheist to believer in one near-death experience

A very clear and detailed recount of a near-death experience.

As I lay dying a voice said: ‘Let’s go’

Howard Storm was an atheist until he had an extraordinary near-death experience. After that, everything changed. Indeed, he is now a Christian minister. His book, My Descent into Death, shot to prominence globally after the novelist Anne Rice called it “a book you devour from cover to cover, and pass on to others”.

She added that “Storm was meant to write it and we were meant to read it.”

--

“I was lying there, when I heard a voice say: ‘Pray to God.’ I said: ‘I don’t pray. I don’t believe in God.’ Then, it came a second time; and a third: ‘Pray to God.’

“So, tried to think of a prayer. I started to mumble some things. A mention of God came into a few of these phrases. With each mention the people around me became very, very angry, and started screaming at me: ‘There is no God’ and ‘Nobody can hear you.’ It angered them so much that they were retreating from me. The mention of God was unbearable to them.” Encouraged, he mumbled other jumbled half-remembered phrases: “Glory, glory hallelujah, God Bless America, Our Father who art in heaven…”

“I felt that there was some kind of justice in the universe and that if you lead a miserable life you go down the sewer pipe of the universe into the septic tank. And that’s where I was. Yet I knew I hadn’t been flushed down into the deeper part, just yet.

“In that state of hopelessness I had a memory of myself as a child in Sunday school, singing ‘Jesus Loves Me’. I also had a vivid feeling of being a child and feeling that there was a wonderful God-man named Jesus who was my friend and who loved me. With real sincerity, I called out: ‘Jesus, please save me.’ With that, a tiny light appeared in the darkness and it came down over me. Out of this light came two hands. They reached down and touched me, and all the gore and filth that was me just fell away.

“In two or three seconds I was healed and filled with an indescribable love. In this world there is no equivalent to that kind of love. These arms picked me up and brought me into this brilliant light. I was held against the body of this man. I knew that he was Jesus. I cried.

“We were moving straight up, faster and faster towards the world of light. It dawned on me then that everything I had believed in was wrong, and I was going to where God lived. I thought: ‘They’ve made a terrible mistake. I don’t deserve this. I’m garbage.’”

Getting an obituary published in The New York Times

Someone Dies. But That Is Only the Beginning.

THEY pour in by the dozens every day: reports of the dead from near and far. Daniel Slotnik, a news assistant, handles them, including the heartfelt pleas from family members hoping their departed loved one will be elevated to that special form of life after death: an obituary in The New York Times.
--
as Mr. McDonald put it: “Death is just the news peg. It’s the lives that make it interesting.”
--
Appreciating a life in the context of its own time is essential. It was Mr. Vitello who wrote the Iowa butter-cow lady obit. He noted it wasn’t just her quirky story that made Norma Lyon interesting. He saw her as a woman of her time (born in 1929), with an artistic bent but few career paths open. So she became the official sculptor, in butter, of cows — and once, of a diorama of the Last Supper — at the Iowa State Fair.

Then she lived on in the Times obituary archive, where resides a most unusual collection of the powerful and the brilliant and those who were saved by a writer’s touch.

Things I didn't know about the Titanic

There are thousands who "Just found out Titanic really happened!'  Brittany tweets, "Nobody told me titanic was real:/I thought it was just another movie I haven't seen."

Father Thomas Byles, a Catholic priest who gave up two spots on a lifeboat to stay behind and hear confessions.

Agnes McCoy, one of the survivors, says that as the great ship sank, Fr. Byles “stood on the deck with Catholics, Protestants and Jews kneeling around him.”

“Father Byles was saying the rosary and praying for the repose of the souls of those about to perish,” she told the New York Telegram on April 22, 1912, according to the website devoted to his memory, FatherByles.com.

Did anti-Catholic sentiment help doom the unsinkable ship?

Harland and Wolff, the East Belfast shipyard  where the ship was manufactured, was notorious for not hiring Catholics.In the 1900’s the workforce was entirely  Protestant and virulently anti -Catholic.

“At Harland and Wolff it was not unknown for workers to paint on the sides of ships under construction the words “NO POPE” in letters ten feet high or more,” writes naval historian David Allen Butler.

There were widespread stories that each rivet hammered into the Titanic was accompanied by a ‘f.. the pope epithet

Daily Mail archives reveal how Britain learned of the Titanic disaster

The BBC News on Five Titanic myths spread by films

Neoneocon on the complex truth behind Class and gender on the Titanic

there is no escaping the conclusion that gender was an even greater factor than class, and that this was deliberate: Many first-class male passengers either elected to die in order that third class female passengers might live, or were forced by the crew to refrain from saving themselves at the expense of those third class women. That’s a different–and more accurate–narrative, although it’s not quite as politically correct. And it’s one that has gotten very little traction over the years.

He enjoyed 'booze, guns, cars and younger women until the day he died'

What you can say if you write your own obituary and pay for it.

He enjoyed 'booze, guns, cars and younger women until the day he died': Unusual obituary becomes internet sensation

Miami mourns its Cuban "Saint"

"A Holy Man, A 'Friend of God'" -- Miami Mourns Its Cuban "Saint"

Bishop Agustín Román -- the retired Miami auxiliary revered as the "godfather" of the Cuban exile community on these shores -- died Wednesday night at 83.

Expelled from the island at gunpoint alongside some 130 other clerics in the wake of the Castro Revolution, Román served as the exile's spiritual "beacon" in South Florida since the late 1960s, when he was charged with building the National Shrine to Cuba's patroness, the Caridad de Cobre. Named the US' first Cuban bishop in 1979, he continued to live in a one-room apartment at the Ermita -- built facing Cuba on Miami's Biscayne Bay -- following his 2003 retirement, and died there just before he was to teach an evening catechism class in a new facility on its grounds that bears his name.

Famed for an example of deep humility, tireless spirit and simple wisdom, the prelate (who never stopped perceiving himself as the "peasant" of his boyhood) made national headlines in 1987 after defusing an outbreak of riots in US prisons led by Cuban detainees. Having cared for many of the rioters' family members over the years of their confinement -- a witness that, so it's said, led the men to drop their weapons at the mere sight of him -- Román reportedly declined Hollywood overtures to buy the rights to the story for a film.

Miami Herald

"He was a saint to me," said Silvia Gonzalez, 66, who went to school with Román in Cuba and had since kept in touch. "He devoted his entire life to God. He never even took a vacation."

Gonzalez last saw Román at a Mass during Holy Week.

"We've lost someone who was tremendous," Gonzalez said, her eyes filling up with tears. "But from Heaven, he'll be with me -- and all Cubans."

A humble, gentle man with an iron will and a steadfast moral compass, he was viewed by older Cuban exiles as a champion of freedom and faith