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Some parts may not be included

If it’s never happened to you, it’s difficult to understand the tragedy of losing a loved one, especially in a death that requires an autopsy. The tension is terrible as you wait for the body to be returned from the authorities so that you can begin the process of burial or cremation. What if you discovered that parts of your loved one were missing? confiscated by the authorities?

This actually happened to the family of Brian Shipley of Staten Island who died in a 2005 car crash. Years after he was buried, a highschool classmate was doing a tour of the medical examiner’s office and found his friend’s brain preserved and proudly displayed in a jar. The family had no idea about this.

The Shipleys sued, as their beliefs require that the body be buried as a whole. The case has finally made it through the court. According to an article in the New York Daily News, the court decided it is legal for a medical examiner to keep body parts from an autopsy for their own use and that they don’t even have to tell the family.

Is it reasonable for a medical examiner to be able to keep a few souvenirs of their work? What do we say to people whose beliefs require a full accounting of the remains? Should people be compensated in some way when the state keeps a piece or two?

Personally, your author finds this pretty outrageous.

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Do you take this corpse…

By greyloch from Washington, DC, area, U.S.A. (The Corpse Bride) [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons
In Tim Burton’s film, Corpse Bride, Victor Van Dort finds himself unwittingly married to a woman who has been dead for years. Weird fantasy stuff, eh? Not necessarily. The practice of marrying the dead is quite real and more common than you might think.

Called posthumous marriage, the practice of marrying the deceased is legal in France, with similar customs in India, Sudan and China. In France, the custom dates back to World War I, where a few women were married by proxy to soldiers who had died a few weeks earlier. The living party must be able to demonstrate that there was clear intention for the couple to be married. The Guardian reports a posthumous wedding in France as late as 2009.

It’s not just women. The Daily Mail reports the wedding of Thai TV producer, Chadil Deffy, who married his girlfriend, killed in a car accident.

These stories are touching and heart-wrenching all at once. Such a ceremony could provide closure to someone who has been left behind, completing an important part of life that would otherwise have been left unfinished. Of course, it might go deeper. In my travels I had a fascinating conversation with a widow who told me she was still in regular contact with her husband’s spirit who stayed around her house and continued to participate in her life.

Posthumous marriage is not recognized in the United States, though there are cases where people have tried it anyway. Kirsten Smolensky examines Rights of the Dead in the Hofstra Law Review.

Have you been to a strange wedding? Share it with us.

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Hubble Captures a Smiley Face in Space

The Hubble has been exploring new galaxies and capturing the wonders of the unknown, but recently, it seemed to catch a smile, made out of distant galaxies.

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Each feature that make up the parts of the face, are individual galaxies, pulling themselves together into a ring like formation.

“In this special case of gravitational lensing, a ring – known as an Einstein Ring – is produced from this bending of light, a consequence of the exact and symmetrical alignment of the source, lens and observer and resulting in the ring-like structure we see here,” NASA wrote on its website.

There’s a metaphor in here somewhere…

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Meet the Woman Who Has Had More Than One Thousand Near Death Out of Body Experiences!

Beverly Gilmour of Lancashire claims to have had over one thousand out of body experiences that have all almost led her to her death.

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Beverly claims it all started back in 1987, and since then, has had three experiences a month, like clockwork.

“I have an out of body experience and my heart stops.” Claims Ms Gilmour. “Most people who go through an NDE – a near death experience – have them on the operating table or in a moment of trauma like a car accident. Most only have one such experience in a lifetime. But I have been having three a month since 1987. I was terrified at first and a friend suggested it was near death experience.”

She is registered as disabled, and is watched over by her two sons.

The real question is, do the experiences get boring when they happen that excessively?

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Healer Licks Eyeballs to Cure Patients

There’s no shortage of ‘miracle healers’ out there. None are given much credence by the scientific community. As the American Cancer Society has stated, “available scientific evidence does not support claims that faith healing can actually cure physical ailments.” But that doesn’t stop folks who have been seeking miraculous cures from the blessed for centuries upon centuries. Generally speaking it’s referred to as ‘the laying on of hands’. But one woman in Bosnia lays on her tongue. On eyeballs.

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Hava Cebic lives in a small village in northern Bosnia, is 77 years old, and folks come far and wide to have her lick their eyes. She claims she can cure about anything with her ‘golden tongue’, that she hopes will be preserved after her death (which probably isn’t that far away; she’s 77) to keep helping people.

When Hava was a little girl, she discovered she had the power to help when her brother complained of dry eyes, and jokingly she held them down and licked them. When he claimed he could see better after that, she knew she had a strange gift. Trying it with others (that would have been an interesting conversation to be a fly on the wall for) she found that her lick could cure allergies, dry and tired eyes, conjunctivitis, ocular hypertension and could even relieve the effects of other more serious eye conditions.

“Now, whenever anyone has something stuck in their eye or whatever, they come to me,” said Hava. “They come from different towns and villages and in a minute or two, their problem is solved. But I always make sure I wash my tongue in alcohol before or after an eye lick.”

Hava never asks for anything for her help but people give sizable donations anyway. But I gotta ask: if the cure is the tongue, why does it specifically only seem to work with eyes? Did she try licking other body parts? I’m not trying to be risque or anything, but seriously, even though the scientific method is clearly not involved in this situation, a little trial and error seems like it would have been called for. Still, it’s all kind yuck. I’d have some about of trepidation letting a 77 year old woman lick me anywhere much less my eyeballs. Just not my kind of kink.

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Dead Grandmother Sends “Selfie” from Hell

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This is the picture that Gina Mihai of Romania received on her cell phone that she believes was sent by her dead grandmother. “When I switched the phone on I was horrified to see my dead grandmother’s face. She had what looked like a snake around her neck, and the whole image looked as if it had been taken through a hole, like it was shot through a tear in the fabric that separates the living from the dead. I took it to a fortune teller who told me that my grandmother was sending me a message from the other side, the snake around her neck was a symbol of the fact that she was being punished in the other life for some sin. By contacting us she was telling us that if we were to pray for her, we would still be able to save her soul.”

In Romania once a year there is a feast called “The Service of Alms” where Romanians give food to their ancestors in the graveyard. Gina apparently hadn’t made the effort since her grandmother died 3 years previously and received the photo while she was making doughnuts. Since then, she’s been bringing doughnuts every day out to grammie’s grave to placate her afterlife tormenters. A relative said, “The village priest told me that we need to do 40 Days of Alms to make up for those that we missed and we are doing it now. We want to help her soul to be saved.”

Hmm, I wonder if there’s an instagram filter for hell? Someone might want to get on that. My first step would have been to check to see if I had a trade-in available with my phone contract. Either way, free ghost doughnuts! It seems win-win to me.

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Millionaire Guru Kept Frozen by Followers Who Argue: Dead or Asleep?

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Although doctors in India say that wealthy guru Shri Ashutosh Maharaj is definitely dead after a heart attack, his followers aren’t so sure. They say he may be ‘clinically dead’, but they believe he is spiritually alive and in deep meditation. Some of his followers were quoted as saying, “This is nothing unusual. Medical science does not understand things like yogic science.” and “He is not dead. His holiness will return to life as soon as he feels it is right. We will preserve his body until then.”

And sure enough, the head of the Divine Light Awakening Mission, who is worth 100 million pounds, has been put in a freezer by his followers, who say it won’t harm him since he was used to meditating in the deep cold of the Himalayas. But relatives of the guru claim the followers are just trying to keep control of his money. A court has been asked to investigate for the family who want his body released for cremation.

In his follower’s defense, there have been examples of holy men in recent history who could slow down their body functions to an incredible level through concentration. However, I can’t find any case where anyone could actually stop their heart, at least to the level where modern doctors couldn’t detect life. I wonder how long it will take for the oversized freezer’s electric bills to run through the guru’s fortune?

 

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SENATOR HAS ANGELIC VISITATION FOLLOWING STROKE

Senator Mark Kirk claims he was visited by angels while in the hospital.
Senator Mark Kirk claims he was visited by angels while in the hospital.

Each year, millions of people worldwide report what has commonly become known as Near-Death Experiences, or NDEs. Add Illinois Senator Mark Kirk to that growing list of people who claim to have had an otherworldly experience with what they can only describe as angels.

For Mark Kirk, there was no white light, no tunnel.

What Illinois’ junior U.S. senator experienced was three angels standing at the foot of his bed.

“You want to come with us?” Kirk was asked.

“No,” he told them. “I’ll hold off.”

The Highland Park Republican, who plans to return to the Senate when Congress convenes Thursday, recounted the story in his first in-depth interview since he suffered a massive stroke nearly a year ago.

Awakening from what he says might have been a dream, a side effect of medication or a near-death experience, Kirk found himself lying in a hospital bed in Northwestern Memorial Hospital’s Intensive Care Unit, hooked up to monitors and tubes.

He had no way of immediately knowing what had transpired in the days after he suffered an ischemic stroke on Jan. 21, 2012; that doctors had put him in a coma and performed several surgeries, temporarily removing a 4-by-8 inch portion of skull to allow his brain to swell and heal.

What Kirk did know was how close he had been to death.

“A thing goes off in your head that this is the end,” he remembered.

Kirk’s life and outlook would be dramatically changed, the stroke serving as a defining moment that he said deepened his faith and altered his sense of purpose.

Sitting at the dining room table of his suburban townhouse, his left arm slack, Kirk gestures emphatically with his right hand as he says the experience made him resolve “to never, ever give up.”

He is determined “to just keep going, even when things feel like we’re at the end here. Which is what the ICU was like for me.”

What do you think?  Did Senator Kirk actually have a visitation by three angels as he lay semi-concious in his hospital bed? Or could this have been merely a hallucination created by his brain due to the drugs he was being administered? Or perhaps it was a combination of both?  Maybe our brain isn’t a transmitter, but rather a receiver, and when certain factors affect our brain function, we are actually able to perceive things that normally we would not?

Have you ever had a Near Death Experience of your own? If so, please feel free to share your experience here.

READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE:   Senator Kirk speaks for the first time about his stroke

 

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THE MAYAN APOCALYPSE DIDN’T HAPPEN, SO IS THIS THE NEW AGE? IT CAN BE.

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Many people believed the end of the world would come on December 21, 2012, the date that marked the end of the Mayan calendar. That date has come and gone, and I can’t help but wonder what all the die-hard Mayan Apocalypse believers are thinking now.

There were two general ways of thinking about how this end would come: it would either be a horrific doomsday scenario that would be the end of all life as we know it, or it would mark the beginning of a new age of human enlightenment and responsibility.

One idea dwelt on the negative, the other positive.

So since the world didn’t end, where does that leave us now?

Since several days have passed and still no apocalypse in sight, I’d like to make a proposition to you, the person reading this, and to myself as well. I propose that you and I abandon all ideologies that promote fear, anger, hatred, and ridicule. Instead, let’s make a daily, conscious decision to live both our lives as positive and loving as we can be.

And how can we do this?  There are two things that we must remember and embrace with the core of our being.

My high school track coach, Mr. Tintle, instilled in me one of the basic tenets of my being that I hold to this day. That is, one must have PMA, short for Positive Mental Attitude. With a positive mental attitude, you can achieve the impossible.

My other basic tenet is I live by the Golden Rule. I try not to do anything to anyone that I wouldn’t want done to myself. It’s that simple.

Keeping a Positive Mental Attitude and following the Golden Rule.

Adopt it. Embrace it. Teach it to your kids.

And with these two tenets in mind, I’d like to make a call to action to you and myself as well. Let’s do something in the world today, right now, that will make a positive difference. I’m writing an open letter to the world, now it’s your turn. What will you do?

Want to fight global warming and climate change? Plant a tree in your backyard. Can’t stand the partisanship that has taken over politics?  Turn off the news and volunteer in your township.  Upset about kids shooting other kids? Become a Big Brother or Big Sister to a troubled child… or simply a high school track coach.

The point I’m trying to make is, no matter how big the problems of our world seem to be… no matter what the difficulties we face… even the smallest, most seemingly insignificant action we take can make all the difference in the world.

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To the Mayans a Baktun was a measurement of time lasting approximately 400 years. December 21, 2012 marked the end of the 13th Baktun on the Mayan calendar, and the beginning of a new one.  Descendants of the Mayans never believed the world was going to end on that date; instead, they look at the 14th Baktun as a period of hope and change.

So as we begin another year and another Baktun, I’d like to propose not just a new year’s resolution, but a “New Baktun Resolution” we all can adopt (after all, the next one won’t be for another 400 years). Let’s take this opportunity to leave all the hatred, negativity and baggage the human race has been carrying around with us for all the millennia we’ve walked this great earth and leave it in the past. Let’s take control of our destiny and stop living in fear. Let us start the new Bakun as a loving, more mature, and enlightened human race.

Not the end of the world, but the beginning of a new one.

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BOY SAYS LAST WORDS AT HIS OWN FUNERAL

Funerals are terrible, this one was terrifying!

While usually a somber and quiet affair, funerals give us a chance to say one last goodbye… you just never expect the person the funeral is for to say something too!

Daily Mail writes:

A two-year-old boy sat up in his coffin and asked for water before laying back down again lifeless, according to a Brazilian news website.

In a case that seems almost too incredible to be true, ORM claimed that Kelvin Santos stopped breathing during treatment for pneumonia at a hospital in Belem, northern Brazil. He was declared dead at 7.40pm on Friday and his body was handed over to his family in a plastic bag.

The child’s devastated family took him home where grieving relatives held a wake throughout the night, with the boy’s body laid in an open coffin.

But an hour before his funeral was due to take place on Saturday the boy apparently sat up in his coffin and said: ‘Daddy, can I have some water?’ The boy’s father, Antonio Santos, said: ‘Everybody started to scream, we couldn’t believe our eyes. Then we thought a miracle had taken place and our boy had come back to life.

‘Then Kelvin just laid back down, the way he was. We couldn’t wake him. He was dead again. Mr Santos rushed his son back to the Aberlardo Santos hospital in Belem,where the doctors reexamined the boy and confirmed that he had no signs of life.

He said: ‘They assured me that he really was dead and gave me no explanation for what we had just seen and heard.’

Read more at dailymail.co.uk