So it's Halloween and I thought I would share a fitting anecdote:

A few weeks ago I had the unfortunate duty of accompanying my big sister Angélica to the funeral of one of her best friends. This poor woman's demise is sad and deserve a long entry for some other time, suffice it to say she died out of medical complications provoked by Hospital negligence.

So the week after the funeral my sister contacts me over Messenger, and from what she wrote she seemed pretty upset; she told me that she had just seen her friend's profile appear online on her list of contacts, which obviously made quite an impression, to put it mildly!

She tried to send her friend a message, writing 'Are you there?', but there was no reply. After a few minutes her friend's profile went offline, and by that time my sister was REALLY scared; that's when she contacted me.

So at first I didn't know what to think. Could it be that 'the spirit' of this person was trying to reach my sister with the help of the Internet? That my sister's frightened state somehow 'disrupted' any chance of effective communication? Or could there be a more trivial and mundane explanation —namely, that someone was using her dead friend's PC which had an auto-programmed logging in with the Messenger application.

As days went by, we both learned that the mundane explanation was the right one. Angélica found out that it had been one of her friend's sisters the one that had turned on the computer, and that the reason why she hadn't replied to my sister's messages was because it wasn't allowed by their mourning traditions —My sister's friend was Jewish.

So, even though this particular ghost story was a dud, what kept me thinking about it was my sister's reaction of fear. Why should she react in such a way, when in life she loved her friend so much? My mom told us that when her mother died, one night while she was dreaming —or maybe she was in a state between vigil and dream?— she distinctly felt her presence and her voice calling her name. This gave her such a scare that she immediately woke up, but later questioned her own emotional reaction; she loved and missed my grandmother very much, so why should she be afraid if my granny came to say good bye for the last time?

I suppose that our fear of the unknown —and in this life, death is still THE biggest unknown— blocks away our normal emotions and leaves only and irrational & primordial terror, regardless of our feelings for our dearly departed. If I had that experience myself, I wonder how I'd react: with fear, or curiosity?

How about you?

I'll tell you one thing: When MY time comes, I sure hope I'll be able to send farewell messages to all my TDG friends out there. So in case any future postings from me are a little vague and incomprehensible, with too much emphasis about "The Light" and all that... you'll know why ;-)

Happy Halloween, and Feliz Día de Muertos!! ^_^