Julia K Cole

For me, October is the best month of the year.  It is the month that brings us one of my favorite celebrations...Halloween!  But over the years I have started enjoying another celebration... Dia de los Muertos !  The day of the dead.     Don't let the name fool you.  Dia de los Muertos   is not meant to be sad or frightening. On the contrary!  It is an uplifting time to remember loved ones who have died.   It is celebrated with festivities, lots of goodies and the coming together of friends, families and loved ones. It is a time of reverence. Or as Cesareo Moreno, Chief curator at Chicago's National of Mexican Art stated so eloquently...   "Day of the Dead is a very sacred day. It's a day in which we welcome back the memory and the souls of those people who are still — are still — an important part of our family, even though they many not be physically present"    (Click HERE to read his interview with Chicago...

There have long been stories of near-death or out-of-body experiences but, as researchers at the University of Southampton in the U.K. wryly note, "objective studies on these experiences are limited." So they decided to investigate whether these claims corresponded with actual events. Their conclusion: It does seem to be possible for some form of awareness to happen for up to a few minutes after death, they report in a study published in the journal  Resuscitation . Beginning in 2008, scientists looked at 2,060 people who went into cardiac arrest (which they describe as "biologically synonymous with death") at 15 different hospitals in the U.S., U.K., and Austria. Of the 330 people who survived, about 40% recalled awareness while they were clinically dead. (The lead doctor tells the  Telegraph   that number could be higher if some of those people's memories weren't dulled by drugs or sedatives.) Of those, 46% had memories not commonly associated with ...