Dream within a Dream: Countdown to Halloween (Day 16)

And now for something very different.

Definitely something serious.

Death is a subject I wanted to touch on this Halloween--it being the day on which the world of the living and the dead are said to cross over like a venn diagram.

Below is a photo of Evelyn McHale shortly after her death.  It's morbid, sure, but it's fitting for this time of year, this month in particular and the day we are counting down (or is it up?) to.

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“The Most Beautiful Suicide”

Robert Wiles’ photograph is one of the most famous depictions of suicide ever made.

On May Day, just after leaving her fiancé, 23-year-old Evelyn McHale wrote a note. 'He is much better off without me ... I wouldn't make a good wife for anybody,' ... Then she crossed it out. She went to the observation platform of the Empire State Building. Through the mist she gazed at the street, 86 floors below. Then she jumped. In her desperate determination she leaped clear of the setbacks and hit a United Nations limousine parked at the curb. Across the street photography student Robert Wiles heard an explosive crash. Just four minutes after Evelyn McHale's death Wiles got this picture of death's violence and its composure.

—LIFE Magazine

“Take this kiss upon the brow!

And, in parting from you now,

Thus much let me avow-

You are not wrong, who deem

That my days have been a dream;

Yet if hope has flown away

In a night, or in a day,

Ina a vision, or in none,

Is it therefore the less gone?

All that we see or seem

Is but a dream within a dream.”

—Edgar Allan Poe