Thank you for sticking with the Parapsychology Online Blog for the last couple of years. I have been amazed and grateful at how often folks check to see what’s up. I’m going to talk about the recent change in the ParapsychologyOnline YouTube channel playlists, and then talk a bit about the last seven months of the life of my late husband, Carlos S. Alvarado. Following that, I will finish the blog with some information on the upcoming ParaMOOC2023.
The Playlists
The last time I posted to the blog was in October 2020. At that point, Carlos and I had planned on doing one of our free online courses in the spring of 2021, but that was not to be.
A couple of days ago, I rearranged the home page of our ParapsychologyOnline YouTube channel to include two new playlists. The first is “In Memory of Carlos S. Alvarado (1955-2021),” in which two videos exist. The first one is “The Celebration of Carlos S. Alvarado’s Life and Work,” organized by Professors Wellington Zangari and Fatima Machado of the InterPsi research unit in the Department of Psychology at the University of São Paulo in Brazil. The online event, held in September of 2022, was moderated by Dr. Gerhard Mayer of the Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental Health (IGPP) in Freiburg, Germany. Several of Carlos’s close colleagues and friends, and his younger brother, gave talks about his life and work. There were video tributes, a PowerPoint of comments by others who couldn’t join us, and an open mic at the end of the celebration.
The second video is “The Bill Roll Lecture, 2022,” which took place on March 12th, 2022, at the University of West Georgia and online. I gave a talk called “Made Out of Wholecloth: The Life and Work of Carlos S. Alvarado, Ph.D.,” which uses the image of an embroidered quilt made from a single length of cloth. The quilt’s beauty and complexity and the quilter’s skilled attention are a perfect metaphor for Carlos’ life and work.
The second playlist, “Carlos S. Alvarado’s Lectures, Interviews, and Other Videos,” has 35 YouTube videos. They cover a period from the late 1990s through 2020. These are drawn from various other channels, as well as from the ParapsychologyOnline channel and my original channel, Nan Zingrone. They range from educational lectures, workshops, and courses, to interviews of Carlos, interviews Carlos conducted, and other events that were filmed or took place online. I am sure there will be more to come in this playlist.
Carlos’s Journey
Carlos had health issues for a month or so when I last posted on this blog, but those problems escalated between October 2020 and January 2021. Carlos had surgery in mid-January 2021 to remove tumors on his brain that had been discovered a week earlier. He was diagnosed with glioblastoma, an aggressive brain cancer, in early February and entered treatment. While the surgery and the treatments alleviated his symptoms for some months, he passed away in July 2021.
I was told after the diagnosis that it wasn’t unusual for glioblastoma patients to become angry and suspicious, but that did not happen with Carlos. He stayed the same kind and caring person that he had always been, making friends with his doctor and the hospital staff, from nurses to cleaners, and especially the folks who helped after he left the hospital and when he opted for hospice at home a month before he passed away. His greatest worry was not how long he might live but about the people he had been mentoring and helping and then about the lives of his caregivers. Those of us around him throughout the process were blessed by his concern and affection for us.
Whenever I feel his loss most keenly, I remind myself of how he was during his last months and the 38 years of happiness I had as his friend, colleague, and wife. I stopped doing much of anything on our projects during his illness and for many months after his passing. Hence, the a long gap between my last post and this one.
The Reappearance of the ParaMOOC Series
Our colleagues and close friends, Bryan Williams of the Psychical Research Foundation and Natasha Chisdes of the Chizfilm website, have stepped up to help restart the ParaMOOC courses. Lisette Coly of the Parapsychology Foundation returned to help support this year’s series of The Parapsychology Research and Education online course. The nickname of the course — ParaMOOC — uses the acronym MOOC which means “massively open online course.” While our approach has never been that “massive,” it is open and accessible online. I will upload another post with registration instructions and information on the schedule and speakers in a couple of days.
Carlos and I founded the ParaMOOC series in 2015 after hosting an online conference in November 2014. Back then, only a few of the primary websites of the field were uploading materials to the internet. We not only hoped to provide a more detailed online look at active researchers’ work but also to inspire our colleagues to start doing the same. Oh boy, did they pick up that torch almost immediately! Nowadays students of and researchers in our field are spoiled for choice online.
The ParaMOOC series, as it resurrects itself, is focused on a topic that Carlos chose for the 2021 ParaMOOC that never was, “Ghosts, Poltergeists, and Hauntings.” In all the earlier iterations of the course, Carlos was the guy who did the curriculum building and invited the speakers. I took over the pragmatic things like putting the biographical and presentation summaries together, scheduling the speakers, and handling the marketing.
This year, Bryan, Natasha, and I have moved the ParaMOOC to March in honor of Carlos’ birth month. Bryan took over both the building of the curriculum, the scheduling, the PowerPoints, and the marketing images. Natasha has taken up the registration procedures and the shepherding of the marketing, as well as will be involved in beefing up all the descriptions below the videos we post. I anticipate showing up to be the moderator of most of the sessions. So, speaking of picking up the torch! What a team I have!
Registration will be open throughout the course, and the videos of the presentations will be posted to the Parapsychology Foundation YouTube channel in the ParaMOOC 2023 playlist and mirrored on the ParaMOOC 2023 Playlist on ParapsychologyOnline. But more about that in the next blog post.
Today, my goal was to tell you guys why there hadn’t been much posted in the last two years, give you that glimpse into the two playlists that honor Carlos’s life and work, as well as start the conversation on the ParaMOOC2023.
See you soon!