Funky Winkerbean

For those of you who are not Funky Winkerbean fans, you are missing out on a great comic strip. This strip is a bit out of the ordinary, because it deals with some fairly heavy topics like divorce, alcoholism, and lately, breast cancer. What does this have to do with CHL? Well, in my CHL course, one of the books that I use for background material is Dr. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’ book On Death and Dying. In this book, Dr. Kubler-Ross deals primarily with the emotions associated with dying from cancer, which is the subject of the Funky Winkerbean strip of the past several weeks (Lisa Moore died of breast cancer in Thursday’s strip).

Dr. Kubler-Ross found that the same stages of grief attend just about any traumatic event (even minor ones), and I go over these with my students as background for part of what they may be up against if they are ever involved in a shooting.