Gaby Habashi passed away on January 4, 2021
Trager International joins in remembering Gaby as she was. We have combined messages from our Board, the Education Department, her closest colleague in the Marketing Department and her home Trager Association in Egypt and UK.
TI’s Board:
Dear Trager colleagues,
It is with a heavy heart that we are announcing Gaby Habashi’s passing. Gaby was part of the Trager International Board of Directors from 2017 and her passing is a great loss to us and the Trager community. Through those years the Board has spent many precious hours in virtual meetings with her and we had the chance to collaborate in person on three occasions. We are sharing this eulogy with you as a team and below, as individuals.
Gaby was determined and focused to promote the Trager Approach in the world, and she worked hard towards that goal. She never lost her desire to bring out the quality and uniqueness of our work, up until her last weeks on this earth. When she learned about the spread of her cancer, she clearly expressed her desire to continue leading the marketing department to ensure a smooth transition. We are sharing this, not to encourage putting a job or mandate above one’s health, but simply to highlight her attention towards others - the people she respected, loved and cared about. This is what we will remember from her, her deep humanity.
Gaby, thank you for sharing your vibrant energy with us. You will be missed.
- Trager International Board of Directors and Administrative Secretary - France Fréchette, Patricia Lawrence, Jenny Hare, Joop Töller, Joseph Rodin, Lia Goldberg and Chris Bruels
Personally from each Board member
In 2016 I volunteered to join Gaby’s international marketing group and met her online then. I had just become a Trager Practitioner but I was passionate about it and just wanted to work with her straight away. I then met her in 2017 in Torino, Italy at the annual general meeting. She was so elegant, graceful, beautiful and funny! She was energized and she so much wanted to drive the marketing efforts. Nothing could have steered her away from her goal to spread the Trager Approach into the world. I was inspired! We have spent so many hours together in meetings since then, I couldn’t even count those. Gaby was sensitive and she picked up signals from far away, simply by looking at our faces on her computer screen.
She reached out when one of us didn’t feel well. She wanted us all to stick together, she wanted us all to be well, to be respected. She always got our back. Gaby is a model to me, a model of what humanity should be. Thank you Gaby for having shared your life force with me. - France Fréchette
I have known Gaby for about 20 years - from the days when she was a student and I was her sometime Tutor. Gaby was always eager to learn and to improve herself and never seemed to miss an opportunity to learn and improve. She was passionate about what she believed in, and one of those things was the possibility of Trager being marketed throughout the world. I can visualise her in heaven ‘spreading the word’ - and telling St. Peter about her marketing plan and what needs to happen! Dear Gaby, we will miss you. I will miss you. I will miss your commitment, your generosity, and your support. I thank God for the opportunity of having known you and for our many years of friendship. - Patricia Lawrence
I met Gaby in June 2019 in the Düsseldorf meeting. We shared a bedroom, and shared far more than just that. It was a wonderful opportunity to get to know Gaby. She immediately impressed me, with her free spirit and sharp mind, her beautifully sensitive and caring commitment to Trager and to all. It is thanks to her that I got involved in the TI website commission, and slowly into further involvement in Trager International. She was always attentive and encouraging. Her great enthusiasm and passion was contagious. I will truly miss her beautiful presence and heartful soul. - Lia Goldberg
I met Gaby about 2014 at the International Conference in Maryland. I remembered her heartfelt way of connecting, friendly, with interest, enthusiasm and plenty of eye contact. My next opportunity to relate with Gaby was on the TI board some years later. While she’d seem to become more inward, her caring heart and thoughtfulness were always present. Trager and all of us were blessed to receive her energies and devotion. - Joseph Rodin
We were and still are deeply saddened by our beautiful Gaby passing away. We knew that she was seriously ill, but her passing still took us by surprise. Farewell Gaby and rest in peace, We will be thinking of you while continuing your work for the international Trager community where you had to leave off. Which means that you will continue to be in our thoughts more than often and that feels good. - Joop Töller and your colleagues and friends of The Netherlands Trager Association
I will miss Gaby’s passion for life, friends and family. And Trager. She donated so much energy to us all, in all of the various ways that she participated. Lately, she often felt overwhelmed by how much she had committed to but she still had time to communicate support to me and others.
Gaby could hold what could seem like contradictions, as she regularly attended meditation retreats despite her apparent lack of focus. I will also miss her poise and flair for clothes. - Chris Bruels
TI’s Marketing Department
Dear friends,
Although I knew Gaby only in the last few years, I can say with confidence that she was deeply passionate about making Trager known, making useful contributions to the organization, and leaving a legacy. This was evident even towards the last weeks of her life as she was checking-in and providing guidance, even whilst in the midst of her treatment in South Africa and after. This untimely departure can only offer a perspective (at least as I see it), of whether those of us who seem as if we'll stay for a little longer, are today happy with what would be our own legacies should our time come sooner than later.
You who are the leaders of Milton's gift to humanity may consider taking this reflective opportunity to look through and beyond the same old and known "challenges", and make it a priority to spread the gift through fresh points of view. Can 2021 be the year where the "why" Trager exists can lead and inform the "how"? Amongst all the things that were meaningful to Gaby in her last moments in our realm, Trager was one for sure. Not only was she clear and loud about it in life, it makes sense because for (I dare say) most Trager people, it is a world-view; and as such it must be offered in as many ways as there are ways of receiving it.
You, who are the leaders, and you who are the carriers of this legacy, can you please help us up-and-coming and aspiring facilitators of Milton's gift, expand and imprint it so that we can all have that on our list of meaningful things and gaze at it with a smile knowing that it will live on? Here's to such hope in 2021. - Fernando Rojas
TI’s Education Department
Gaby Habashi – originally from Germany, living in Cairo, Egypt – passed away last Sunday night, on January the 4th 2021. She had been suffering from a devastating illness for quite some time, which took everything from her. Our thoughts and hearts go out to her husband, her children and grandchild and her family and close friends.
In TI’s Education Department we knew Gaby to be omnipresent in many different aspects of our organisation. She had strong ideas on what to do, to take Trager into the world and make it known to the general public. And she knew how to initiate these ideas into projects, involving many people working together. Our beautiful new TI website being one of those projects.
Specifically in our department, she was part of the Education Committee and the International Tutor Committee for six years and she continued to serve TI by stepping up to the Board as Marketing Director.
We will miss her sometimes chaotic ways of doing things, always leading towards a kick start of a project. She made a difference!!
In loving memory,
The Education Committee and Education Secretary - Jenny Hare, Patricia Lawrence, Joe Rodin, Sharon King, Jan Fogel, Jessie Kuipers & Joan Muller
TI’s National Association - Egypt (affiliated with TUK)
In the autumn it seems Gaby had a resurgence of her cancer, this time in her liver. She chose not to take chemo but go a more naturalistic way of treatment which in the end proved all too much for her.
Gaby’s enthusiasm for life and living was an inspiration to many of us. She had many facets and skills that she shared generously and made a difference to many people’s lives, especially in Cairo.
Trager Egypt will miss her enormously as her positive attitude, multiple skills and competence were an integral part of our existence.
Gaby’s final resting place is the Coptic Cemetery in Cairo. - Katriona Shawki
Trager UK
About 20 years ago, Egypt became affiliated with Trager UK and some of our UK trainings and gatherings became enlivened by the presence of our new friends. Among them was Gaby, bringing with her, her exuberance, enthusiasm, her lovely smile and Good Heart. As we all progressed through the trainings, some becoming Tutors and then being involved with International Trager affairs, Gaby was there, full of ideas and commitment and her vision of informing people all over the world about Trager.
She will be greatly missed both as a colleague and a dear friend,
Jenny Hare, Mary Hall, Susanne Koelmel, Jayne Cockburn and Trager UK