When I was nine, I watched a friend get hit by a car and die. It was a particularly gruesome death, witnessed from 10 feet away and my world changed forever. One moment before, death was seeing my Grandmother lying in her casket. The next moment Death was staring at me from my friend’s destroyed face, his mangled body lying on the hot asphalt with a pool of blood growing beneath him.
Recurring nightmares, I could hardly eat, traffic frightened me, I stopped riding my bike and my grades in school took a serious dive into negative land. I overheard my parents talking about me and they were concerned. In 1963 child counselors were few and far between but they found one that agreed to take me. He was a good man but when I look back, it seems he was struggling to reach a 9 year old with a fear of death and a too-young sense of mortality.
He prescribed some pills that blanketed my brain in a hazy/fuzzy fog. Not sure but I think they were zombie pills. I stopped taking them after three days. I would just flush them so my parents would think I was still taking them. I slowly emerged from the gray realm of shock and despair, only to discover that I was living in a tunnel. It was as if I was standing inside a culvert, 10 feet from the opening. So, I adjusted to it and went on with being a nine year old.
I lived inside that tunnel for decades, never knowing the impact it had on my life. I was kicked out of the Marines because they said, “You are not suited to military life.” I fought; I would steal the OD’s jeep at 2 in the morning and go joy-riding and just became a general screw-up that didn’t care what the punishment was. If it wasn’t Death, I wasn’t afraid of it. That’s when I started to ‘Court Death’.
I have been in several high speed motorcycle wrecks, numerous horrendous car crashes, terrible job-site accidents that some didn’t survive and I have stared down the barrel of several firearms… a few that I was holding. Every time I faced Death, it would stare at me from those empty black hollows and grin, and would whisper “Not yet.” So I upped the ante and started shooting heroin and meth. After five years, I had OD’d twice and never went to the hospital. I would just wake up with the needle dangling from my arm, faint laughter echoing in my mind.
At a Narcotics Anonymous meeting, I told my sponsor the ‘life-story’ and he thought for a moment, then wrote down a number on his business card. All he said was “If you want to get better, call this number… tomorrow.” It was the number of his psychologist and it was the start of my long journey out of the tunnel. PTSD, she said. Not an easy fix, she said. Well that was quite the understatement and no, I’m not ‘fixed’. I’m better than I was and that’s a good place to be.
I’m 60 now, the dreams of Death still come by like some unwanted visitor and I know the feeling of mortality much more intimately. Friends have died by their own hand, from bad choices and accidents. All of my birth family and adopted family have died; co-workers have been killed on the job and by other various methods.
I still ride a motorcycle; I retreat into the tunnel occasionally when Life has overwhelmed me, my anger has receded to a manageable level, I kicked hard drugs in ’89 and I now find myself surrounded with reminders of Death. I have an animal skull collection, a (legal) human skull and numerous glass and ceramic skulls. I wear 5 different skull rings, many of my shirts have skulls and even my PJ pants have small skulls on them.
“What, you got a death wish or something, with all these skulls floating around?” a friend asked me once. I just smiled and thought about the question for a moment.
“No, my friend, I don’t. I neither seek out, nor fear Death. I have stared square into its eyes and laughed. I have felt its hand upon my shoulder and felt its breath on my neck. When I die, I will greet it as an old friend. Death is just another path, one we all must take.” I lifted my beer and said “To Life!”
