The very next day I receive word that my father makes a miraculous recovery. My visit to his deathbed is to be put off. The next week my dad calls me to come down to Duncan to spend time with him. I will never forget his stamina as he boomed lumber while on top of the truck. It seems he is in the best shape of his life. We are in Ft. Worth one day buying lumber. Afterwards, we go to a filling station to receive service on the truck before heading home. While there I feel a strange yearning to go under an adjacent Texaco sign. Once under that sign I look back at my dad who is now under the canopy of the station. His head is in his hands. Suddenly, I feel caught up as if leaving my body and ascending. When this happens the colors of my surroundings seem to lose their hue. There is this overwhelming sense that I must never doubt what is happening; it can be described as total fear. Looking upward I see a figure dressed in white, instead of being dressed in a red and purple robe like when I am ten years old. The figure asks, in my mind, if I want to stay or come with him. He said this as I look to the north and see a casket with a body yet unknown. I respond that I want to stay on Earth and tell others. Suddenly, having second thoughts, I tell him that I want to go with him. He then tells me, in my mind, I must stay with my first answer. Immediately, I descend, and as I do the hue of the earth’s colors return. I reenter my body below. The painful feeling at this point I describe like a watermelon entering a small pop bottle.
On the way back to Duncan I tell my dad of the experience. He replies in his usual serious but funny manner. “Don’t be goofy, Son.” He then adds, “Never tell anyone what you just told me, they would think you are crazy. I believe you, Son. But no one else would.” I spend a few more days with him and Brenda before returning home to Judy in Oklahoma City.
My father, Don, lives nine more months and dies too young at 58-years-old in January of ’78. Part of me goes into the grave with him. It seems my mind stays there with him for thirteen years. Until I finally realize time and death waits for no man, and it can come at any time.
My next search for peace and self-respect involves a career in social work. I take the state test and make 80%. This high score surprises me since I don’t think I have any social etiquette and certainly don’t feel I could help anyone with anything. Giving it a try is perhaps what I need to give me social skills. I like my job very much, but even with all the concentration it takes with Food Stamps, Medicaid, Daycare, and Emergency programs, there is an emptiness in me. I still do not believe in divorce. Feeling alone, I find cold words to comfort me and decide to write words down on paper instead of saying them out loud. I end up writing a book of seventeen short stories including a western and a bedtime story called “Through a Dark Glass”. I write novels named Heavymist, which is about how depression feels, Somewhere on the Edge about me and my siblings’ plight, and Dead Letter Cases about a detective named Steve Branson who solves cases no one else wants. I even write a science fiction novel called The Replay Man that never sells like the others. The main thing is now my thoughts have an outlet.
In the middle of this new validation, and after twenty-three years of marriage, my wife wants a divorce. This devastates me as I am now feeling a renewed sense to make our marriage work. Again, I am too late and me trying so hard scares Judy. She just doesn’t care anymore.
I am certainly not proud of all the things I do and see, and hear, out of my sheer desperation and hurt. I feel compelled to relive things of the past. While doing things I should not do to erase those hurts I have words in my mind that linger. I try time after time to forget those words. However, in spite of my efforts, the words follow me as if a cold air on my neck. “Jesus paid it all. He paid it all for me.” I even try to disdain those words. Finally, unable to erase them, they become sweet once again.
My physiologist whom I start going to at this time tells me one reason for self-destructive behaviors springs from the past when I had absolutely no control over what happened to me. It became a mirrored life of the past, he says. I don’t know if my therapist would agree, but I get the idea to actually reenact what happened in earlier life. This time, I would have the control. I would have the power. In my half-hardhearted efforts to pay for what I do after the divorce I go out
On the way back to Duncan I tell my dad of the experience. He replies in his usual serious but funny manner. “Don’t be goofy, Son.” He then adds, “Never tell anyone what you just told me, they would think you are crazy. I believe you, Son. But no one else would.” I spend a few more days with him and Brenda before returning home to Judy in Oklahoma City.
My father, Don, lives nine more months and dies too young at 58-years-old in January of ’78. Part of me goes into the grave with him. It seems my mind stays there with him for thirteen years. Until I finally realize time and death waits for no man, and it can come at any time.
My next search for peace and self-respect involves a career in social work. I take the state test and make 80%. This high score surprises me since I don’t think I have any social etiquette and certainly don’t feel I could help anyone with anything. Giving it a try is perhaps what I need to give me social skills. I like my job very much, but even with all the concentration it takes with Food Stamps, Medicaid, Daycare, and Emergency programs, there is an emptiness in me. I still do not believe in divorce. Feeling alone, I find cold words to comfort me and decide to write words down on paper instead of saying them out loud. I end up writing a book of seventeen short stories including a western and a bedtime story called “Through a Dark Glass”. I write novels named Heavymist, which is about how depression feels, Somewhere on the Edge about me and my siblings’ plight, and Dead Letter Cases about a detective named Steve Branson who solves cases no one else wants. I even write a science fiction novel called The Replay Man that never sells like the others. The main thing is now my thoughts have an outlet.
In the middle of this new validation, and after twenty-three years of marriage, my wife wants a divorce. This devastates me as I am now feeling a renewed sense to make our marriage work. Again, I am too late and me trying so hard scares Judy. She just doesn’t care anymore.
I am certainly not proud of all the things I do and see, and hear, out of my sheer desperation and hurt. I feel compelled to relive things of the past. While doing things I should not do to erase those hurts I have words in my mind that linger. I try time after time to forget those words. However, in spite of my efforts, the words follow me as if a cold air on my neck. “Jesus paid it all. He paid it all for me.” I even try to disdain those words. Finally, unable to erase them, they become sweet once again.
My physiologist whom I start going to at this time tells me one reason for self-destructive behaviors springs from the past when I had absolutely no control over what happened to me. It became a mirrored life of the past, he says. I don’t know if my therapist would agree, but I get the idea to actually reenact what happened in earlier life. This time, I would have the control. I would have the power. In my half-hardhearted efforts to pay for what I do after the divorce I go out