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Last month I was in Tulsa dealing with a stressful family crisis. On April 16, I experienced the first of a series of small strokes that culminated in a major stroke that paralyzed the left side of my body. I experienced my third mini-stroke that night at a Tulsa hospital. I believed I would die and was surprised to find that I wasn’t scared.
When I was a child, I was very scared of death. My father spent most of World War II in a Japanese concentration camp. I was born three years after he was liberated. I now know that my father suffered from severe PTSD. As a four-year-old, I found that the only way to interact with him was to ask him about his wartime experiences.
Unfortunately, my father told me more than I could absorb as a child. He told me about American prisoners who committed suicide because they were weak. He told me about the prisoners who had been executed. He told me about the day he was being taken to a prison ship that was bombed by US Navy pilots who did not know that the ship contained American prisoners.
I remember my father telling me about people who could not swim standing on the deck of a sinking ship begging other prisoners to save them. But those prisoners who could swim were too weak from captivity to help their comrades, and those who could not swim drowned.
My father’s stories scared me. He had survived the Japanese concentration camps because of his strength. I was only a child. I knew I wasn’t strong enough to live through that kind of scary experience. I would have been one of the weak prisoners who would have died.
I grew up in a small town in Oklahoma. Many of my childhood friends belonged to religious groups that believed in whatever Was not a member of their particular sect was going to burn in hell for eternity.
I was a naive child, and my childhood friends were sincere in their efforts to convert me. Yet, I have never understood which denomination the chosen Church of God is. Was it Baptist, Pentecostal, Nazarene or Church of Christ? I never figured it out but I was scared of dying and going to hell. I didn’t get over that fear until I was an adult.
Elie Wiesel was put in a Nazi concentration camp as a child during World War II. In his memoir of that experience, he said that he was introduced to death at an age when children should know nothing about death except what they read in storybooks. Weasel was right. Children should be protected from fear of real or imaginary life. They will soon learn when they grow up.
I am now 74 and recovering from a stroke. Death is near. Maybe I’ll live another five or six years, or maybe I’ll die tomorrow.
I believe in God. He is not powerful enough to protect us from famine, plague, or disease. He could not stop Hitler or Stalin. Nevertheless, God has filled the earth with beauty and sprinkled it with people who love their families and their fellow human beings and are capable of great sacrifice in the service of others.
When I die, I would like to be cremated and have my ashes scattered on the banks of the Upper Colorado River in West Texas. I have sinned and suffered a lot, but God has blessed me with a loving wife and family. I live in one of the most beautiful states in America. I have known the goodness of God in the land of the living. I am grateful.
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