Today I am 73 years old. Happy birthday to me.
I have every reason to be thankful to be alive. On several occasions in my lifetime, I have flirted with death, or been exposed to deadly circumstances, twice being saved by merely standing here, rather than standing there … and once being saved by my inexperience with alcohol.
To be alive, to still be alive after all these years and all those close calls, feels almost like a miracle, and is certainly worthy of my deepest gratitude for the life I’ve been given and the life I’ve been spared so many times.
My father and his father both had fatal heart attacks in their middle 50s. When I was 50 years old, after a long, long time between visits to the doctor, I became so ill with a respiratory infection that I went to a clinic for some help. There I learned that my blood pressure was dangerously high. The doctor gave me one refill of some blood pressure medication and meds for my respiratory problems. He insisted that I find a family doctor for a complete examination and further blood pressure refills.
That insistence probably saved my life.
I was living in Charlotte, North Carolina at the time, working from a fancy top-floor corner office, in an environment that had considerable stress. It was a job that I was ill-equipped to handle, considering it needed an accounting degree and corporate accounting experience, neither of which I had. But, like all the promotions I had received in the previous 20 years, an opportunity appeared, and I rose to the challenge, quickly filling in the gaps in my knowledge with private study. The sad thing is that the position I aspired to, and was qualified for, existed in that same office complex, one position above the one I held, manned by a person who did not want that job, a person who had told me I would likely be his replacement. PTSD stole that opportunity from me.
My first appointment with my new family doctor was unsettling. Once I revealed my family history, and once he had fully examined me, he made a statement that shook me: “Your current lifestyle is predictive of a fate similar to that of your father’s and grandfather’s.” That’s probably not a perfectly accurate quote, but it’s close enough. I had to make some changes if I wanted to continue to live into my 50s.
I was put on medication for high blood pressure, high triglycerides, and high cholesterol. I changed my diet and started eating more nutritious foods, severely lowering my calorie intake. I began walking. I bought an exercise machine and used it religiously. Within a year I lost 50 pounds and no longer needed most of the medication. My doctor was surprised. Apparently, most of his patients just rely on the medication and don’t follow the doctor’s advice.
At the time I did not realize that posttraumatic stress disorder was closing in on me, making it difficult to continue working in a stressful environment. My body was now healthy … but my mind was still tainted and triggered by war trauma from Vietnam, as it had been, to one degree or another, all my adult life. As a combat infantryman, I had been wounded in the field and wounded again while in a convalescent Center at Cam Ranh Bay. I was a sheltered-life country boy, totally naïve about war, ill prepared for what I saw, what I did, and what happened to me.
Uncharacteristically dark thoughts began to haunt me. Although I could not even admit it to myself, I knew something was wrong and tried my best to hide it. My anxiety level got so high at work that I sometimes would break down and sob, behind the closed door of my corner office, while I sat at my beautiful old wooden executive desk.
One day, on the way home from work and in heavy traffic, I was so distraught that I forgot for a moment that I was driving, and took my hands off the wheel, putting them on either side of my head, as I looked down with unfocused eyes.
I caught myself just before my car left the road, and managed to make it home safely. I couldn’t handle it anymore. I gave notice, quit my job, and moved back to my hometown, close to my mother, who was approaching her 80s. I had a harebrained idea on how to make a living. I will not bore you with the embarrassing details, other than to say I spent a lot of money and a year of personal effort in preparation… and it didn’t work. I went through some dark years, including some when life did not seem worth living.
In a three-year period, I saw my fanciful attempt at business crumble; I saw airplanes crash into buildings as I watched television; I saw a long-term, long distance relationship with a woman from New York fall apart because I could not be there with her; and I spent months at my mother’s side until she died from complications from cancer. I suffered long nights with anxiety that drove me to walk up and down local roads in the middle of the night, trying to exhaust myself so that I might sleep. I suffered two bouts of deep depression, both lasting several months, but never fully escaping depression’s energy-sapping stranglehold on my life.
During my work life, I lived frugally, saving and investing a large portion of the money I made, amounting to several hundred thousand dollars. In a period of about eight dark years, I spent every penny. Except for lottery tickets and scratch off cards, and my delusional attempt to start a business, my spending was not wasteful. I just paid my bills and continue to live frugally … and continued to live in denial of what was happening to my mental state.
Some of the things I did in those years are too embarrassing to admit in public. I will probably take them to my grave, although some of them I did reveal to mental health professionals while I was in therapy. But I will reluctantly admit to one thing: for five or six years after quitting work I lived a strategic plan to end my life when the money ran out.
Initially, I considered the possibility of just being homeless. I researched that for months, seeking out the places where the homeless might get a meal, or lay their heads: in parks, in abandoned buildings, under bridges.
But I eventually realized that I was too weak to live that life: nowhere to get a shower, nowhere close by to go to the bathroom. And what would happen if I got sick, or injured, or beat up? What would happen when it got really cold? What would happen when it got really hot? What would happen if I got so lonely that I needed to talk with someone? How could I trust anyone, when I was in such a low and weakened situation? I have trust issues in the best of circumstances.
Homelessness would have been unbearable.
I came to that realization when morning while sitting on a park bench in Cleveland Park, Greenville South Carolina. And what, at one time, had been three choices for a solution to my misery, became two: win the lottery or end my life. I calculated how much money I had, how much I could spend on lottery tickets, and what it cost to pay my bills. I looked at my declining bank accounts and calculated how long I had to live. Although all that sounds foolish now, at the time, and given my state of mind, it sounded like a plan.
I got quite creative in coming up with ways to put off the date of my demise. But the day came in February 2009. I had received notification of foreclosure on my condo. The water had been turned off; I couldn’t even flush the commode. I was being hounded by creditors and collection agents daily, none of them concerned about my well-being, only about the money that I rightly owed them.
I’ll be leaving out a lot of details here, but I will say that my inexperience with drinking probably saved my life. On a couple of occasions, I bought a bottle of wine and drank most of it, but I could not bring myself to do the next step. So, with my last dollars, I bought a big fast-food meal and two large bottles of wine. Surely, that would be enough to let me do what I needed to do.
Around 9 AM the following morning, I woke up still alive … after what should’ve been a fateful night, sleeping pills still on the nightstand. Suffering an enormous hangover, an empty bank account, and knowing I had no other choices, I called my sister, who was not aware of the depth of my problems.
I met with her and my brother-in-law, thinking that my well-connected brother-in-law would pull some strings and get me into some sort of sanitarium or home for folks who had given up on life. Upon revealing that I had almost killed myself the night before, the first words out of his mouth were, “You need to come live with us.”
He assisted me in getting the help I needed. Together, he and my sister showed me that life was worth living, even for a broken man like me.
After years of therapy, much of which I despised but nonetheless found helpful, I started feeling a bit more like a human being, worthy of my place here on earth. My sister’s two children got married and had kids of their own. I got to play a role in their young lives which both excited me and gave me more reason to be glad I had not ended it all those years ago.
In those early days of therapy my mind was so weak from those long years of darkness, that I found it difficult to think any complex thought. Although it’s hard to remember back to that time, my introduction to social media was Twitter. The exercise of trying to put thoughts together in a concise 140 characters proved to be excellent therapy for my brain. It’s a shame how Twitter became such a terrible place over the years. But the demise of free speech on popular social media led me to gab.com, for which I am forever grateful.
Although I still have not regained the mental capacity of my younger days, and I still must rely on the dictionary and thesaurus to ensure that I use proper wording, my brain has healed considerably, and I have returned to one of the more enjoyable pastimes of my life: writing.
I have developed a new hobby of photography, which was spurred on by all the interesting things I had seen on my hikes at Paris Mountain State Park. I spent an enormous amount of time there after I quit working and moved back to my hometown. Sometimes I would hike for four or more hours on those trails, trying to burn off all that anxiety which haunted me almost every day, including a few times when I was triggered by some scene along the trail that reminded my subconscious mind of something that happened in Vietnam.
But on the better days, those beautiful sunny days and even those cold harsh days, as I walked along the trails up and down the mountainside, I could see interesting things. I wanted to capture those scenes for future years when I might not be able to spend time out in the woods. So I bought a small point-and-shoot camera. And over the years I worked my way up to my current kit: a Nikon D610 camera and a Tamron 70-200 mm lens.
I hope to someday upgrade to a mirrorless camera system with more megapixels, a faster shutter, a bigger buffer, and more reach. If and when that day comes, it will be due, at least in part, to the fact that in Vietnam I was exposed to agent orange, which eventually gave me prostate cancer (successfully removed in 2017), a terrible disease which for several months gave me full VA disability benefits, providing me with unanticipated funds.
I find it most interesting that the combination of my hiking, my photography, and my writing have led to much calmness, a sense of accomplishment, and considerable joy. And it spurred me on to become active on social media, which eventually led to gab.com, where I created my group: The Good Morning Brigade. There, amongst a gathering of good and kind folks, I have a way to share my life and my interests with people who enjoy reading about them or seeing the photographs I’ve taken.
There was a time, just 12 years ago, when the path I was on would have kept me from the life I live now. I still have to deal with PTSD issues, but I’m better than I was. My current situation is a bit of a protective bubble that sometimes gets poked at by reality’s unpleasantness. My life may not be perfect, or even close to perfect, but much of it is good … and well worth living.
And just yesterday, as I was writing this, I was visited by my sister and her youngest granddaughter. That child is five years old, in kindergarten, incredibly bright, the sweetest person I know, and totally beautiful. Spending time with her and with the three other grandcutie’s adds a quality to life that I had completely forgotten about, a quality-of-life I would’ve missed, had my previously-mentioned path been followed to its mortal end.
And so, as I celebrate my 73rd birthday, I spend a proper time looking back, hoping to avoid the mistakes of my past. And I spend a proper time looking forward to, and planning for my future, with the expectation that it might be a good one and fulfill some of my dreams. But most of all, I will spend this time, these moments, living and enjoying my life, glowing with gratitude for what I have, knowing how many times in my life when it all could have been snuffed out.
This moment, these thoughts, this breath I’m taking, they are precious. And I am thankful for them.