For My Sons

  My red pocket notebook which was discovered in the wrecked car in which I had the near-death experience. As a father, I want to pass down the most important and relevant lessons to my children that I can, from my own experiences. So, I should begin with the most life-altering lesson I have to offer, the lesson of mortality. Truly knowing your life has a limited span, understanding we are mortal, has a profound effect on a person's life. As a young person, we know that we will eventually die. No human being is immortal.  Not knowing when our time will be up, we only have the context of the number of years we have already lived. A fifteen-year-old may believe that he or she will live another fifty or sixty years. From  the teenager's perspective, those fifteen years he has experienced seemed like an eternity. However from the point of view of a sixty-five-year-old man, if he believes he will live up to another ten years, those ten years seem much too short of a period of time.