The Pocket Notebook: A Journal of Mortality

 

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.

When you realize that the time you have left in the world is shorter than the time you have already experienced, that realization changes your perspective on time, and it often forces you to reprioritize and reconsider what is more important in your life. And when you face the realization that your life can end at any time, due to illness, accidents or someone's malevolent intent, you can gain this perspective at a young age. I was gifted with this perspective quite suddenly, and unexpectedly on my 19th birthday in 1987. This is the story.

Reflections of the Heart

An autumn leaf falls upon the plane,

Of a reflecting pool left by the rain.

The concentric that dispense in haste,

Are replaced by a vision of your face...

I wanted to finish this poem and share it with Connie. I was writing it in my red pocket notebook, which I always carried with me during my sophomore year in college. For me, this was my most ambitious effort to share my feelings for this young woman who was attending the same university. Up until that point, I was a shy introvert who never had the courage to express my interest or feelings to girls. 

Exactly one year previous, on my 18th birthday in 1986, I fell unconscious, alone at home, during a chemical experiment with chloroform. I had an extensive chemistry set, and was an avid young researcher, trying out many experiments at home, including studying the mind-bending effects of chloroform. In my living room, I dropped a large bottle of chloroform onto the carpet and there was a large puddle. As I bent down on my knees to soak it up with a towel, I soon found myself falling unconscious. The next thing I remember, I woke up in the hospital emergency room. I had severe burns on my face and my wrist, where I had been laying in the chloroform puddle.

My brother Steve came home from school and saw me lying in the puddle unconscious. He thought I was taking a nap and proceeded to watch TV in the same room. My brother James came home awhile later, and he realized that I was unconscious, and he could not wake me up. He found a neighbor who was a nurse, and she resuscitated me and called an ambulance.