When I was four I busted my head on the sharp edge of an oak coffee table while I was riding my toy horse with wheels on the couch. I recall seeing my mom in bell bottoms and long hair walking through a doorway bead curtain and screaming. You’ll think I’m crazy, but I remember floating over her and my body. I remember her frantically knocking on doors asking for help and someone carrying me down the stairs. I floated above the doctors into the waiting room where my mother was crying. Maybe it was all a hallucination. I don’t know, I was just a kid.

That was maybe my first near death experience, but not my last.  Once, I almost drowned and I remember seeing a bright light, but waking up.  Then there was the time where a friend and I were at the beach and got swept away by a current.  I was on my board and couldn’t stop laughing.  There was another time another friend spun 360 degrees in a jeep on the freeway, and I reacted by also laughing.  This is actually a phenomenon called nervous laughter, and I literally laugh at the face of death.  I also almost fell off the rim during a trip to the Grand Canyon. One of these days I’ll run out of lives.

I don’t know what to think of death, really.  I think I am more afraid of life than anything.  I would get these moments of anxiety from being unable to escape my own reality and body.  I would wonder just why?  Why am I here? Why do we have to live?  Why do we have to lose people we love?  

“I don’t think people have a fear of death more than they have the fear of being left behind by those they love.  Or at least, that’s how it is for me,” I said to a friend who is also family and who was like a father to George Junior.

“I don’t think anyone is leaving you behind.”

“You don’t think George left us behind?  You think you’ll ever be united with him again?” I asked.

“He never left,” he replied.

I love that answer, and I thanked him.  

First Law of Thermodynamics: Energy can be changed from one form to another, but it cannot be created or destroyed.