A TIME TO LIVE AND A TIME TO DIE

Sometimes we live our own miracles, and sometimes we don’t. There is a passage in the bible, Ecclesiastes I think, somewhere around the third verse, I’ve read it many times, and it goes something like this:

A  Time  for  Everything

“THERE IS a time for everything, and a SEASON for every activity under the heavens. There is a time to be born and a time to die,  a time to plant and a time to uproot, a time to kill and a time to heal.”

There was a time I considered Everything as meaningless. That we all come from dust, and to dust all return. Who knows if the human spirit rises upward and if the spirit of the animal goes down into the earth?

It’s getting on into the new year and I know most of you have been worried. There have been whispers and nudges… many of them on the money, but much of it second or third hand and passed down the line. So here you have it from me, I’ve been out of the loop for most of the last year, getting on day to week to arrive at another medical procedure. Having my last Christmas at the Medical Center, I suppose I felt like I was fighting to survive.

Indeed, I fought every day just to breathe and swallow.

I wont go into the particulars, but its been tough GETTING THROUGH the last eighteen months. I am back now, and in much better shape than before. With a new piece of hardware holding my neck in place, much of that pain has subsided and I’m feeling like  that “Christmas Miracle” the nurses spoke of when I came through the other end.

Life and death… I write about it, I suppose the horrific glare of the monsters and demons that live in these shadows.

Yet never have I come before their countenances like I did this last month.

I’ve seen the orbs of life in the E.R. and the Darkness of the Intensive Care Unit… I felt the spirits moving along the long corridor that rested just outside my hospital room door.

Sometimes, I’d catch a glance at the bag and stretcher which carried away the remains of what we are.

And if I stretched your ear to the corridor, I heard a soft cry, imagined a tear that streaked a cheek of a loved one.

It was scary stuff.

Writing contemporary Horror and Suspense, well.. it brings things into perspective a bit. It makes the edges a bit less blurry.

For the entire month of December I saw and heard many things, sometimes it would be a muffled cry and a glimpse of families struggling to understand.

I was terrified I found myself slipping into that groove.

It’s a scary place to be, late into the night, when the lights go down and its just you on the bed, lines running through your veins and the outcome uncertain. I’ve been there, it will remain with me forever, and now that I have come out the other side, I wonder… who will be there in the end?

There will always be fine nurses by your side, maybe a doctor or two… I’ve met them by the dozens, they tend to your every need and try their best. But what can they do when the boogie monsters come out of the shadows?

So where does this leave me, late into the wee hours when I sit here and stare out my window for a miracle? With collapsed veins, bags hanging, and a cell phone at the end of my fingers, who should I call when the end come knocking like it did for me?

I lost 25 pounds in December and gave up my soul.

In the end, the heavens spat me back to Earth to tell the tale.

Maybe one day I will, perhaps, if the edges ever become clear.

Right now I’m just grateful to be here with a few new fans and the knowledge it wasn’t my time.