Death

Death is something I have always been comfortable with. In my youth I had been around it and had an experience with events where I, myself, could have died. Many relatives lost, many friends and family members. I have put on the black suit more times than I care to admit, and I know it will have to be worn much more as time moves on. For my coping mechanism on Death, I have found that I can not help myself but cook or prepare food for others. Which is a bit ironic… Death and food (life) Death is often depicted eating in fantasy or lore and I find comfort in it and I know it is hard to focus on eating when these instances occur, we still all need to eat. Death has always been an understandable inevitability in my developmental mind and I want to talk a bit about it.

My first interaction with death is possibly one of my earliest memories. I believe I was around 4 or 5 years of age, visiting family back east and  Great Aunt Jessie, my paternal grandfather’s eldest sister, had passed away. We had just left Marion, Virginia to visit family there and had moved on to North Carolina to visit my Dad’s bud Dirt Bag, who I may have mentioned on this blog previously before. We were there one day when my Dad got the news Great Aunt Jessie had passed on. My mother opted my father to take just me back with him to the funeral and we were off headed back to Virginia. I recall walking into the church with my father and walking up to the open casket and seeing her. I had not met her while alive and did not have any memories with her. But I will forever have the memory of how comfortable she looked in death. I remember reaching out and touching her and felt she was hard and stiff. My dad kind of pulled my hand back as I was a bit shocked how stiff she was. My dad explained we do not normally touch the body and that we simply say our goodbyes. I remember stating that she was hard. My dad then explained rigor mortis to me and explained that this is what happens to all of us and that it was natural. From then on my views of death were more along the lines of a mutual respect and I understood it was all our destiny.

My next experiences of death were mainly suicides or murders. I can not recall the age but it was early in elementary school, possibly 2nd grade. A classmates elder brother had committed suicide by hanging himself I the closet. This opened us kids at our school to that possibility. None of us had even thought that was a thing to do in life. It was impactful and at the time I did not realize how many more people around me would go on to commit suicide. The number is high and I will not go into too much detail. The next impactful death in my life was Big John. He was a buddy of my dads serving time at Terminal Island. There would be random weekend mornings where my dad would wake me up at 4:30 AM to get going from SD to make it in time for visiting hours. The drive was quick for me as I would sleep most of the way. I remember always waking up when my dad would go over San Pedro Bridge (I would later accept a job position at a building right next to the bridge later on in my life). Sometimes my Uncle Wayne would come with us and sometimes it was just me and my dad. One thing is for sure they would hand me a package to hand to Big John and he would always laugh. I later found out it was a large envelope full of dirty magazines (for currency) and I just liked to help out! Big John got out eventually for good behavior. I can not recall how many years he was out but one day my Dad told me he would be coming to visit and to not panic  if I hear someone coming in through the front door. I stayed out in the room and tuned into Toonami/ Adult Swim and waited for him as I comfortably snuggled under my blanket. I fell asleep and I heard the door noble jiggle. The door opened and Big John came down the walk way and sat on the futon with me to say hello. I woke up again and this time, it was very late and the TV was now off. I fell back asleep and awoke to excitement to see Big John. My dad was concerned and I asked him where he was. My dad tells me he never came by and that he was unable to contact him. I remember seeing him though… and that he WAS here. I realized that I had dreamt his arrival and was disappointed he never arrived. My dad later found out that he was murdered that night and that would be the last I had ever seen Big John. His killers were caught later on and have been sentenced to big time in prison. The next impactful death in my life was my Uncle Dave. I was in 11th grade and had been exploring the underground water tunnels of Mira Mesa and had no access to a cell phone. My group of friends and I finally got done exploring and my buddy Carlos had one too many missed calls from my mom. I call her back and she tells me her broth had passed away from a self inflicted gun wound to the head. This was tough for my mom as her father had killed himself in her first year of college. First her father, now her brother. If you remember, My uncle Dave was the one to bring us camping. He was a handy man and he had lived in Orange County ( where I ended up residing and not too far from his old apartment for the past 7 years). It was set that I would miss school to go up and help my cousin Derek and Jenny to go through and help clean out his apartment of his stuff. When we got there, there was a large mess as the clean up crew did not do a very good job. This is the first time I smelled death for what it actually was and I will never forget that smell. There was still much blood and my cousin Jenny could not go through with going into that room. I do not blame her so it was mainly my cousin Derek and I. We see his note and we read it. I remember bits of it today that I won’t discuss here and now. But his ammunition and his gun case were there and I see he used a .22 to do the deed. Cleaning out that apartment and helping my cousins was the only way I felt I could help. We have not spoken of that day with each other since and possibly one day it would be okay to revisit that day with Derek at least. I feel it would be too much for Jenny still. At this time in my life too many friends had already committed suicide and I was quite numb to it.

I have spoken of my Uncle Joel passing away from cancer and my father and him making amends, but that was when I was out of High School. I remember that day as I could not sleep. I had an app on my phone that allowed me to see cameras in streets and aquariums all over the world and it was around 6am I was scanning those cameras. One was the bombing site of Nagasaki and the memorial they have there. Another one was a camera at an aquarium in Texas that I would watch as it had Arapaima and Arowana in the tank ( my favorite species of fish) . I got a text from my Aunty El. She broke the news to me that my uncle had passed and I remember being upset because I always felt I never spent enough time with him. I remember calling my good friend JB to see if he was getting off work to go eat. I hopped in my truck and drove to pick him up and we went to eat at IHOP. We had a cathartic talk on death and I thank him for that morning. But one of the heaviest deaths and is still being investigated is the death of my Dad’s bud Barry and his wife Carol Sandberg. Barry was not…the nicest of people to strangers. He was hot tempered,  but he was finally sober. I had just showered for the night and was getting into bed and over heard the news Chanel talking about a murder in a Bay Park home. I thought nothing of it and turned off the tv to sleep. The next morning I went to school and came home. I went upstairs and was on the computer when my dad called me down. He broke the news to me that Barry and carol were murdered in their home over the weekend (around my dads Birthday, they shared a close birthday and would call each other ALWAYS, Barry never answered) Carol was as sweet as could be and also made one hell of a sandwich I’ll tell ya that. Barry had a really cool home for a kid to explore although again, not many children were welcomed at his home. But Barry loved the shit out of me and got a kick out of my attitude. He was a collector of many things, arrow heads, shark teeth so on and so on. We were invited to his home to help clean it  after the crime scene was done wit their investigation and evidence collecting. His home was ransacked. His classic car was stolen along with his motorcycles, his home destroyed, and displayed weapons were missing. Black dust was EVERYWHERE from forensics. We were invited there by Carol’s sister who knew how close my dad was to them both. She wanted us to help clean and take whatever we wanted. Walking through the home, it was evident how gruesome the murders were. We would hold annual rides from Mt Soledad to the Harley store for lunch in honor of their death and to bring attention to the news to keep their unsolved murders in the public eye. I am unsure of the progress on their murder case, but I can tell you it is still unsolved.

Plenty of death in my life by the age of 18. I even had my own brushes with death. I had almost drowned in my pool growing up learning to swim, my older sister pulled me to safety. That was a bit minor though. The earliest brush with death I can remember was being at a daycare and I was balancing on a big wheel (when told not to) and I remember it slipping from underneath me and falling on my head blacking out. The next close call was on my fathers birthday at the age of 4. We took our annual ride on his motorcycle and stopped by the Calle Cristobal look out. This was a small hill with a concrete walkway at the time. We walked to the top and my dad received a call from his brother to wish him a happy birthday. I get bored immediately, of course and tug on my dad's jeans to tell him I am going back to the bike. He tells me to stay on the path and of course I do not, I B-Line to the bike cutting across the dirt and sticks and mosey on to the bike. I take a couple steps getting close to the bike and I hear something. A familiar sound. A sound I know all too well from my Steve Irwin snake VHS. I had almost set my foot down and refrained from doing so for an unknown reason. Beneath my foot was a baby rattlesnake. Faced with an event I had prepared myself for. being young I was obsessed with snakes. I dreamt of snakes. I watched snakes. The first thing I wanted to do at the zoo was see the snake exhibits. I backed up slowly, kept control of my breathing and created enough distance from me and the snake, and ran back up to my dad. Babbling and crying incoherently my dad asked me what was wrong and I could not get the words out. I took a breath and yelled SNAKE! I brought my dad to the location and the snake was gone. We walked back to the Harley and we heard it once more. He sees a stick to pick up[ and reaches for it. On the other end of the stick is the Snake! He maneuvers the stick to get the snake into a position under his boot, takes out his knife and cuts the snake's head off as well as his rattle. He buries the head so a dog can not eat it and hands me the rattle. I grew a little older at the age of 7 and had the next brush with death. We were visiting back east once more in MooresVille, North Carolina to visit my dad's bud Dirt Bag once more. His home is settled on a lake, we get his boat, and he takes all of us to a smaller island that houses a restaurant. We spend a good amount of time there and Dirtbag has quite a few drinks as well as my dad. I get bored from sitting and go to the docks and see what I thought to be a snake in the water. I look up and see dark large clouds vastly approaching and covering the twilight sky. I run back up to warn my dad and Dirtbag states we are fine. We were not. We finally get on our boat and sail out, the water overfilling the boat and the lightning and thunder surrounding us. We were sinking, there was no question about it. We push as far as we can go and try to get as close to one edge of the lake as possible. We see a home with their lights on, and a man with a flashlight running out towards his dock waiving for us. The boat submerges and my dad is holding my older sister and I in one hand by our life vest handles, and my younger sister Kristen in the other hand swimming backwards towards the dock, the man throws a rope out and we were able to climb it and the man pulls us from the water. Dirtbag goes to tie his sunken boat up as it had just made it….but sunken of course. The night I don’t remember being too scared, I just knew we were all going to be alright. I was more concerned  for my sister Kristen based on how young she was, but we all made it out alive. The last brush with death was the day I did my last job in SD up in Japatul Valley. I had to help my customer clean his garage out, something simple he wanted, to help put some more money in my pocket for my move up to Orange County. He was also in a giving mood and I had a truck full of goodies. A couch, a pressure washer, an air unit, a roofing nail gun and some more goodies. I was driving through the mountain pass and my front tire had caught a small drainage ditch. I let it ride as opposed to correcting it because I did not want to lose control of my vehicle. Instead of riding out of it, my wheel caught an angle and it jacked my front wheel to the left, locking it in place. My truck spins into a 180 and I see I will not stop in time and my truck is going to go over the hill, the road not having a guard rail either, I grabbed my wheel and threw my head to the center console. As soon as I did I saw my driver side roof cave in. I flipped four times and made it out without a scratch. I crawl out of my truck and call my dad, he says he is on his way as he is actually near his office. I called my customer, who is also my dad's boss. He is trained to check for concussions. He arrives and checks me out and I am fine. Police arrive and take their notes and make sure I am okay. He even comments on my tie down skills as nothing flew out of my truck. The fire department arrives and they ask me multiple times if I need an ambulance. I heard a man say ‘Holy Cow’ and I knew the voice. He was an old customer who happened to be the Fire Captain in town. He says Ian?! Was this you? Boy I thought I was going to have to call for a chopper for a body. I had just trained my guys on this exact scenario this morning…’ No matter how it played out for me, I knew I was going to live.

So that’s death for me, and I really hope you all enjoy this post today. I had to rush this one out and will not be proofreading as I am off to my buddy Charles’ Birthday celebration. It is sure to be a good night celebrating life and seeing my good pals. Tonight will be a fun one indeed as my good buddy is taking the next steps in life to become something bigger than himself and joining one family and making one of his own. Take care, everyone!