As a boy from age 2 to 4 I knew I likely would have to die in battle as a soldier because of the way boys were still raised in the 1950s. Because of this death was not something to be feared but to be expected at a fairly young age. Also, I saw people dying all around me of all ages then so preparing for my own death seemed like a good idea so I didn't have to freak out about it like many did. I just needed to accept my death. Also, I had almost died of whooping cough by age 2 also and that changed me a lot and made me more of a risk taker so I could at least feel like I was still alive by taking risks and not walk around feeling dead a lot and traumatized from life.
So, when I look back now from age 78 I tend to have much less fear of death than most people do that I meet. In fact, death has never really scared me at all. However, I don't like pain at all whether it is physical pain or emotional and mental pain even though my father taught me how to sublimate pain. IN other words if you are hurt and not bleeding and nothing is broken you just need to think about something else rather than your pain in order to just keep going through whatever you are dealing with then in life.
However, looking back now because of my training from babyhood to accept my own death as a soldier the things that almost killed me aren't the things that bother me the most in life.
What bothered me the most in life were always regarding all the people I loved in my life more than anything else. My own death really never mattered to me that much but other people's lives and my nearness to them were what mattered which I think is how most boys were trained to think about all this for thousands of years (at least until the Viet Nam War) where everything started to change.
So, when I look back the biggest traumas in my life have never been around my own death but around other people's deaths instead or the death of a relationship I had with others along the way.
So, the real traumas I deal with now are not my health problems because I have always accepted death as real in the sense that I could die at any time in my life since I was 2 and almost died of whooping cough.
So, the first real traumas of my life are the first few loves of my life where I thought something else could happen than actually did.
I don't really know where to begin here because everything in life is built upon other things in life first. But, maybe if I start with the girl I planned to marry for 2 years time (even though we were celibate during this time because we were churchgoing at the time).
When she told me that we were not going to have a sexual relationship which meant to me mainly we weren't going to ever have children which is the ONLY reason why I considered marrying her or anyone in the first place this is where the real traumas of my life began.
Recently, I was able to for the first time reclaim my life before I was 21 years old emotionally which I haven't been able to do since I was 21 I realized recently. It has been like I have been estranged from who I was before age 21 and didn't fully realize how bad this was until I made peace with the person I was before age 21 and made peace with everyone I knew and loved before age 21.
So, this has been a great blessing in my life to reclaim this part of myself that I felt was lost to me all these years from the pain I dealt with then of breaking up with this girl and then the chain reaction of breaking up also with the religion I had been raised in.
At the time my experience was that my girlfriend and my religion had betrayed me. However, from my present perspective what really happened was I realized I couldn't fit into that mold of my religion or into the life of that particular girlfriend.
So, in the long run discovering all this before I was dead too young was a great boon to me surviving to now be 78 in the first place.
So, even though all this caused me incredible pain and heartache it also caused me to create a life I could actually live without self destructing like many people I have seen in my life who aren't as adaptable as I am from my pioneer genetics of people who have survive everything in the U.S. since the 1720s which was a lot.
So, I had what it took to survive all this when many did not.
And for this I'm Eternally Grateful to God for helping me live through all this and come out the other side in one piece.
by God's Grace
