I can remember being 8 years old in my room and I had just been given my own .22 rifle and bullets and so I had my rifle hanging on a gun rack on the wall then in 1956 and I kept my .22 long rifle bullets (usually about 200 of them) up high in the closet and I was told not to tell my friends where the bullets were because those friends might not be trained "Gun Safe" and responsible like I was. Then you were expected to be mostly like an adult if you were a male by 4 and if when they gave you a gun when you were about 8 if you actually hurt someone with the gun you expected to "literally be beat to death" by your parents. So, though you were 8 years old you were an adult in this sense and a full protector of the family which is the American tradition that goes back at least to the 1600s on the east coast.
But, when I was 8 my 16 year old cousin who was the son of my Dad's oldest brother then in 1956 had learned to drive in an old 1949 Dodge I think and made a mistake and drove into a house with his friends in the car and broke his neck. So, when he turned to ask everyone if they were okay he died because of his broken neck right then.
So, I remember thinking and feeling very vulnerable if one of my cousins had died like this. I was very scared because if he died that meant I could too.
Though one by one my grandparents all died starting with my mother's father in 1960 when I was 12, he wasn't very nice to me so I didn't really miss him. He might have had senile dementia because he wasn't nice to me at all. I think he was jealous of my having a Dad because his dad died when he was 8 in Boston, Massachusetts from pneumonia because he went to get medicine for my grandfather and so my grandfather had to live with this the rest of his life and so became a Christian minister to cope with it.
There were a lot of crazy people from having survived the 1800s and then the Great Depression and World war II and all the rest just like there will be a lot of really crazy people around the world caused by the coronavirus and starvation with nothing to do or to eat around the world for the next 20 to 50 years too.
This is just a given so I recommend you prepare for dealing with them all because it is going to be difficult.
But, the one I was never prepared for was the death of my father at my age 37. He was 69 when he died. But, my father was such a larger than life person who was always the life of the party and had traveled at age 24 with his brother and first wife on a yacht to Tahiti from Canada, Seattle and then Los Angeles and was Valedictorian of his high school Class was just such an amazing specimen of health that we all thought he would live to 100 at least. But then, he got prostate cancer but hated doctors so instead of getting it taken care of he went on a macrobiotic diet to cure it and this choice eventually killed him 5 years later of prostate cancer then cancer of the bladder then cancer or one of his kidneys then he had all that removed but not before all that metastasized into bone cancer and he died 5 years after his prostate cancer was diagnosed leaving my mother and I both pretty lost in some ways.
I realized that my marriage then of 7 years wasn't going to be until I died which was pretty awful during this time too which was horrific to deal with on top of the death of my father. So, basically between middle Aged crazy which then set in at 37 and facing my father's death and my own forthcoming death really made 37 to 50 extremely difficult for me until I almost died myself of a heart virus. Then I gave up worrying about dying and just was grateful for each day I had left which is wonderful.
If you can somehow stop worrying about dying because you almost die yourself and just give up and be grateful for the time you have left with your children and family you have solved most of your problems right there.
This is what I found which has made the last 22 years since I almost died the best years of my life so far!
You cannot really live if you are afraid of dying. So, living and dying really don't go together.
So, basically in your mind you are either living or you are in the process of dying. It's true you can say that everyone is dying once they are born or conceived. But, that isn't the whole story because our souls are immortal and they are more real than our bodies are.
Our bodies are more like the cars we drive around in on earth more than anything else. They are a gift from God to enjoy and learn on planet earth with.
When I asked God and he appeared to me when I was young what the purpose of life was he said, "The purpose of life is to love and to bless life."
This has always made complete sense to me because I could imagine myself as God being lonely and so creating all of us much like we get married and have a family. Raising kids (even though they are expensive) can be very fulfilling and when I first held my first child, a son in my arms when he was first born I felt like I was holding God in my arms and then my life finally made sense ever since.
I was 26 years old and my wife then was only 21.
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