And With My Dying Breath

Alright so I've decided that I'm not going to make this a regular thing, at least not till after finals, maybe. This decision is only because of two things, one: I am way too tired from school to use my brain anymore than I have to. And two: nobody really reads these anyway so I'm not sure how many people care that I'm not keeping to a regular posting schedual.

Anyway continuing on with what I was talking about last week, anger. Yeah bad stuff, we went through that. I told you that anger was completely unnessasary. Why do I think this way? We are all products of our environment and our biological makeup. Since I was not born with an immunity to anger, we can assume that something big happened to make me this way. You would be right.

I want to begin this by telling you why I'm asking you to read. Because it is my belief that life is to short to get angry. I believe that we as people, maybe more so as Americans, get caught up in the things that don't matter in the grand scheme of things. We don't live as big picture people. And therefore we waste our lives worring about things that we have no control over. Or we strive for things that won't be worth anything to anyone once we no longer exist. This is a lesson of sorts. You can read it and not be effected, as I can assume will be the result for the majority of people reading. Or you can take it to heart and apply it to your own life in some way or another, as I hope most of you will do.

So I once upon a time I used to have a pretty close relationship with my brother. But somewhere along the line things went wrong. If I knew what it was that changed things for the worst then I might've been able to fix things. But I was about 13 or 14 and I just didn't care.

My brother was always getting angry about the smallest things, anything and everything that most of us would just shrug off and forget about he would blow out of the water and make a huge deal about it. And the only things that really got me pissed off back then were people making a big deal out of things and ruining an otherwise peaceful environment. That and people who refuse to just get along with other people. Ironically, those were the two things that I often did all by myself by getting pissed off about it. But my brother was one of the only people I've ever known to get so angry about things that were so small without any warning whatsoever, aside from a 3 or 4 yr old. And as you might imagine, with him doing the only things that really pissed me off, we got into a lot of fights.

When I was between the ages of 12 and 14 we exchanged bloody noses, bruised ribs, and countless holes in walls and doors. He was the cause of some of those but the most of the damage was my doing. I'm not sure why, but whenever we would get into these fist fights he would run for the couch, his bed, or my parents bed, and just lay there as if it were base or to somehow make himself seem innocent of provoking me in the first place, or something, I honestly can't figure it out.

On the night that it all happened, I was in my dad's office on the computer, doing homework or something. And I remember hearing my dad come home from getting pizza, which was a treat cuz we hardly ever ate out as a family. He set the pizza down, and my brother came over and looked at it and started to get upset with my dad. What did he get angry about this time? It wasn't the pizza he wanted, even though when my dad asked what kind of pizza he liked, he said he didn't care. So I was sitting there trying to ignore all the yelling and screaming that was going on over the pizza. But as much as I tried, I couldn’t help but get angry too. And as my brother was yelling at my dad out the door so he would go back and get the "right" pizza. He came inside and slammed the door. The walls shook and I snapped. I ran out of the office and got in my brother's face, pushed him up against a wall and to told him to chill the frick out, but with more colorful language. There were no parents around and my sister kept to herself in her room, so I had free reign to do whatever I wanted to him and no one could stop me. I felt the raw untamed power start to swell in my head. So I kept on yelling at him, and took it further, I told him something to the effect that if he didn't frickin stop with this bullcrap I was gonna beat him bloody with a baseball bat, again, more colorful language was used during all of this. As you can imagine, he didn’t like that all that much so he started pushing me up against the opposite wall. And as I hit the wall I punched him in the gut really frickin hard and then pushed him back really hard. That's when he ran. Straight to my parents bedroom. I'm not completely sure how it all happened but I know this, I ran after him intent on killing him or at least bringing him close to it either way I was doin serious damage. So as he lay there on my parents’ bed, the only thought I had was that I was going to do a pile driver and drive my elbow through his face. So I leapt...

So my parents bedroom is set up so that if they were sitting up in bed they would be facing the door to the living room and kitchen, a dresser with a mirror straight in front of them, there would be a window to the right of them and to the immediate right of where my dad slept there was a lamp that we had owned since we moved from California sitting in the corner. This lamp was like any other, except that it had a nightstand of sorts right in the midsection of it.

And where was my brother was lying? Right next to the lamp, right where my dad sleeps. So there I am in midair and something happened, no matter what happened it was my own doing, I either got repelled away from and over him or I just straight up missed and over shot. But there were no thoughts between my leaving the floor and then my head reconnecting with it.

The next thing that I knew I'm on my back with my legs up in the air up against the wall and I feel like I’m in a Quentin Tarantino movie. My neck was squirting blood, I couldn't see it but I could feel it. I knew that if I didn't slow the bleeding that it wouldn't be long before I bled to death. I almost passed out on the way to my parents bathroom to shove cotton balls in my neck. I yelled at my brother and sister to call 911 and then go across the street to get our neighbor who was a nurse, as they were both freaking out. I knew that I couldn't show it otherwise everyone would lose it and nothing would get done and I would die, but I was screaming inside.

Scared for my life, my heart was racing, and my knees got weak. I had to lie down. I had to close my eyes. Feeling so faint. No energy. So cold.


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My neighbor came over and stayed with me, she was freaking out inside too but trying to stay calm on the outside, but it showed. All I could do was let tears run down my face; "I don’t want to die, not yet." But I knew I was going to die, something had to happen fast. The paramedics were taking so long. It might be too late. It was getting harder to breath, every breath that I took felt like breathing in poison. I don't know how long I can hold on. The paramedics got there right before my parents got home. And they walked in just as I was getting wheeled out on a gurney into the ambulance. The ambulance drove me to a helicopter, when I was in the helicopter, I couldn’t help but think about my life and how short it had been, it’s true what they say, when you’re about to die your whole life flashes before your eyes, everyone you care about and the things you're leaving behind. It was a short flash. Then I realized that I had done nothing of value, that if I were to die that night that my life would have no long term significant value. Tears running down my face. Was it God’s will that I die tonight? And then I had a thought, so what if it was? If it’s God’s will that I die tonight, then does it really matter what I want? God has a purpose for everything and if my death can positively impact someone for Christ then I will gladly give it up. My life was in God's hands now, and I had shaking feeling so cold and so scared. When I realized, at 13 yrs old, that my life was not my own that God was truly in control. My breathing started to become more regular, my hands and feet started to feel warmer and it traveled up my arms and legs, still scared but a lot calmer. We landed at a hospital in Chandler and they wheeled me to the operating room. Still scared, is it my time? This is it, 10...9...8...7... Passed out.



I woke up in a hospital room with people I knew around me. I don't know who was there first, my concept of time at that point was all distorted. But Jeremiah, my mom and dad, and a few people from church came to see me. I was pretty drugged up on morpheme. And I couldn't move my neck. The nurse came in a bit later and told me that the cut to my neck came within a few centimeters of my corroded artery and messed up one of my salavary glands. She said that if it had gone 4 centimeters deeper there would've been no way to save me. That was definitely an act of God to teach me a lesson in extreme way. It was as if at the exact moment I left the ground to attack my brother He pressed pause, came in and moved me into just the right position for all of this to happen. He could’ve done it a different way, sure, but this way I have something to show for it. This way, I have something to talk about. From that point on I decided to never get angry again unless it was about something that really mattered. My reasoning: if it's not worth dying or almost dying for then it's not worth getting angry about. We got home and I saw my parents comforter and one wall had been soaked in my blood and in the garage was the lamp. And it had one piece of glass on it sticking out like a scythe, as if it was the last piece that was determined to exist for the sole purpose of threatening my life. So now here I am, I have a scar on my neck that limits my range of motion, that side of my neck stings when something is too spicy or too sweet, and my face near the back of my jaw bone can't feel anything but pressure. But I'm a better person for it and I have yet to get very angry about anything that wasn't of top priority.

Take a page out of my book and stop getting angry. Don't let it take something seemingly drastic to show you that you're just being stupid.