“A head like yours is supposed to hurt.”  That’s what my father would always say whenever I had a headache.  I can’t remember if he ever substituted other body parts when they were hurting, but I heard that specific phrase so often growing up that, even now, almost 50 years later, my soulmate often hears it whenever I have a migraine.  It’s just one of the dozens of eccentric sayings that he would say and that I would eventually adopt.  Some I would even repeat, to a chorus of strange looks from my classmates and friends, but to me, it was strange that they didn’t have these (or any other sayings) from their parents.  

As I went through elementary and junior high school, I would grab every story I could get my hands on – TV shows, movies, books, games, comics – and I would memorize every aspect and character in them as best I could.  They were living in different worlds, and I would learn their lessons, incorporate them into myself, and try to live as Encyclopedia Brown, who could solve any mystery with a single question. I would meditate on the injustice of being a chaotic good dark elf in a world where lawful evil human assassins are more accepted, and I would follow along with Qwill and his cats as they solved murders and completely misrepresented how smart and friendly cats were. They were all people who, like me, had little in common with those around them.  

These stories prepared me for when my parents divorced when I was in sixth grade. I knew exactly what to expect.  My siblings and I would be dragged into a packed courtroom one by one, sobbing our eyes out, while the judge coldly sits on his high chair and asks us which parent we wanted to live with.  We would shuffle back and forth between two houses – maybe even two schools! – and our parents would bribe us while throwing barbed curses at each other.  

But that never happened.  Instead, I had to go, separately and with my siblings, to some sort of court-mandated therapy with a nun/family counselor who refused to accept that yes, I’m fine, and yes, I know both of my parents love me, and yes I know it’s not my fault so can I please just go back to my books?  There would be no courtroom and no bribes because my mother would instead disappear for the vast majority of the time, and my dad would keep the kids, keep the house, and have to work extra hours every day and on weekends to make up for the missing income.  Whenever I needed money for anything, I would earn it myself (all while throwing half of what I made into my dad’s pocket to help out).  It was only when I hung out with my friends, the ones that didn’t have to work to pay for school supplies, and got the newest toys and games for Christmas instead of socks and underwear, that I noticed that my experiences were not only severely skewed, but were also completely invisible to the vast majority of people.  That was when I realized that the problem comes from seeing things as “normal”.

The truth is, there is no such thing as normal.  What people call normal is just a collection of somewhat common life experiences that were either talked about or experienced by them, and which therefore becomes that individual’s default expectations.  While by itself, this does not pose a problem, it can become a huge issue when that individual is faced with a person who doesn’t have those same defaults.  I believe that most conflicts that humans face could be more peacefully resolved if people would just stop acting as if there is some universal “normal”.

Every single person starts with their own issues, their own struggles, and their own personal pluses and minuses that change how they see things and how they react to things.  Added to that are environmental, societal, and economic advantages and disadvantages that change what options they may have and what results from those options.  These all come together to shape the various people, places, and events of that single individual’s life.  So why, when faced with such obviously complex variables, do so many people insist that everyone should still somehow filter through a single generic path?

And this isn’t even just about society as a whole – this is a problem on the individual level as well.  My ex-best friend used to constantly say to me, “You can’t do that, or you’ll never get a girl” over and over, where the word “that” would mean anything from wearing a specific tee shirt to reading fantasy and sci-fi novels to everything else he deemed a non-starter when trying to attract a mate.  The one thing that he said it most often about was video games – “you can’t tell them you play video games!”  Now, ignoring the obvious microaggression inherent in assuming that girls wouldn’t also be interested in video games, the key point he was trying to drive through to me was that there were things that I had to be, and more importantly, things I strictly cannot be, in order to be accepted by a person I wanted to be with.  

But the funny thing was that he could never counter my response – if the person I was interested in didn’t like that I played video games and didn’t like the things I liked, why would I still want to be with them?  I can’t count the amount of times I’ve watched people let their family, friends, and even random strangers dictate how they should act or what they want, all because “that’s just what you have to do” or because “that’s what growing up is all about”.  To me, the rule was simpler – “As long as you’re not hurting anyone, it doesn’t matter what other people think.”  

Now, this is not to say that neglect or abuse are in any way, shape or form acceptable.  There will always be absolute moral, societal, and legal requirements that one must uphold to maintain one’s ability to remain in society.  Just because there is no real “normal” way to raise a child due to various differing cultural, religious, or community standards, that does not give people the right to beat or abuse their children, nor does it excuse them from the consequences of their actions.  Just as with everything else, your right to choose your own path stops the second your path crosses the path of others.  

More and more in today’s world, we are being asked to think of and accept certain aspects of our current state of affairs as the “new normal.”  The word normal is defined as “conforming to a standard; usual, typical, or expected”.  Should we call a constantly-conflicted and severely divided nation usual or expected?  Should a pandemic that has killed almost seven million human beings worldwide while infecting over 775 million others ever be considered typical?  Perhaps we should stop pushing these rules about absolute conformity to outdated standards, and instead celebrate the very thing that makes us all human – our diverse and ever-expanding differences.

I can’t really remember much of anything about it, except that I was dead.  And by dead, I don’t mean the kind of dead one sees in the movies or hears about from television, where you see a tunnel with white light at the end and you’re supposed to follow the light, I mean dead as in no breathing, no signs of life, that sort of thing.  Well, that’s not entirely true, because while I didn’t see any tunnels or white lights or anything of the sort, I did see people in white flying around.  Not winged angels or anything, but just a bunch of people in white, flying, in some sort of strange room type environment.

Now, what I do remember about it is the beginning and the end.  Kind of strange, I know, because it’s rather difficult to imagine a story without a middle.  Like when you’re flipping through T.V. stations, waiting for a friend and you catch the beginning of a movie, and when you return you catch the last five minutes of it – that’s what I remember.  

The beginning started just a day earlier, when in the morning my asthma started to act up.  Normally, in situations where my breathing is either very shallow, or congested, or sounds like an old coal train’s whistle, I take a puff or two on my inhaler, and I’d be fine again.  But, for reasons that will probably never be really known to me, that isn’t what happened.  I could conjecture that it was the exceedingly harsh winter winds that I was continuously breathing that day, or that the airborne allergens that I live in constant fear of were especially active at the time, or even that some combined offensive flanking maneuver occurred, in which cigarette smoke provided some form of cover for the cat dander and biting winds to collectively attack my larynx in an attempt to seize control of my lungs, but whatever the case, I was unable to breathe properly, and was continually worsening by the hour.

By nightfall, I was taking Primatene Mist almost hourly, and for those who don’t know what Primatene mist is, or the schedule by which one is supposed to subscribe to while using it, let me educate you on exactly what Primatene Mist really is, and coincidentally why you never see commercials for it on television anymore.  Primatene Mist is to normal asthma medications what a hundred pound sledgehammer is to a tack hammer.  Or, for those unknowledgeable on what those two items are, it is akin to using a car to smash into a thumbtack, instead of just pushing it in.  And I was basically performing vehicular manslaughter on my lungs once an hour, instead of the recommended once every four hours, and not really getting much better.

So, to put it mildly, I was not doing well.  But, given that I had spent over seventeen years of my life dealing with this painful, frightening, and sometimes unbearable disease, I thought I had the full measure of it.  After going through a childhood like mine, where at age ten you’re paying rent, your father telling you asthma is all in your mind, and spending nights sitting down wishing you would just die instead of having to deal with a throat that doesn’t seem to like you all that much, you tend to think you know the worst, and how to deal with it.  

For example, one time I will never forget, no matter how badly I want to, was the time my throat completely closed on me.  I was maybe 16 at the time, probably younger, and I was having trouble sleeping, as most people would if they had only one tenth the necessary amount of air flowing through their lungs.  And, because I grew up having to steal Primatene Mist inhalers because no doctor would prescribe it, my parents couldn’t afford it, and no doctor would listen to me when I explained to them that the medication they kept prescribing me wasn’t working, I was stuck without medication at 11:30 at night on a Sunday.  I would have gladly (albeit extremely slowly) walked down to Rite Aid to steal myself a new one, but they didn’t open Sundays, and I had run out Saturday afternoon.  All my various secondary cures were ineffective – the pure lemon juice I had squirted down my throat hadn’t dissolved the congestion, really strong coffee only worked when it was a mild case, and trying to slowly breathe out and forcefully breathe in was making me hyperventilate.

So I was stuck just dealing with it, watching television, hoping that I would just die rather than have to face the hours of waiting interminably just for a smidgeon of improvement, when it happened.  Unlike most times, where my throat would just sit patiently, happy to torture me slowly for some crime I must have committed in a past life, that day it decided that I deserved some crueler fate and simply closed up.

If anyone ever asks you how you want to die, don’t choose suffocation, and don’t choose drowning.  Perhaps you know that, perhaps not, but I do.  For at least forty seconds, which in a situation like that is equivalent to forty or fifty YEARS of torment, I did not breathe.  I could not yell, I could not talk or whisper or do anything at all except sit in utter panic.  Finally, by some miracle, or curse depending on your viewpoint, I coughed, and a good amount of congestion cleared, and I took the deepest breath I had ever imagined possible.

But that was during childhood, and this was not.  Perhaps, as my wife believes, the seventeen years of jackhammering my lungs had weakened them.  What I do know is that, like then, I had tried everything I could think of, and was simply not getting any better.  And, just like then, I simply tried to ignore it, hoping this time that it would go away, as it had so many times in the past.

Unlike all those other times, however, I had the company of my wife and her parents.  She watched me go from okay, to bad, to “fine” (a word she hates because she knows when I say “fine,” it really means, “I’m not doing so good but I think I can beat it” or “I’m doing horridly but don’t want to worry you” or “I really can’t tell for sure yet”) to the point where every other sentence starts with “Should we go to the emergency room?”  But, as I said earlier, I thought I knew the worst, and thought I could handle it, so I kept saying no.

By the time I’m well enough to move, it’s way past midnight, and while I’m not dead (yet), breathing so shallowly has gotten to me, and my wife helped me slowly crawl up the stairs.  She helps me undress, and while I cannot lie down (because the worst thing in the world for me to do when I have an attack is to lie down) I am able to watch television in the hopes that it goes away enough for me to pass out.

But it doesn’t, and after another hour, I concede, and she quickly runs to wake up my father in law to take me to the hospital.  She helps me dress, and as she does so, I am suddenly panicking, more than I had the entire night, and I keep apologizing.  My breaths are coming quicker but shallower, and I am both hyperventilating and getting no air whatsoever.  I am dizzy, unable to really move at all, and all I can think of is how horrible this must be for my wife to deal with, and how truly sorry I am to put her through this.  I keep repeating that in my head, and I think out loud (although how could I without being able to get any air?) I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.  I remember entering the hallway and looking down the stairs, and nothing more.

In the car, I remember breathing very short, forced breaths.  I must have gotten down the stairs somehow.  I can’t remember.

I awoke to hear a steady beeping, and feeling very faint and weak.  I don’t remember much of anything at all besides that about the room at first.  What I do remember, more than anything else about that place, was the fact that my wife was by my side.  I didn’t know where I was, and I probably didn’t even know who I was, but I knew her, and I knew peace.  I smiled, and she explained all that had happened to me.

I had died on the way to the hospital.  No breathing at all, I was out cold.  Dead.  Cheryl, my mother-in-law had carried me down the stairs and threw me in the car. Charlie, her husband, had driven like a man possessed, ignoring every single sign, car, and obstacle to drive up to the hospital, carried me through the doors, and had yelled at anyone who would listen that his son had stopped breathing.  My wife had been hysterical in the car when I went limp, and Cheryl had helped get me out of the car and had spent the rest of that time consoling her.  Four days had gone by, and I was in the Intensive Care Unit of Flushing Hospital.  Everyone I knew, knew what had happened.  People had visited me, my job had been notified, and everything was okay.

But it really wasn’t okay, not at first.  I had to spend two more days in the hospital, during which I was also told that the men in white suits that I had seen when I was dead were the orderlies trying to hold me down so they could put the tubes in me.  There were six of them.  The reason I remember them flying was because I kept punching and kicking them, and in the end it took those orderlies and eight shots of morphine to knock me out so that I wouldn’t move.  Ironically, my wife had always called me Hercules, because of some semblance she sees between the Disney cartoon and I, and now she had proof, even if it wasn’t the kind of proof one wants.  She also called me Wolverine, because of my tendency to heal quickly after cuts, and the doctors agreed with her on that as well – my lungs were undamaged after all that I had put them through, and they were all amazed that I was back to normal after less than a week.  

Or, as normal as one can be with morphine withdrawal, something the hospital neither warned me about nor prepared me for.  During my time at the hospital, eating their horrifyingly bad food, I was never told to move around, and so I assumed that I was doing well, but was just weak.  Morphine withdrawal, however, is the most painful experience I have ever been through – consciously, anyway – because it involves such fun activities as hours of projectile vomiting whenever you move while  having food in your stomach, and dry heaving when you don’t, the inability to stand up, sit straight or balance whatsoever, and (as if that wasn’t enough) headaches and aches throughout your body so painful that you would rather drag your vital organs through crushed glass than go through them.  And that’s the fun part of withdrawal!

So, after many nights of bucket-worshipping and peeing-in-a-cup, I slowly redeveloped the ability of moving around, albeit with help – either my wife, Cheryl or a cane – and slowly recuperated.  I think the best day during that time was the day I didn’t vomit, followed closely by the day I actually walked to the bathroom by myself (with copious breaks in between, however.)  It wasn’t a fun time, but it beat being dead.

But then again, when I really stop to think about it, regardless of how little I really know about what truly happened, and knowing about all that happened in my past, I realized something.  I’m still dead.  Or rather, since that day, I’ve always been dead.  Because after the hospital, and after I got over the withdrawal, I noticed things I’ve never seen before.  I noticed how truly beautiful it is to live in this world.  To see the individual leaves on a tree, or the tiny branch at the very top that a little bird is setting a nest on.  Or the joy that comes with just being able to walk by yourself, wherever you want to walk, and not throwing up after two steps.  Most importantly, the person who thought he knew it all, could handle it all, and knew what the worst that could happen was, died that day.  And, luckily for me, he did, because in doing so, he saved my life.  So, every year, in a strange sort of way, while most people only have one day for them to celebrate their life, I am fortunate enough to have two.  And, for those like me who’ve died and gone to Earth, Happy Death Day to you too.  

Some things are easily forgotten:  people’s phone numbers, perhaps, or maybe the location of your keys, or even the reason you went to the store this morning. But for whatever reason, the glue that usually sticks a memory to the mind wears out, and we are left with the broken, half-shattered remnants of an event.  This particular time, however, is not one of those tattered remains, but a full out superglue-d bit of my own history, and it involves a man whom most people believe is a toothless, gristle-skinned dinosaur.

Fourth of July, 1985.  I was eight at the time, holding a dozen sparklers in my hand, trying to convince my mother and father that it’s safe for me to use them all simultaneously.  They don’t buy it, of course; what mother and father would?  But they allow me four, two in each hand, and I am happy, jumping and frolicking in the smoke-filled air.  It’s a little late, about eight or so at night, when my parents have finally had enough of the snapping and popping sounds, and they invite us children back into the house for some fresh-cut watermelon.

After a well-eaten dessert, my brethren and I are shooed off to bed, and we sit around, listening to the bottle rockets and sky screamers and roman candles whistling on their journey into the sky.  My little brother William is the first to fall asleep; at five years old, he didn’t have the training that eight years of life gives you.  My older brothers, Mike and Sean, clock out soon after, because at 10 and 13, you’ve already learned that the Fourth of July comes every year, and that explosions aren’t as good as a well-deserved sleep.  Me, I lie there, savoring the taste of watermelon and the few pieces of pear that I snagged from the fridge, enjoying life as only a small child can.

The doorbell rings, and at first, I’m annoyed – it’s almost ten by now, and my little brother is snoring away.  Meanwhile, my older brothers are waking up, wondering as I am what that strange crackling noise is.  The door to our bedroom slams open, and my father screams, “Get out of the house!  NOW!”

“Why, Dad?” I ask, while rubbing my eyes and yawning.

“JUST GO, NOW!” he bellowed back, before running up the flight of stairs leading to the upstairs apartment.  As I slowly got up from my bed, I heard the reason loud and clear.

“Fire in the backyard!  Get out of the house!” my father was screaming at the family upstairs.

A fire…  now that changed my outlook on waking up significantly.  I rushed out of the front door, still in my pajamas, and ran two blocks down to the only pull station I knew of.  I pulled the handle as I had been taught to do in school, and waited very impatiently for the operator to respond.

“Where is the fire located?”  That was the first intelligible response from the box.  It sounded like a hollowed telephone, with a strangely robotic hint to it.

“74-11 97^th Avenue!  Please, hurry!  It’s my house on fire!”  Amazingly, I was pretty calm for a kid thinking he’s going to be homeless any minute.

“We’re sending a truck now.”

At that, I turned around, and was amazed to find that the fire truck was already there.  So was a crowd of people, and a lot of flickering light.  ‘Wow, they’re good!’ I thought to myself, and started walking back, confident that the firefighters knew what to do.

After the first block back, though, I started hearing something really peculiar. And then, as I got halfway through the second block, I saw something I never imagined possible.  There, in the middle of the street, were six or seven firefighters.  They looked to be concentrating on something in the middle of them, and what it was I really couldn’t see.  Then, it happened again.  Like a rag doll, I saw another fireman go flying through the air, at least four feet off the ground, to land not so nimbly on his feet and hands.  Determined, he rushed back to help his colleagues with whatever it was in the middle of them.

As I got closer, however, it became clear what (or really, who) it was inside the circle of flying firefighters.  It became alarmingly clear, because I heard something I had never ever heard before.  My father, perhaps the gruffest man I had ever met, was screaming, half-crying, at the top of his lungs, “MY SON IS IN THERE!!!”  

“DAD!” I yelled, and ran to him.  He turned, flipped all the firemen to the floor at once and ran to me, and yelled in the loudest possible voice, “DON’T EVER RUN AWAY LIKE THAT AGAIN!  DON’T EVER DISAPPEAR LIKE THAT!”  And then, he hugged me.  

Now, most people would think that’s a standard logical response, to hug your child, but my father was never one to accede to emotions.  It had never occurred to me, not once during the eight years of my life, that my father had ever cared for me until just that moment.  My father was stern.  Powerful.  He was for so many years a god to me.  But never, not once, was he the hugging type.  He was just my father.  Dad was just the name we had all given him, but after that night, Dad was exactly what he was.

I must have forgotten some parts of that night; my life has progressed quite a bit since that day.  Maybe I’m not positive on which words my dad screamed at the firemen as they flew away from him.  I might even be totally wrong about how far away that pull box was, or how it sounded.  But never in the eighteen years since that day have I ever forgotten the sight of my father tossing seven firefighters through the air just because he thought that I might be hurt.  Never once have I ever forgotten he’s my dad.