Forty times I should have died.
Forty times I came back.
What follows is not a memoir in the polished sense. It is the account of a man who has spent eighty-one years asking why he was allowed to keep going — and what he was supposed to do with the time he was given back.
I was born in 1944 in a small town in the American Midwest, into a family that prayed before meals and meant it. My first brush with death came when I was four. I do not remember the fall, but I remember the hands that lifted me afterward and the way the kitchen smelled — bread and iron — when I came back into it.
By the time I was thirty I had lost count somewhere around seventeen. There was a fire on a fishing boat off the coast of Florida. There was a head-on collision in a snowstorm in Wyoming. I was shot at twice in two different countries by men who, I believe, did not really intend to kill me, but who were close enough.
"I am not telling these stories because they are remarkable. I am telling them because they happened to an ordinary man, and that is what makes them worth telling."
People ask me, often, whether I am afraid of dying. The honest answer is no, but not because I am brave. I have simply spent so much time near it that the unfamiliarity has worn off. What I am afraid of is forgetting — forgetting the faces of the people who pulled me out, forgetting the prayers I made when there was nothing else to do, forgetting that I was meant to come back for a reason.
I moved to Cartagena in my late seventies. The light here in the afternoons does something to a man's memory. It pulls things forward. The Great Eagle Series began as a few pages of notes I was writing for my grandchildren, and it became three books because once I started, I could not find the place to stop.
Forty is a number. The stories behind it are not. If you read the books, you will meet the people who carried me, the moments that quieted me, and the long second of stillness that always — every single time — came just before I was given back. That second is what I want you to feel.
— Verl K., Cartagena, Colombia
