Essay 4 - 2024. My Personal Fight with Stage 4 Cancer or CLL.
My Introductions with Dying and Death! What About You?
By: Mr. George D. Patnoe.
January 25, 2024
I bet most of you, if not all of you have been introduced to dying and death at some time in your human life. Actually, it is unavoidable, isn’t it? For some children, they get to see dying and death with their own eyes, a pet, cat or dog dies, a fish dies, a grandmother dies, or maybe those kids watch war movies with bullets, blood, guts, and bodies flying all over the place. Then there is all of that gaming, shooting, destroying creatures and buildings, and other stuff. It seems that some children grow up just shooting and killing other living creatures, even if those other fantasy creatures are only in a computer software.
Some of you might have experienced death when you were at a very young age too, meaning you as young children were actually dying somewhere like a hospital or even in your own home. I bet some of those memories haunt some of you badly, while some of you might have experienced dying and death at a later time in your life for the first time, like when you went hunting for deer in the forest, or you saw killing, dying, and death, in a war. A real war of blood, guts, dying, and death. A bit of a shock to your mind, I am guessing.
Then there was that first kill shot in a firefight overseas as a United States Marine. I knew a United States Marine who was a real nerd before he enlisted in the Marine Corps. To make it short, he played games meaning he was a gamer, he was a churchgoer, he even sang in the choir, and he had a clean criminal record, meaning he had no criminal record. Then, overnight, he was enlisted in the United States Marine Corps, doing pushups for the very first time, which led to his first kill shot through a wall, killing someone who was trying to kill him by shooting bullets through a wall in a building.
This Marine was in a building, cleaning it out of the violent enemies. He was walking down the hallway when out of nowhere, bullets were flying through the wall, headed his way, when he had just enough time to point his rifle at the wall to start shooting at this target. He then walked around, through a door and he saw what his own bullets had done to a human biological body.
There was blood everywhere, and of course, there was a completely dead human body, never to breathe again. The Marine dropped to his knees, and he sobbed like a baby until he could not sob anymore. Then he spent the next eight years killing other enemies. His words, “After the first kill, it was easy!” But it wasn’t like killing as a gamer. People were trying to kill him, and he was killing other people, until he made his way home to America to tell me his stories.
For me, I was introduced to dying and death at a very young age, then again in middle school, then again in high school, then again while in the university, and then again and again after my university days. I either had my own close calls with dying and death, or I saw other peoples' close calls with dying and death. I had a young, but old mind back then. My dad said I grew up fast, I think because I was ready to kill anyone who wanted to take my human life. When he saw what I could do in a fight as little boy, he was probably in shock, but he kind of gave me his adult permission to defend myself as best as I could in a real street fight.
Believe it or not, I just saw someone die in a rather long Netflex series. For some stupid reason, I actually got choked up for a second or two. It is funny how we connect with the strangest things, isn’t it? Anyway, she was a wife, a mother, a grandmother, an uneducated loser, a drunk, druggie, a sex addict with mental problems. Nobody in the family was going to miss her, but they were all sad that she had died. She was gone from planet earth. She was gone from the Netflix series too.
I will bet that most of you might have had the same exact emotional experience about someone you knew who died. I know I have. Where do I begin? Hum, I ask myself. My mind is now racing with images of those who I have known who died, and those people who I did not know who died. There was one thing I discovered as a little boy. People can be so mean and rotten to other people, so it was very good that I developed a high degree of killing skills at a young age.
Images upon images of dying and death, or just dying, or just dead, that never seem to go away, although they really were not really remembered until I started writing this essay. Isn’t that the way it is in life, because the truth of it is that life goes on for the living. We see someone dying or dead and we start to think about your own human limited morality, or your own human death.
As a very young boy, we would visit my grandma’s house. There were so many people in the house sometimes that us kids needed to sleep on the floor sometimes. On the wall were these oval wooden frames with black and white male portraits inside them. When I asked my aunt who they were, she responded, “Oh Georgie, those are your ‘cousins’ that died in the war.”
I asked myself, “What war?” “What was war?” The questions continued within my young mind. I bet that those soldiers did not even get a funeral. They probably died in the dirt somewhere overseas, in a foreign land where people probably did not like, nor want Americans, in their own lands, and they probably did not like Americans dying in their country either.
I did not know what war was back then as a boy, but I did know that there was something called war. It did not sound like fun to me at all. I knew that involved mass killing, dying, and death, which seemed to be and still is a common experience around the world. I know a lot more about the world now, about how the world works, and how and why the human brain likes to kill other human beings, for the stupidest of reasons. For some people, war is part of life for many people around the world, from the moment they are born, until the moment they did. More dying and death on a mass scale.
As a boy, I did not know that people died in war everyday around the world, mostly males in a lot of countries, but innocent people die too, by the millions. They learn about dying and death sooner than they should since they are part of the human species. But for some goddamn reason, some of which I know now, people kill each other on a planet that has existed with abundant life in one form or another form for hundreds of millions of years, oh, for billions of years, if you consider cellular life forms.
Amazing and insane if you think about it, if you think about it very deeply. After hundreds of millions of years, or longer, like billions of years of life on planet Earth; after the biological brain, and mental evolution of human beings, they are still killing each other either by a single low-life criminal or by a world leader who has no sense of right and wrong; nor a sense of having a guilty conscience. You would think that a biological species with a seemingly higher sense of consciousness and intelligence would not want to kill each other, but that is not the way it is for the moment for the human species.
One other thing that really bothered me when I was a very young boy, was when every time I visited the local Catholic church with my family every Sunday, there was that huge brown bronze 3-D image of a guy’s arms being stretched out with his hands being nailed to a bronze piece of wood and his feet also being nailed to the other piece of bronze wood that was hanging on the front wall for every church goer to see and stare at because it was unavoidable to see. So, I stared and stared always asking the same questions, like, ‘What the heck is this guy all about?’
What was that all about? As I stared at that bronze statue of a middle-aged male hanging by his arms with his hands nailed to wood. It was bronze against a white wall. It stood out from everything in the whole church, except the stained-glass windows, which by the way were so beautiful, so colorful. I imagined the blood dripping from this whipped body, the pain in his brain, another innocent human being killed and murdered by violent bully human beings.
The stained-glass windows told a story, but as a boy, I had no idea what that story was about, nor did I know the story of Mary, Joseph, Jesus, the Cross, and other stuff too. About the Bible in general, you know. I did not even know there was a book titled, “The Bible.” I bet that there are millions of children in America who do not know that there is a book titled ‘The Bible’ either.
But the point about the cross in a church as a little boy was, “Why would anyone be nailed to a piece of wood and what did he do to deserve that slow, painful, and horrible way of dying and death.” Week after week. Month after month. Year after year. Until there came a point in my thinking and pondering brain and life when I did want to know what the heck was a guy doing hanging on a cross, and I got no answers from anyone at all, until later in life.
More importantly, I wondered what he felt like just hanging there like a dead piece of deer meat. What was he thinking when he was all alone on a wooden cross with other people staring at him in real life. I wonder now what do normal people feel like when they are dying? What is happening within their minds when they are dying of old age, of cancer, by a car accident, some sickness or disease, or the instant they have a heart attack, or an overdose of drugs, etc. Or they simply die inside by losing a lover. How about dying from a falling airplane?
To top all that off, when I asked an old man Catholic priest and then a very young Catholic priest the question, “What is God.” They both looked at me like I was asking the wrong question, an impossible question to answer. The old priest answered, “You will learn about that later in life.” He had no idea what I would learn about God, evil, and the human species before not too long afterward, like decades later. I walked away from both of them knowing that that church was not for me. I simply did not want to repeat the same words every week for the next ten thousand years of my existence, here on earth or in any place whatsoever.
I simply walked away from a church that only repeated the same words week after week, month after month, years after years, for a very long time in history, especially without explaining anything about my life or death, or your own living, dying, and deaths. I had guessed as a young boy I would have to wait to get answers about living, dying, and death, and just maybe, an afterlife too. Maybe some of you have your own experiences just like mine, or something like it.
Then there were the WWI movie and WWII movies. I watched war movies when I was a little boy and then I watched them too when I was older. Of course, maybe most people in America watch one war movie at least once in their lives, I am guessing while other people have to live in a war zone everyday of their lives.
What a horrible way to live on such a special planet called earth. A planet that supposedly is the only planet with life on it. Is this what the human species is all about. Killing each other on a planet that is the only planet with life on it? Give me a break!
But none of the war movies looked right. Something was wrong. I was missing something. I did not know what the cause of those wars was. Who made the decisions to send millions of human beings to war to be killed. What was the logic behind it?
I did not know what all the war movies were all about when I was a young boy. I never watched the news, but even if I did watch the news, I did not understand worldly and international events like I do now. Now, I also understand something about the hardwired human brain and soft-wired human consciousness too. Actually, I truly know a lot more than I did as a young boy, and that is the way it should be.
Moreover, back then, the televisions back then, in the old days were not like today’s televisions. Back in the old days seemingly so long ago, but still locked in my memory, the televisions were small boxes with black and white pictures, with antennas sticking out of the top of the televisions. We were lucky to even get a picture at all sometimes. Plus, I think there were only three television stations to watch. ABC. CBS. NBC. The point being is that even the blood was in black and white compared to the red blood on televisions today.
So back then when Bibles were in limited supply, so was the news about the world. The news was very limited, and I was not allowed to watch it anyway, most of the time, when the worldly stuff was on it, like when the real wars, with real dying, and real death were being broadcasted throughout America, and the world.
Back then, I bet the politicians did not want anyone to see the world wars with all of that blood, dying, and death. Now, actual killing, dying, and death are on the news very day in a million different tv channels, on every smartphone, with those images sticking inside your brain and mind like the first time you had sex, or the first time you start a human being walk on the moon. Etc. Etc. Etc.
Do all boys and girls get introduced to dying and death at an early age, all around the world? It seems to me that many young boys and girls get introduced to dying and death from the moment they are born to the moment they die, especially in some of those backward, primitive countries, cultures, and religions that have no respect for human life, for the life that still exists after hundreds of millions of years of life on planet earth.
Isn’t it truly amazing? False religions that pretend to pray to a god somewhere, and they go out and kill other human beings in the name of a god somewhere that doesn’t even exist as those religious kills think it does, as another big human fantasy.
I bet some boys and girls never experience any type of dying and death until they are older, or really older. I sort of envy those people who are lucky enough to live in a very rich and secluded life. Those people are protected from the very dangerous world we all live in, even in America.
My personal introduction has many more introductions to dying and death and I bet many or most of my readers have their personal introductions to dying and death, either locked away somewhere in your subconscious mind, or maybe you remember them every day, or week, or month, or every so often. How do those locked or unlocked memories of dying and death that affect your own mind, your own state of consciousness, and your own view of dying and death? Of life and living too.
Moreover, how do your own locked or unlocked memories create your personal view of life and living, of your own future experiences of dying and death? I bet you never thought about those questions, did you, you living creatures called human beings on planet Earth? Human beings want to hide one of the most important topics that their tiny minds should worry about before death. And that is death itself.
I think that there are some common denominators that govern how the general human species views dying and death. The number one emotion is probably fear, the fear of what is going to happen after each individual, personal human body stops breathing, because every human being knows that one day they will stop breathing, or in other words, the body will stop breathing.
Maybe that is the real first emotion some people learn to have when they are young or old. The fear of dying and death, the fear of the unknown, and maybe the fear of a God too. How about the fear of being killed? The fear of being killed or murdered way too early in life. When people get old, meaning their biological bodies cannot take the daily struggle of living because they are just too worn down after being alive for decades on end.
Maybe after reading my next 48 essays, you will not fear dying and death anymore! Let us hope so anyway.
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