Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire When did you first feel your mortality?

i know i well die someday, i just don't worry about it and try to enjoy my life.

Stepping of off a hole on my favorite salmon river.
Exhaling my last breath while continuing to sink and be swept downstream.
Looking death in the eye.

A last moment boulder that I kicked off of saved my life.

I should have drown...

23 October 1983, 06:22 am, Beirut...

In Da Nang when I made it into a sandbag bunker about 1 second before a rocket exploded the plane I'd been standing beside. Thank God for sandbags.

Got smashed up pretty good at work a few years back, should have been much worse. At that time I realized what a bind my young wife and 1st son would have been in had it been worse.....

well i guess when i fell out the back eyeballs truck when he moved while i was still standing up and i only broke and dislocated my collar bone, then i drove 700 miles home and almost ran off the rd but hit a guard rail, but i took in stride because i wasn't dead. could of broke my neck i guess.

toss up between flipping a swing set at 6 yrs old

Or that time when i mounted that 850 thermoquad on a big block 67 coronet 440, when them manual secondaries opened up...sounded like a toilet flushing

35?? I'd give my left nut to be 35. Wait a minute, that would defeat the purpose......

Jan 4, 2010.
Car accident.
Right at sunset.
-4 degrees temp.
Whiplash.
Never been the same since.

Sitting on a porta-crapper in Iraq...I hear a swiiiisssshhhhh BANG!. The porta-crapper shakes and is peppered with gravel and shrapnel...no harm to me, and that chit wasn't a difficult one!! That was an eye-opener.

I first felt it at 20. Had a lard-ass "deputy sheriff" point his revolver at my chest for what he thought was a minor game law violation (it wasn't) while I was standing there holding a shotgun in my hands. Pucker factor was sky high.

Now I feel it all the time. I've got four older brothers, oldest is 74 with cancer that's metastasized. They'll all probably pass before I do. So I think more about that than my own mortality. I'll most likely be the last one standing.

It was not a single instance but a cumulation of a few over several months.

First was answering a call for a baby not breathing 3 days after getting my EMT certification. Was the first one on the scene and realized that there was nothing that could be done and called it. I was 21 years old.

Second was less than two months later. Call behind my house for an overdose. It was a guy I knew very well only 2 years older than me. We worked him to the hospital to no success. Turned out to be an embolism that could hit anyone at any time.

Next, I was beaten to an inch of my life responding to a bar fight. I knew everyone there to some extent and thought there would be no problem. Alcohol can change people's attitudes and I really didn't know them all as well as I thought. Thankfully, one guy thought I was too young to die and stopped the rest before I was hurt too bad. Only spent three days in the hospital and 5 off work.

Last, I lost my wife in an accident. Panel truck went through an intersection and broadsided her. Luckily, it was not in my jurisdiction as I was working.

By the time I turned 23 I realized no one lives forever and that I had 2 roads to code from. I almost screwed up there.

17 came up with a tumor in the side of my face and had to have it removed. Took 2 years to mostly heal, now 50 plus years later there are still side effects. About 5 years ago a Urologist decided I had to have cancer and he could do lots of surgery; I got depressed, decided to let it take it's course rather than spending all my wife's inheritance on a miserable existence for a year, and also got a second opinion. He was wrong. SOB

Many times.....

Sunday August 23, 2015......in the ER when the doc told me I had cancer.

You never know. Barry Gibb is the oldest BeeGee and the only one left. His brothers died at 30, 53, and 62.

January 10 1985.

The day the back was cut open and i was without legs.

It does make one think differently about things and changes up just what you will put up with.

I never would have guessed you to be a fan.

Bu seriously, none of us can sing.

I've worked my entire life in some form of Emergency services and ER nursing, now a flight nurse. Seen way too many people with life altering and life ending injuries and illness. While I am responsible enough to plan for the future, I live for today. Have a soon to be 4 month old son I had late in life ( I'm 44) so my "future" planning has changed a little, but if I still consider today the most important day of my life. I hope some day my son has so damn many guns he doesn't have a clue what to do with them, and each one has a memory in his mind of something he and I did together with it.

Nov. 1966 south of Dak To, RVN the trooper on line in front of me was shot in the head. 4 days later on a Co. patrol 79 casualties out of 116 reporting in less than 3 hours, I realized that I may not live forever. Life has been a little boring since those days.


mike r