All My Lives

Engrossing Psychological NarrativeThere are people among us who survive great catastrophes, even murder attempts, in one lifetime, but few have survived innumerable murder attempts, and multiple catastrophes. I am alive today, despite, or, because of, quirks of chance-in fact- there are people who have said that I have experienced what can only be calledmiracles of survival. Regardless of the reasons, the paradoxical inevitability of the facts remains true: over twenty near-death experiences, via disease, accident, beasts, and by men with knives and guns, as well as inopportune and unfortunate events of nature, all occurred within one lifetime:Mine.I have lived one lifetime but more than one life. I have had five last names and a complete name change, although I was only married once. I have fled my home to save my own life on a rainy stormy night, and I lived incognito, hiding under an alias, with nothing, no money, and no home, with only my five small children. I sat with the highest and the lowest, the poorest and the richest, cried with the saddest, and walked with the bravest and the best of us. I have been intimately acquainted with the bottomless pit of sorrow and hopelessness while in the depths of despair, and I have been on the tops of mountains in the heights of triumph; but in all times and through all my lives, I lived fully vested in Rudyard Kipling’sIF:“If ALL men count with you but none not too much”, and IF you can “Watch the things you gave your life to broken” and “Stoop and build them up with broken tools” and IF you can continue forward when all things pull you back, crawl uphill when the odds are against you , and never fall so low that you can never get up, to give life the full potential of your worth by living it with all the fire and vigor you possess, to give it your all ”Sixty seconds of distance run’” full-out, giving it everything you’ve got. I did this, although quietly and without fanfare, because we live most of our lives without fanfare, no matter how brave or how zealously we wo