Back in 1986 I got over my fear of dying.

　

It was about the 17th of August and I was in my 24'7" sailboat in the middle of the Gulf of Alaska and an early fall storm blew up and the seas got wild.

The guy I was sailing with got a little panicky and asked me what I was going to do. I told him to go below and pour us both a drink of Glenlivit 12 and open a couple of bottles of Guiness stout.

"How can you even think of having a drink at such a time!" he cried.

"Because these may very well be the last drinks we have together on this planet," I answered calmly.

He did what he was told and I ducked below to savor the good scotch and climbed back into the cockpit with a bottle of Guiness, the neck of which I kept covered with my thumb.

He knocked back the scotch in one untasting gulp and chug-a-lugged the beer and I guess it settled him down a bit and the two of us sat in the cockpit and watched the storm rage.

Sometimes God calms the storm, and sometimes God lets the storm rage and calms his child.

This time God chose to let the storm rage and I have been grateful for that ever since. He calmed me instead.

I was in the middle of a storm in the Gulf of Alaska because I had put myself there and had nobody to blame but myself. My crewman was in the same boat, literally and figuratively. I hadn't shanghai'd him, he had come along as a volunteer.

Neither of us had anyone to blame but ourselves.

We sat there in the weather looking at the seas and contemplating our demise and discussed it calmly. We discussed the fact that if we lost the boat we would be in the middle of the Gulf of Alaska in survival suits and that we would likely pass slowly of hypothermia, our remains would end up as fish food and we would have simply disappeared.

We both agreed that we would not expidite matters while there was still hope. We would see it to the end and die as small shivering men in neoprene suits shivering like a junkie in a blanket.

To me it didn't seem like all that awful way to go because it was while doing something that most people are too cowardly to do. I was making an open ocean crossing in a small boat and was the captain of my own ship and the master of my own fate.

I had sailed into waters in a small boat and was at the mercy of Mother Nature. All she had to do was turn her head and it would be curtains for the pair of us.

That was the day I lost my fear of dying.

While I most certainly am not suicidal and very much like being alive, I learned that every life has a beginning, a middle and an end. As time goes on and I get closer by the second to the end of my life I consider the lesson I learned aboard my little boat to be one of the most important things I have ever learned in my life.

Had I lost my life back during that fateful storm back in '86 I think I most likely would have met my maker with no regrets because I was doing something interesting. The thought at the time of dying of Alzheimer's was and still is fearful.

Of course, I have had a number of good years since but that's immateriel. At least I would have gone in a way the the sheltered will never know, adventuring for the joy of it.

It changed me considerably and one day it made me a better person.


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