THANKFUL TO BE ALIVE

How many people do you know who have had many near death crises in their lives and are still very much alive?

My friend Lee Beam experienced seven of these kinds of experiences, and yet he is not afraid, not worried, and not bitter. He is simply thankful to God and his family for helping him survive.

You may well remember him, for he has lived in this area for his whole life, and he worked for the Enquirer for almost 35 years.

Lee’s first terrible experience happened when he was just five and playing with his aunt of the same age under a walnut tree. Suddenly his grandmother cried out that the children must get on the family’s porch immediately, and just moments later lightning split that very tree in half.

When he was 12 and playing on a hay stack, he suddenly fell into a void at the bottom of the stack, where he could barely breathe. Fortunately his father had a thin friend who could fit down into the hole. Then, with super-human effort, Lee’s father pulled them both out, just in time.

Then when he was old enough to drive, Lee regularly drove a younger friend in that boy’s 1936 car. One day, with four kids in the car and another one driving, the vehicle turned over several times with many serious injuries.

Years later, in 1990, Lee had an aneurysm between his brain and his skull. He suddenly got a terrible headache and was rushed to the hospital in Charlotte. No one there could analyse the problem, however, so he went home, where the headache become even worse. 

At that point he went to the hospital in Battle Creek, and though they rightly diagnosed an aneurysm, they couldn't find it. Finally, after six months of terrible pain, Lee was taken to Ann Arbor, and the doctor there not only discovered the location of the aneurysm but repaired it through an opening in his skull.

Around this same time, Lee’s blood pressure was dangerously high. One day, when it went up to 215-110, he finally said to God, “Lord, I give up. I’ll do whatever you want me to do.” Suddenly he felt a tingling up from his feet to his head, and his blood pressure went down suddenly to 120-70.

Then, when he was 69, Lee began to suffer from kidney failure and needed dialysis three times per week. He figured he’d probably have to continue that unpleasant procedure for the rest of his life. He suddenly felt, however, that God wanted him to get kidney replacement. He therefore applied to the hospital in Ann Arbor. He asked God for a good kidney and please to do it quickly, and he received a call the next day and was told to go there immediately for surgery. After a couple of setbacks, he now has a perfectly functioning over-sized kidney.

Next Lee had a heart attack and was declared dead for five minutes. He had to get an artificial aortic valve which also works perfectly.

And finally, Lee developed neuropathy which makes his feet, legs, hands and lower arms numb and painful without normal feeling. He has trouble walking and is constantly cold because of poor circulation.

After all of these near deaths, however, Lee is truly a model for us all. He remains a God-loving, generous, cheerful fellow who is still enjoying life and is forever thankful simply to be alive.

And he’s half a year older than I am, for he just turned 75 two days ago.

Experiences of Death

“What Happens When We Die” is a fascinating book by a brilliant British specialist on the subject of Near Death Experience or NDE.

The author, Dr. Sam Parnia, is clear about the fact that he does not know what happens after death, but yet he has a lot of evidence that NDE truly happens to a number of people who not only return to life after serious illnesses or injuries of different sorts but who also vividly remember amazing experiences.

Parnia can, of course, interview only those people who survived their accidents, their surgery, their seizures, and so forth. In addition, unfortunately, some who may have experienced temporary death, especially from cardiac arrest, do not retain very detailed memories.

But Parnia nevertheless has a number of fascinating examples of NDE to share. It’s especially interesting, he points out, that this is not simply an experience for those who believe in an afterlife. True enough, some said they actually encountered God or Jesus, but others simply called what they went through a loving encounter with deceased family members and friends. For still others it was more vague, such as a tunnel journey, followed by very bright light.

Parnia also emphasizes that this is not simply a western phenomenon, for he has learned of similar reports in what he described as “Buddhist texts, Islamic works and in accounts from China, Siberia and Finland.”

The book includes quotes from many of those he interviewed after they had this amazing experience. As one man who was in a terrible traffic accident put it, “I felt myself floating, and as I spun completely away from the force I saw the most gorgeous light I have ever seen. It was a huge orb of light and color, and it was the planet Earth. I was in space miles above, gazing down in amazement at the wisps of cloud and blue oceans….”

Another victim, a Christian lady, said she went through a tunnel toward a bright light. “When I reached the end, Jesus stood there with his arms open wide and stopped me, then said, ‘Not this time. I have more work for you to do. You must go back.’”

An especially positive aspect of NDE is that these people seemed not to suffer from their terrible physical pain while going through it.

And, more important, after many interviews with these people afterwards, Parnia was impressed with the positive changes they tended to experience. As he put it, “Typically, people felt that they had become less materialistic, kinder to others, more of service, less afraid of death, and generally more pious and religious.... Some people who had been atheists developed a very strong faith in God. The effect typically lasted for decades.”

Some of these people go through a review of their own lives, whereas others become painfully aware of what he calls “any pain and distress that they caused others during their lifetime.”

Parnia includes a delightful cartoon which shows him addressing a couple of angels at the entrance to Heaven. He looks quite insistent, saying, “No, I don’t want to come in. I’m just researching out-of-body experiences for Southampton General Hospital.”

Parnia definitely plans to continue to study NDE and doesn’t pretend to understand it all yet. His book simply reveals his knowledge of it at this point.

In conclusion, though it’s scary because it generally happens when one is close to death, NDE seems to be a positive experience which can give people a better remainder of their lives than they could have anticipated.

Thought-provoking Art Shows in Battle Creek

On last Sunday, May 3rd, Battle Creek became a world-class art city, with two receptions for two wonderful exhibits, one at the Art Center and the other at the Congregational Church. The former show is the work of the amazing Jewish woman, the Holocaust survivor, Miriam M. Brysk.

Miriam was just a child from Poland at the beginning of World War II, but during the war her family were prisoners in Russia. There were no formal prisons there, as there were in Germany, where they wanted to separate the Jews from the rest of the populace. But as Miriam put it, the Jewish people in Russia were in some ways treated even worse, sometimes with ingenious cruelty.

For example, in one camp, starving prisoners, some weighing less that 100 pounds, had to carry rocks heavier than themselves up a hill. Then, as Miriam said, they were told they could live if they pushed another off the cliff.

No doubt Miriam would have died with one and one half millions of other Jewish people there except that her father was a competent doctor who was very much needed to treat wounded soldiers. When the war was over, the family were finally able, with great difficulty involving several illegal border crossings, to move on to western Europe and eventually to this country.

Miriam went to high school, college and graduate school for a Ph.D. here in America and had a fine long career as a professor and scholar in Texas.

After she retired, she turned to creating serious artwork about the Holocaust. Her work is highly original, for she has developed unique techniques, one of which was blending photographs of people and scenes from the war rather than using traditional montage. After this show is over here at the end of the month she will be taking her work to Jerusalem to exhibit it there.

This was Miriam’s third exhibit in Battle Creek, thanks to her warm, caring sponsor, Dr. Margaret Lincoln of Lakeview High School. Though Miriam is almost 80, she says she hopes she will be able to bring yet a fourth exhibit here in the future.

The second show was based on another worthy theme, that of saving our environment. The artists are all from this area and include Joanna Learner, Don and Susan Rowe, David Curl, Ryan Flathau, Ladislav Hanka, Martin and Sarah Hubbard, Gerald Mackey, Kimiko Petersen, Pete Williams and Rev. Sue Trowbridge

One of my favorite paintings in that show was one by Joanna called “String Theory,” which showed our poor earth hanging from a fraying string. Joanne was pleading, through this work, that our future is not sure and we need to take better care of our planet.

A series of award winning environmental films will be shown on Wednesday evenings at 6:30 at the church. These are open to the public free of charge. On May 14 a new film called “Gasland, Part II” will be presented  by the Michigan Citizens for Water Conservation and the Committee to Ban Fracking in Michigan and a group of Physicians for Social Responsibility.

On May 21, they will show the documentary film “Chasing Ice,” which deals with the melting glaciers around the world. Then on May 28 there will be the Robert Redford film, “A Fierce Green Fire,” a documentary about the environmental movement in this country.

Both exhibits will both be here in town for the month of May, and I certainly recommend you go see both collections.

Elizabeth Smart’s Story

I’m always happy if I’m in the middle of a really good book, wanting to know how it ends and yet not wanting to finish it. Elizabeth Smart’s autobiography, called simply “My Story,” was certainly one of these books, and I highly recommend it to all.

Elizabeth, as you may remember, was kidnapped on June 5, 2002, at the age of 14, and was forced to spend nine months in captivity, living outdoors in the mountains, often denied food and forced to drink glasses full of liquor. Worst of all, she was frequently raped, sometimes multiple times each day.

Mitchell, her captor, pretended to be a religious prophet, telling her that he had saved her from “all of the wickedness of the world.” To keep from being caught, he forced her to cover her face with cloth and actually kept a policeman from removing it by saying emphatically, that she was his daughter, and their religion strictly forbade people from showing their faces.

She was forced to spend three months in mountains near her home in Salt Lake, Utah and then six months in the mountains of southern California. Of course Elizabeth wanted to return to Utah because she hoped desperately--as she had for nine months straight--that she’d be rescued. It certainly seemed as though it would be more likely to happen if she were closer to home.

As it turned out, as soon as they returned, the Salt Lake police captured her kidnapper and his wife and returned Elizabeth to her loving but desperately sad Mormon family.

When we hear of a story like this one, most of us would probably feel sure that this young teenager would never completely recover. She had suffered horribly, lost weight and, worst of all, been cruelly raped. But, as she says repeatedly, her religious faith and thoughts of her loving family truly saved her.

Elizabeth certainly never experienced the “Stockholm Syndrome,” in which hostages feel empathy and sympathy toward their captors. She truly disliked and feared Mitchell and his wife, but she never lost her faith. In fact, as she says early in the book, “I never felt closer to God than I did throughout my nightmare with Mitchell.”

She also still felt very close to her beloved grandfather, even though she had just gone to his funeral one day before she was captured. Rather than feeling abandoned, she felt his presence the whole time. “Grandpa was one of my guardian angels. He was sent to comfort and inspire me in the very darkest hours, to help me find reasons for hope or encouragement when I felt the most despair.”

Elizabeth’s mother was also a powerfully positive influence, saying, when Elizabeth came home, “Don’t you let him steal one more second of your life. Not one more second! You be happy. You move on.”

Elizabeth did just that. She got right back into her family’s loving activities, returned to playing her harp and riding her favorite horses. She eventually got a bachelor’s degree in music performance.

When the trial for Mitchell finally took place, eight years later, she was in Paris as a Mormon missionary. She came home for the trial but then returned to finish her work.

In 2011 she created the Elizabeth Smart Foundation to help educate people about the dangers of violent and sexual crime and has given talks on the subject all over the country.

Then in 2012 she happily married Matthew Gilmour, a man from Scotland who had served as a missionary with her.

What a model she is for us all!