My Brush With Death and Subsequent Restoration At a Time When I Was All Out of Options

I Watched My Career Die Before My Eyes, Only to Experience the Transformation of My Soul

My Own Story, a Story of Death: Not of a Person, But of a Career

(and the lessons it taught me about life and how to live it)

by Rev. Paul J. Bern, Atlanta, Ga.

For a good frame of reference to this short story, we need to travel back to the late 1980’s. It was a time of turmoil and rapid change, and it was spearheaded by a technology boom. I was a much younger man, filled with energy and much determination. But I had bounced around from job to job, doing stints in warehousing and local truck driving, which invariably involved handling my own freight. So it was because of that, plus some other stuff having to do with career satisfaction, that made me decide that what I needed was a whole new profession. To make it short and sweet, I went back to school and learned to be a computer and electronics technician.

I graduated in the Fall of 1989 with a 2-year degree in Computer Technology (now known as IT) from Control Data Institute, a school that sadly no longer exists. But I managed to log in 21 years in the tech industry, and I have that degree plus 4 professional certifications to with it hanging together on my wall above my desk. Unfortunately, about 15 years after all these things had happened in my professional life, and only 4 months past my 50th birthday, I had a stroke. What can I say? There was no one specific reason that I suffered a stroke, but I’d say that I’m a stronger man because of it. The temporary loss of my health taught me to embrace wellness to a degree I had not previously achieved. Which is the opposite of what some may have expected.

What’s it like to have a stroke for an otherwise healthy person? The main thing I remember was waking up about half an hour before my alarm was set to go off. The entire right side of my body had no feeling in it at all, so I knew something was wrong. I remember spending a few minutes trying to walk off my feelings of numbness in my right side. Only then did I become concerned enough to dial 911 on my own behalf. I was apprehensive about trying to drive myself to the local ER, and the paramedics who came to transport me affirmed that not trying to drive was a good decision.

Fortunately, I survived all of the above, but I was lucky to have done so. I endured about 6 weeks of physical therapy after my hospital stay was finally over. I had my health back and I was plenty grateful enough for that. But by this time it was the fall of 2006, and the Great Economic Crash was just barely getting underway. As you know, that was the time when the US job market went into a state of contraction, and I went through a long dry spell where I did not get one single job offer for 15 months. Ultimately, I ended up homeless and sleeping in my van. This was how I hit bottom, and yet I had no hard drug habits nor any habits in the way of alcohol consumption. I didn’t have the money for all that anyway. But in the end, at least for myself, my abstinence wound up not making any difference whatsoever.

My own experiences, which culminated in a 5-month-long stint with homelessness, has opened my eyes to how broken and dysfunctional the current system truly is. I was forced into early retirement after getting sick and becoming disabled. My original plan was to get well so I could return to the workforce, but that’s not how it worked out. After being out of the computer/IT profession for nearly 2 years, all attempts at obtaining employment — either as a contractor or an employee — proved fruitless.

So I looked into reeducating myself and training for a new career, only to be told that I didn’t qualify for financial aid because I had a “poor credit rating”. While all this was happening, the bottom fell out as far as wages were concerned within the IT industry. Technicians and support personnel like myself who used to make $20–35 dollars an hour are now being paid $11–14 dollars per hour for essentially the same work, and that’s assuming you’re lucky enough to have a job. It’s been a bad shakeout all the way around.

If America had a system in place to take better care of unemployed people, people like myself could be an asset to society instead of a liability. For example, if we had a universal health care system in place, I would not have to be concerned about the cost of my prescriptions and my doctor visits because all that would have been taken care of. Ditto for dental and mental health, and let’s not forget optical care. For another example, if America had a system in place for retraining American workers, I and the millions of others like me would have a way to train for new vocations and professions without cost. This includes the handicapped, older workers, convicted felons who have served their time and single mothers, to name a few. We can easily afford to do this because it has been done before.

After World War 2 Congress passed the GI Bill and sent hundreds of thousands of former soldiers back to school, paying big dividends to America in the form of tax revenues generated when these ex-GI’s eventually went back to work. If we do this for veterans, then why can’t Congress do this for everyone else? If I could have had a way to do this, or if we had universal single-payer health insurance like Medicare for all, I could have gone back to work or gotten retrained for a new profession and become a taxpayer again. Instead, I subsist on my tiny little disability check, living off the taxpayers when I would rather be contributing. Tough luck for me, I guess. But it doesn’t have to be this way. We’re going about this all wrong.

It’s been 15 years since all those things took place in my life. Sitting here writing this now as an older but wiser man, I’m seeking the best way to communicate to all who read this what I took away from this series of misfortunes from my own past. One verse from Scripture out of numerous examples I could cite can be found in James chapter 1, verse 12: “Blessed is the man/woman who perseveres under trial, because when he/she has withstood the test, he/she will receive the crown of life that God has promised to those who love him.”

I have found that God brings us through learning experiences like what I endured to toughen us up, to cause us to grow quicker into something more than the sum total of our former selves. While I endured much hardship, and a medical emergency that nearly took my life, I am a stronger and somewhat different man than I was before. I wouldn’t trade my experiences for all the money in the vault. Anybody’s vault.

In closing, I resolved that I was not to blame for my brush with homelessness and oblivion. I had to find a way to stop beating myself up about it, and that took a while. I also had to face the fact that my career was over. Like my brush with oblivion, that also took awhile. Still, I’m grateful to God for helping to see me through what I’ve been through. I now live in a modest apartment in a complex for seniors and the disabled. They have an entire building set aside just for the war veterans, which is something I applaud. Still, I’m caught up between a rock and a hard place; too old to work and too young to retire. But I’m lucky to have survived it all just the same.