The long way around

The boy who was afraid of dying

I was nine when I worked out that I was going to die. It did not stay an idea. It turned into anxiety that would not let go, and into panic attacks. My mother took me to the family doctor, who examined me head to toe and told her he had no diagnosis. I heard that the way a nine-year-old hears it: no diagnosis means no cure. Now I was certain.

That summer my mother took off work. We spent the days together — I still remember the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. She bent over backwards to walk me through it.

Then a television programme called Emergency came on, about paramedics, and I knew what I was going to do with my life. For my twelfth birthday I asked my parents for a blood pressure cuff, a stethoscope and a watch, so I could take vital signs. I got them. It is the only birthday present from my whole childhood I can still name.

Where it started

I was fourteen when I started taking calls at a crisis center and suicide hotline in Columbia, Maryland — the youngest volunteer they had ever trained. I had been certified in CPR and first aid since I was twelve, and I was teaching it by eighteen. Whatever else I have done since, that is the work I keep coming back to: being the person on the other end of the line.

The years I would rather have skipped

I was bullied through middle school and most of high school. The odd part is that the same school elected me student representative to the board of education, a job I took full advantage of. It did not stop anything.

What ended it was a boy I had never met, calling me a name across the school grounds one summer before my senior year. I decided I was not spending another year there and transferred to South Carroll. The vice principal, Mr. Jump, pulled out every stop for me — he even moved students out of classes so he could fit me into them. Then I joined the theatre programme and was promptly cast as a homosexual priest living in the attic, which is the exact reputation I had left the other school to escape. I have never stopped finding that funny.

I mention it because I build things for children now, and you should know that I remember precisely what that feels like.

The last panic attack

Senior year, driving to school, one hit me hard enough that I had to pull over. Sitting on the shoulder, something turned over in my head. I was terrified of something that had not happened. I was healthy. I was safe. I was sitting perfectly still on the side of a road, frightened of nothing that was actually there. I saw how ridiculous it was, and I have never had another one.

I do not offer that as a method. It worked for me. I would not tell anyone else it will work for them.

Twenty years on the truck

I spent twenty years as a paramedic, and more than forty in emergency medicine and crisis work all told — as medic, instructor and preceptor across fourteen fire departments and ambulance companies in seven jurisdictions and two states, and in four hospitals along the way. I taught physicians, nurses, paramedics and anyone else who would sit still for it, everything from basic first aid on up. For the Maryland affiliate of the American Heart Association I served as affiliate faculty in Advanced Cardiac Life Support and Emergency Cardiac Care, which means I trained the trainers.

I am trained in post-traumatic stress disorder, acute stress disorder, critical incident stress debriefing and psychological first aid, and I served on a CISD team in Baltimore — the work of looking after the responders once the call is over. It turns out the people who run toward the worst days of other people's lives need someone to stay with them too.

Coming to it late

I was not raised in church. Faith came to me in adulthood, in a hard stretch of my life, and it came first — before the writing, before the nonprofit, before any of the rest of it.

The question came later. I was in a men’s group at church when it landed on me, and I have not been able to put it down since: what would happen if someone actually decided to love others the way we are taught to in the Bible? Not the sentimental version. The costly one.

I have been running that experiment for more than a decade now. The book is what came of it.

The work now

I founded Families Renewed and serve as its chairman and chief executive. Families rarely come apart all at once. They come apart quietly, in the months when nobody is looking, and the interventions that work are the ones that arrive before the crisis rather than after it. That is the whole thesis of the organization.

I also drive a motorcoach, which people tend to hear as a step down from medicine and which I have come to think of as a calling. A bus is a small room with a door at the front and one adult in it. Kids talk. Driving a school bus I had the same faces for an entire season, long enough to learn who was not eating and who was not sleeping. A motorcoach trip is usually a week — but it is a week of every meal and every mile together, and a week is plenty of time to notice who is not going to say anything to anyone unless somebody asks.

The school bus years are the ones that keep paying out. Those kids are grown now, and a good many of those relationships are still going — which tells me something about what a reliable adult is worth to a young person, even one who only ever saw you for twenty minutes a day.

What I am trying to do

Teach young people the skills that hold up under pressure. Give parents something better than instinct to work with. Say plainly, in writing, what love costs and why it is still worth it. And keep showing up in the rooms where people have already been written off — because in my experience that is exactly where the work is.

The love that changes people is the kind that does not leave when it gets expensive.

A lot of different lives

What surprises people most, when they hear about my life, is how much of it there has been. Paramedic. Pilot. Squadron commander in the Civil Air Patrol. Real estate. Motorcoach driver. Nonprofit founder. Writer.

That is not restlessness. I am a measured risk taker, which is a different animal. And the breadth is not a list of hobbies — it is where my perspective comes from. Every one of those lives taught me something about people under pressure, and all of it ends up in the work.

Away from the desk

I live in Pennsylvania. My oldest daughter is grown and out in the world. A second came to me at fourteen and simply stayed. My wife lives in Guatemala, which is also where a good deal of my medical mission work happens; she brought three children into our marriage, and we had a son of our own not long after the wedding.

I have never once been able to hold those distinctions in my head — who arrived when, who shares my blood. They are all mine, every one of them.

The same thing has happened, quietly and without anyone signing anything, with the kids I have driven. A school bus season here, a motorcoach trip there, and by now I have unofficially adopted hundreds of them. Two look after my house while I am on the road. A third keeps my lawn. I did not set out to build any of that, and I would not trade it for anything.

The best conversations, in my experience, still happen somewhere between mile forty and mile ninety.

What I think about it now

I am not afraid of dying anymore. I am not looking forward to it either, but it is coming and there is nothing I can do about that — except live as fully as I can and make a positive difference in the lives of as many people as I can. I have too much to do and too little time to do it in. That takes priority over being afraid.