Grappling with Mortality: Part 3

It's not the time to get into all the specifics here, though I guarantee you that the subject will absolutely be plundered quite in depth at some point, but suffice to say my father spent the time between July 2004 to November 2011 serving time in a state penitentiary in San Luis Obispo, California. This meant taking trips up north with my wife, son and mother once or twice a year to visit him for about four hours a day over a weekend.

In order to visit an inmate at that particular facility it's necessary to register in the morning before you go in. The queue to get in is usually a mile long by about 8 AM, so it becomes necessary to get there quite early. On one of our trips we decided to stop in at the Carl's Jr. just down the road from the men's colony. We went in, ordered our food, and took it back out to the car so we could eat it quickly on our way up to get in line to register.

Suddenly, as I turned left onto the road that winds itself up to the prison, I felt a pit in my stomach. Something didn't seem right. To this day, I'm not even sure I know what didn't feel right, but I know I had the feeling that indeed there was a reason to panic. I wasn't in a panic over dying this time, this was more that nagging "did I close the garage door when we left this morning" kind of panic.

On instinct, I reached into my pocket where my wallet should be. Not there. Then I checked the center console. Not there either. I couldn't find it. I checked in the food bag...nothing. My wife asked me what was the matter. I told her, and she started looking around for my wallet as well. It was nowhere to be found The biggest problem with losing my wallet at that time, outside of having cash and credit cards in it, was the fact that I'd need my driver's license to get into the prison and visit my dad. Now all three of us, myself, my mother and my wife were in a bit of a lather looking for my wallet. I turned the car around and headed back to the Carl's Jr. Parking quickly, I ran inside and looked around the entire restaurant and even checked the trash cans...my wallet was just not in there.

In the parking lot Carolyn and my mother scoured the curbs and bushes, but to no avail. There was a nice Hispanic lady in a white van in the parking lot. She asked my mother and Carolyn what they were looking for, and they told her. The wallet was seemingly gone.

The thought of driving six hours out of town to see my father who I got to see only once or twice a year, but then not being able to because I lost my wallet was starting to really upset me. I actually ran up to the road with Carolyn and I got to a point and just stopped; it was no use. I figured that someone had found it and had just walked off with it.

Carolyn, however, kept walking up that four lane, uphill highway. I had started pulling my cell phone out, dejectedly accepting the fact that not only would I not get to see my dad, but that I'd need to go ahead and cancel the credit cards. As I was dialing the first credit card company and walking back to our car, my wife ran back across the street, holding a folded black piece of leather...my wallet.

I was so relieved. I almost felt tears well up in my eyes. This was a tiny little miracle. The Hispanic lady, seeing Carolyn and I return with the wallet asked us if we'd found it. We confirmed that, yes, we'd found it.She said "Oh, thank God! I had been praying for you since you told me what it was that was lost! Thank God!"

Of course my mom, the devout Christian also thanked God profusely. In an amazing turn of of events, I had put my wallet on top of our car while I loaded our son into his car seat. Obviously I'd left it on there, like so many of us have done with a drink or something else. Somehow the wallet and stayed on top of the car as I turned onto the highway. It finally flew off out onto the street.

The worst thing that ultimately happened was that the wallet had been run over a couple of times by passing cars. The cards inside all had some kind of damage, and a couple were split into a few pieces. But everything was intact. The money was there, the cards that weren't splintered actually worked. As I drove to the prison parking lot, the Hispanic lady's words stuck in my head, repeated over and over. She had prayed for me, a complete stranger, to find this wallet which was pretty much a needle in the proverbial haystack...and we had found it. From despair and resignation to euphoria in about 20 minutes.

Logically I knew it was just luck and the laws of physics that had really saved my ass that morning. But yet, I couldn't shake the feeling. Here I was, having asked "God" for proof of his or her or its existence for months and at a moment where I felt like all hope was lost, Life was put back on a not-so-shitty path. The feeling I had I would imagine would make any devout Atheist at least take pause. The fact that we had found the wallet, coupled with the fact that a complete stranger had been praying for us kind of stopped me in my tracks.

That night I finally came out to my wife about the panic attacks I'd been suffering through. Up to this point, I'm sure she had noticed some things were "off" but I hadn't actually come clean about what I was going through night after night. I broke down when I told her. When I say I broke down, I broke down. For some reason, I can't quite remember why, but we put my son in his car seat and we drove around town. I don't remember even why I finally came out to her about the panic attacks; it might've even been touched off by an argument.

I think the emotional release I felt after finally telling someone about these attacks has sort of flushed all the particular details from my mind. But I do remember the moment that I finally just told her. I told her that I felt like I was going to die one day and I'd never see her or my son again. I told her that it made me feel like life was pointless.

I told her that I had been actually praying to God every night, in the midst of my attacks, begging for some kind of sign of either God's existence or absence. She began to cry too. She was seeing her husband completely stripped of any pretense of bravery, strength or confidence. I told her, finally that the experience with my wallet, and that lady's prayers had made me question everything I thought I knew about the Universe. I felt like my compass had been taken away, and I had been spun around a hundred times and told to walk home.

She told me something that I'll never forget. I don't think it had ever been put to me in such a way before. She said that she had decided long ago that there was no way for her to know what happened after we died, and that no one had any control over that. So she had made a conscious decision to stop worrying about things that she couldn't control, and life after death was one of them.

So we talked for a couple of hours as we drove around some small town where our Motel 6 was. At the end of the night we went up to our hotel room and fell asleep. That's when the second miracle of the day occurred; that night I didn't have a panic attack. They weren't gone forever though.