This next chapter is painful for me to relate so I will keep it short. I have to include it because it is the most likely time of my passing. It happened a little more than a year after my stroke.
In short, my best friend (The one I dedicated my trilogy to. Not Roger who incidentally also was killed in a car wreck) and I were in a car that was hit broadside by a Greyhound bus going 60 Mph through a stop light. Out of body, I remember God asking me if I was willing to die. Without giving it too much thought, I confessed I wanted to live. Bear in mind, that this conversation was not so much words as it was abstract thoughts that I am trying to put into words.
Then God asked my friend if he would die in my place. He must have said yes because when I came to in the hospital, they told me he had passed. My best friend the Marine who had survived a tour in Vietnam and several other perilous missions died at my side - killed by a Greyhound bus.
Now, I don't know if it was truly God who spoke to me. He didn't identify himself as such. I don't know if the conversation was just a figment of my imagination. I do know that a couple of months after the crash my friend's girlfriend told me what my friend had said when he heard about my stroke. We were roughly nine thousand miles apart at the time of my stroke. He and his girlfriend were both on assignment in Addis Ababa. (They were going to write a book about that, but they never got the chance.) When the news reached him, he was afraid I had died. He told his girlfriend that he wished it had been he instead of me. He was a better friend and a better man than I.
This is a hard memory to live with. Perhaps it is just as well I'm dead.