I want to introduce you to my new hero.
This amazing young fellow is called Kyle. He’s an incredible artist (you should see the stuff this guy draws, it’s phenomenal!) and a very passionate video gamer, among a great many other things. He has a phenomenal sense of humor and happens to be one of the bravest human beings I have ever met in my life. Kyle and his family would like me to share his story with you.
Kyle’s dad is part of the paramedic community. He reached out to me by way of the paramedic academy and asked if I would like to drop by and talk about ghosts and the paranormal with his son. Kyle has been battling a very rare form of cancer for most of his life, and has spent the better part of fourteen years undergoing hospital treatment, where he made friends with many other children who also had cancer.
Heartbreakingly, one by one, some of those children passed away. As his own condition progressed, Kyle began to see those children coming into his room at night, where they would hang out and talk with him — something that he found to be of great comfort. Recently, however, although he still sees the children, they no longer speak; they simply stand there in the room with him.
One night, as he was laying in bed trying to sleep, Kyle told me that two eight feet-tall luminous figures glided (not walked, glided) into his bedroom through the open door. One of them, a woman, leaned over the bed and touched his face gently with one hand. The hand was warm, and immediately began to soothe the pain that was caused by the erosion of bone and tissue there. He felt it to be a healing and comforting touch.
Then the woman spoke to him. She said, “The third time will be the last time.”
Kyle’s cancer had gone into remission twice. Shortly after, it returned for the third time. This is when the children he was seeing stopped speaking.
Kyle’s cancer may be killing him, but it is NOT beating him. Not even close. He is still undergoing chemotherapy. Kyle is a realist; he knows that his death is not far away (the prognosis, rather vaguely, is “months at best”) and does not fear it. While not a religious young man, he anticipates an end to the constant pain and discomfort that he has to deal with on a daily basis, and believes that wherever he goes afterward, it will be a better place than the one he is leaving behind.
As he told me his story, I was impressed with his ability to look at his experiences with an open mind. He is convinced that they were neither dreams (“my Apple watch confirmed that I was awake when the two glowing figures came into my room”) nor hallucinations brought on by either the cancer or the medications being used to treat it. He is convinced with absolute certainty that they are real, and who are we to argue?
We talked about the end-of-life experience and the conversations I have had with palliative care providers, particularly hospice nurses. When my own dear old mum was dying of cancer in 2004, she began to receive visits from deceased family members each night. The nursing staff told me that they would listen to her speak and realize that this was one half of a conversation that was going on. They also said that such pre-death encounters were very, very common indeed. Some choose to write this off as being the process of the dying brain shutting itself down and generating hallucinations, but I am not even remotely convinced of that.
I had the great privilege of sitting next to Kyle’s bed and hanging out with him for a couple of hours tonight. His bedroom setup looks like gamer central; Kyle loves Minecraft and first person shooters, and likes to play them long into the night (he’s a man after my own heart there). In addition to talking about ghosts and hauntings, we talked a lot about Marvel & DC comics and movies (we both agree that the Black Panther movie was a little over-rated), our favorite video games (he’s a huge “Call of Duty” fan) and the coolness of conventions. Kyle got to go to the big E3 gaming convention, where the bigwigs of the video game industry invited him to beta test some of their upcoming titles, and custom-build his very own XBox controller.
Kyle is also an honorary U.S. Navy SEAL, having been adopted by teams Two and Six. (He was given a ghillie suit by one of the Team snipers).
“Your career makes mine look like nothing!” I laughed.
“Yeah, but it’s going to be a whole lot shorter,” he deadpanned. That stopped me in my tracks. Just what do you say to a remark that? It was delivered with a twinkle of the eye, and I realized that this truly remarkable young man was teaching me a lesson that I sorely needed to learn. He is fundamentally grateful for all of the things that most of us take for granted. Kyle told me that he wished he could go to work every day, to have a social life beyond the four walls of his room, to go to a comic book store and browse along the shelves.
That was when I realized that my problems were utterly minuscule by comparison.
I was blown away by how just little he complained. Despite the pain and discomfort, despite having his life unfairly cut short by an illness over which he has no control, Kyle is neither bitter, resentful, or fearful.
What an incredible human being he is.
I hope that when my own time comes, I am able to face it with even a fraction of the dignity and positivity that Kyle displays. Having known him for just a few hours, my whole worldview has been changed, and that is something for which I cannot thank him enough.
All being well, Kyle and I are going to hang out more in the future. As he has an interest in the paranormal, the plan is to Skype him into some future haunted locations that we are investigating. He’ll make an excellent addition to the team.
I might even take his advice for the next book that I write. After all, who wouldn’t buy a copy of “The Haunted Hookers of Colfax?” Between us both, we might just have a bestseller on our hands!
Glad to know you, my friend x
