Incredibly, some would say miraculously I am once more writing from my little cottage in Bodfish. In our small Dust Bowl church in Little Oklahoma, this would belong to that part of the service called “Testimony time” since I was taken to the Skilled Nursing Facilities (SNF) in Mt. Mesa expecting to die there and making plans accordingly. After two months I am not only home again, but deemed too healthy to be eligible for hospice care any longer! No one is more surprised by these events than I am.

“The Lazarus Syndrome” has followed me since birth, at which time when I was born on a kitchen table in the small house on a cotton farm in Weedpatch the old country doctor pronounced “God saved this baby, not me.” My maternal grandparents promised the Lord to give me the name Samuel and dedicate me to God if He would spare my mother and me. And so it came to pass, much like the story of the prophet in the Bible. These days such a story would seem antiquated, completely out of touch with the Norman Rockwell America into which I was born. However, back then such a thing belonged to an America that had not yet entirely forsaken God.

As with our ER and hospital here in the Kern River Valley, I can find nothing but praise for the people at SNF that restored me to health. There were so many “Attending Angels” like those of Hoffmann Hospice, all the nurses and aides that treated me day and night, to these I can only tender a hearty “Thank You!” though you all deserve so much more than that as do those like the friends that visited and so many praying for me. Those of you who deserve a “special thank you” will understand that to name one specifically would require I name all, and some are too humble to want to be singled out.

Though often nursing homes and places like SNF are “a place where hope goes to die,” places where some people are “warehoused to die,” some of them living in a private hell like an active mind but the body unable to respond, here in our Valley we have personnel and facilities of which we can boast to the world we are most fortunate to have the hospital and the various medical services, staff that genuinely cares about people most living elsewhere would justly envy. Again, my thanks to those responsible for my care, to those for whom their position is not simply a “job” but extend their love as attending angels to others like me.