On the 9th of August, I walked out in a funk, through the funk, to get the mail. In the mailbox there was yet another fat envelope from lawyers – papers I had to deal with myself because I couldn’t afford a divorce lawyer and was foolishly and badly representing myself. I went inside and opened the envelope to discover that they were looking for detailed financial records from when I was in the second grade, or something equally delectable to lawyers, and I went down into the basement of the house, where my papers were stored, to try to locate the information.

As I stood at the file cabinet I looked down, where there sat a box full of vitamins and herbs. In it, on top, was a huge bottle of a very strong prescription pain medicine that had been given to me for the chronic pain that I suffered after my head and neck injury. I thought, “If I took all that, I wouldn’t have to deal with this anymore.” And just as spontaneously as that, I went upstairs, drank it all down with water, wrote a note to the friend whose house I was sharing, and locked my dog out of the basement, where I lay down and died.

My friend’s video shoot got rained out some time later and he came home and found me. I don’t have anything funny to say about this; it was a dark moment for him and I’m amazed that he’s still one of my best friends ten years later. He called 911, an ambulance came, and they took what was now my corpse to the emergency room. If you really love details, you can read the E.R. admission report here. It’s scary.

My physical body was revived after many efforts with a shot to the heart of adrenaline and the repeated use of defibrillators in the E.R. I had no brain activity, however, and my family was called and told that I would not come back. It was recommended that I be unplugged from life support. My family declined this opportunity and got on airplanes to come to Boulder.

I spent six days in a coma with no measurable brain activity. During that time, I cannot tell you where I was, but I can tell you that I was mostly not aware of myself or anything else. When I was, the one thing that I knew was that I could not communicate with my daughter from there. The pain of this is beyond my powers of description.

At some point, I traveled in some fashion to some place where I met and had a telepathic conversation with my grandmother Cincie, who had died 14 years earlier. She made it clear to me that there was a place for me there, and that there was a place for me here. She indicated that either would be fine, but gently suggested that I could come back here to complete my responsibilities. The gist of it was that I was given an opportunity to come back, and I took it.

It sounds like a happy ending, but I came back into a very bad situation. My body was a wreck. My brain chemistry was so screwed up that it took many years to work out. The main nerve to my left leg had died, and that leg and my left buttock withered to almost nothing during the three weeks that I was in intensive care. The doctors treating me could not tell me whether it would regenerate or not. (Happily, it did, and it’s widely agreed that I have a nice butt now. I can also run and climb and play, but it could easily have been otherwise).

“Depressed” is not an adequate word to describe my spiritual condition. I could not sleep at all and was in terrible pain. I felt as though I had a blowtorch running on the bottom of my foot for two and a half years, an effect of the death and regeneration of that nerve in my left leg.

I got out of the hospital and things got worse. I couldn’t sleep, night or day, and was in agonizing pain. No medication touched this pain. Ten weeks later, never having slept, I went through my divorce trial; after two long days sitting for ten hours in a court room, I was in such physical pain that I picked up a bottle of tequila after dinner and began sipping on it. I had never been a big drinker in my life, but sometime in the night, I’d drunk enough tequila that I passed out, a relief for which I was grateful – at the time. What it led to was years of daily alcohol and prescription drug abuse.

A depressed man, in pain, full of alcohol and drugs, is a danger to himself and everyone else. And that’s who I was for years. I saw the inside of more jail cells, psychiatric hospitals, drug and alcohol treatment centers, and therapist’s offices than I care to recall. I almost didn’t emerge from a lot of them. I was always depressed, often insane, sometimes violent, and completely scary to myself and others.

Many things that were done to try to save me, and that I did to try to save myself, were helpful. But ultimately what returned me to happiness were the simple practices I discuss in Be Happy Now, and those are available to anyone, anywhere, at any time, free of cost.

The point of this story is to tell you that any life – any life – can be recovered and turned into a good and positive and happy life. If I came back to happiness – and friends, I have come back to happiness – then anyone, anywhere, under any condition can find happiness again.