“YOU SOUND LIKE a man full of fear,” wrote an old Indian from Texas, after reading my first two articles for FrontPageMagazine, stories that dealt with patriotism, warriorship and the right to bear arms.

We Indians are taught never to ignore the words of an elder. That Indian’s words have stayed alive in my mind for months.

Am I full of fear? Is that why I dwell so obsessively on themes of fighting and warriorship? I wonder.

Certainly fear and struggle have dominated my life.

At age 11, I nearly died of a cancerous thoracic tumor. Following weeks of killer cobalt, I was left with cut-and-burn battle scars before I was twelve.

I had been a good athlete, up to that time. But now I became physically disabled, and turned from sports to music. I performed Rubenstein’s Piano Concerto No. 4 after only two years of practice, at age thirteen.

I wasn’t supposed to live to be sixteen, though no one ever told me (until just recently). I had numerous biopsies during my teens, checking for more possible cancer, but all were benign. Nevertheless, I was cut to pieces before I was twenty.

Cancer struck again when I was a graduate student at Yale Divinity School. A slice of my lung was removed and I underwent chemotherapy. Those were tough times.

The third time I got cancer, I tried a natural remedies center in Maine, but to no avail. I really didn’t expect to get through this one. Emotionally I knew I couldn’t. And yes, I was full of fear.

It was then that I fell in love with a girl named Amanda. I felt obligated to lay all the cards on the table. Soon after we met, I told her, “I’m a dead man.”

She thought I was joking. But then I told her everything. And that pretty much ended that. I’ve always felt like the girl should know, from the start.

Pardon my indulgence. I don’t mean to bore my readers with all these stories. But it’s an old Indian custom for warriors to sit around the campfire and show off their battle scars, as they recount their exploits. My own grandfather, as a young boy, used to hear Bad Eagle and others talk. “Ka-chok!” they’d say, pointing to scars. “Bad!” Of course, they meant “Good! Look what I endured!”

I have spent my whole life confronting death.

During all these years of struggle with sickness and death, I kept on fighting. I earned advanced degrees in several fields, including a Masters of Divinity from Yale and a doctorate in piano and composition from the University of Arizona. My doctoral thesis was on Franz Liszt, and his attempts to create non-liturgical religious music. Between degrees, I also spent eight years in social work, counseling emotionally disturbed children. Often, I was broke and near starving. But I kept on fighting.

The third time I developed cancer, I had to make a desperate decision. I thought I would have a mental breakdown, and, to me, that would be worse than dying. I simply offered God my mind. I wanted to live. There was too much beauty in the world. I wasn’t ready to leave it.

Many people, when fallen deathly ill, ask, “Why me?” So many die.

But I lived. The cancer is gone, at least for now. And so I also ask, “Why me? Why was I spared?”

“Teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom,” prayed the psalmist in Psalm 90:12. If there is one thing I have learned in life, it is that our days are numbered.

Is this fear? Am I full of fear? Yes, I suppose I am.

I’m afraid of losing what I love. I love life. I love this land, this nation, this people. I’m afraid of losing all of them.

I’m like one of the old Wolf Comanches. A Wolf would fight to the death. There was no retreat. No “guerrilla” war, no raiding, harrassing, and running off. A Wolf never left the fight until it was over, one way or another.

Such a warrior’s place on earth was at best tentative. He was a ghost among men.

I’m like a ghost, really. I haunt my fellowmen. I deeply care. I brood endlessly. But there’s no real place for me among them. I haven’t found a home. I’m a wandering spirit, lighting on FrontPage at the moment. Here I say what’s on my heart.