On December 28, 2017, I died in Manglaralto, Ecuador.
Not metaphorically. Not symbolically. I was gone—lifeless—blasted by a fireball that ignited from a sealed 55-gallon drum I had been cutting into with a wormdrive saw. A fraction of a second changed everything: one spark, and a barrel full of paint thinner fumes erupted. The explosion could be felt across the town. Some say it shook the earth. Others say it was the heavens speaking.
I remember none of it. Not the two days before, not the moment itself. But I’ve pieced the story together—told by my son, my neighbors, the doctors who didn’t expect me to live.
I had been persuaded, despite my better judgment, to turn that drum into a BBQ pit. My girlfriend at the time asked for it weeks before. I said no. The area was a shared space for tenants at the apartments I managed. But something changed—something that upset me deeply, something that pushed me to act against my instincts. I can’t recall the words spoken, but the residue of betrayal lingers.
What I do know is that I bought the drum from a hardware store. It had stored paint thinner. It was sealed. When I got back from the hospital, I saw that I had even swapped out my wood-cutting blade for a metal-cutting one on the saw—a decision I must have made while under emotional duress. I had every reason not to do what I did. And yet, I did it.
When the saw met the drum, it sparked. The ignition point. A wave of pressure, fire, and force slammed me—launched my body, drove the wormdrive motor into my right eye socket, and fractured my skull. Titanium now holds together my zygomatic arch, both sides of my frontal bone, and four inches of my right wrist.
They tell me I wasn’t breathing. That I had no pulse. That they threw my lifeless body into the back of a pickup truck and raced me to the tiny local hospital in Manglaralto. The staff didn’t know what to do. I was sent on to Santa Elena, and then—by the mercy of a friend who was a doctor in Guayaquil—transferred to Hospital del Sur.
They operated a week later. But I was already gone.
I didn’t wake up until two weeks after the explosion. But somewhere during that unconscious stretch of time, something happened. Something that most people might write off as a dream—but I know better.
I was asked a question. Not in words, not in voice, but with full presence:
“Are you sure you want to do this?”
I knew what it meant. It was permission to let go—to stay in that place, that stillness, that rest. But I also knew I had a son. A boy who had no one else to show him how to work, how to live, how to love, how to be a man.
I said yes.
