Editor’s note: This is a guest post from a dear friend of mine, William Melendez. He is like no other person I have ever met, his battles unique and his writing, hauntingly good. This is an honest account of his literal fight with death. Being that he wrote this article, we can assume he won that fight, but not without walking through the valley of the shadow of death.

Being a person who suffers from mental illness I have dealt with the vicissitudes of aberrant mental and physical states. Nevertheless, after enduring years of mental illness and several gastric diseases, dear reader, I began to succumb to the lie of a sick man’s philosophy: life, with its ups and downs, was always something that happened to me, and of which, I had no control over. I was clinging to a deflated lifeboat, buffeted in the winds of an unruly sea. Two things controlled the course of my raft, sink or swim: the happenstance of life and the constant intervention of God on my behalf. Mostly, I spent my time praying to God that He would get me through whatever was happening to me. My only contribution to my circumstances seemingly consisted of begging.

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I had this friend named Collette.  I met her in a creative writing class at my junior college.  As I recall she had written a story which turned out to be a thinly veiled story about herself, in which the main character was dealing with some conflict with her husband.  I mentioned in the feedback that the story was frightening, to see such a clear example of spousal abuse, and she came and talked to me afterward, to ask if I really thought what she had written about constituted abuse.  I told her I thought it did, and in some mysterious way this caused us to become friends.  That's my first memory of Collette.

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We assume things about the poor, like they’re uneducated, drunk and contagious. Add a disability to the mix and you can add that they’re either a fraud, or beyond help.

Kathryn is poor and in a wheelchair. Been disabled six years and three months. I asked recently how her injury happened?
“How long you got?”
“How much you wanna tell?”
“Not everything, but I’ll at least give you the main parts.”
“Okay,” I said. “That’s how long I got, then.”

Kathryn started-out with a hell of a thorn in her flesh. Her mom shot her up with heroine at age three and her dad was never in the picture. Nonetheless, she somehow made it through high-school and college and eventually landed a job at a worldwide news conglomerate.

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Eight years ago this week I was living in Paris. I’d not been there long, so my language proficiency was functional, at best. It was a Tuesday morning and I was online at the library, when CNN interrupted my screen to live-cast two planes hitting the Twin Towers. It felt like a Punk that had gone horribly wrong.

Americans were advised to avoid public places, including the metro. I remember walking home in the rain, drenched by awareness that our world wasn’t the copasetic place I once believed. I wasn’t too close with my family at this point, but recall a deep longing for their voices that week. Calls wouldn’t go through though, and the two times I did reach a payphone operator, my ability to speak was frozen in tears.

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