Michael George Patterson, a 59-year-old Native Alaskan, stood before a group of high school students on a recent morning and told them about his impending death. Sooner or later, he said, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease or another complication of lung damage from years of smoking — starting when he was 9 — will kill him.
But he also could not help sometimes smiling broadly and happily as he spoke, and he talked about that, too. In facing death and finding he could perhaps make a difference in telling his story, he said, he had found new life, and a profound joy in the simple day-to-day experiences that had eluded him.
“This is what I am choosing to do with the time I have left,” he told an assembly at Yaakoosge Daakahidi Alternative High School. After years of depression, violence and homelessness on the streets here in Juneau, Alaska’s capital, he had found his way to the school’s small library on a rainy morning, traveling a path, he said, that was all about “doing something right.”
[For more of this story, written by Kirk Johnson, go to http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12...amp;WT.nav=RecEngine]
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