Brad and Carol Hall lived in Coronado, California, from 1970 to 1974. Brad was then an officer in the U.S. Navy whose career was on the rise. On April 29, 1970, he went to the Navy hospital in San Diego for what he considered a quick visit with the doctor. For two months he'd suffered from intestinal bleeding and he'd decided it was time for the doctors to give him "a pill or two to stop the infernal bleeding." Within the hour, he found himself admitted to the hospital, and not at all happy about it. He didn't have time; he'd just gotten a bigger and better job at the nearby Air Station and was about to be checked-out in the new E-2 airplane. "God," he asked, "how could I ever get stuck in a spot like this?"
He later described his feelings: "By the third day, I was fully and classically depressed. I had strolled around the officers' floor of the hospital and found in most rooms many old and dying admirals. By that time I figured that I had cancer and might indeed die just like the rest of that floor's occupants. I was extemely lonely, the doctors and nurses said little about my disease (colitis), its cause or cure. I just sat there day after day, waiting. The one light came with the daily visits of my wife, Carol. It was a period of steady decline as I lost touch with the Navy, work, airplanes and life.
"I did a lot of bargaining. I gave up drinking, smoking, anything that I thought might be the cause of my disease. I even started eating peas."
Soon after Brad's discharge from the hospital in San Diego, he was presented a medal for work done in a previous command. "They pinned it on my chest with some appropriate remarks and I was dismissed," he later recalled. "At home later that afternoon I flung the medal into a desk drawer and laid down on the couch to rest. At that point I knew I had bottomed out. Nothing meant much anymore. How ironic to be given a piece of iron to cover my chest, already well-ironed, when my whole insides were falling apart. I wept for the first time in many years. I reached over to my bookcase and grabbed a Bible. It was a zippered black leather King James Version which the dean of my college had given to me upon my graduation fifteen years previously. I unzipped the zipper for the first time and within a few days read the whole complex story from beginning to end. It was the start of a seven-year-quest."
Throughout his life, Brad had been (and continued to be) an outstanding student. In his illness, he had run into something he couldn't analyze or rationalize or figure out. "I had no stories, no words, no language to find meaning, to find understanding of what was happening to me," he admitted. "The technocratic world in which I had been educated, and the technological world in which I worked as a Naval aviator and engineer, did not allow for illness, depression or hospitals. We live within the confines of our language. My language knew about flying, achieving, leading. I had no language which could understand depression, illness, suffering.
"I was raised in the parochial Roman Catholic school system. That religious background plus my heavy concentration in the rational sciences allowed little room for the mystical, intuitive suffering...after reading through my Bible, I decided that I would do something about my state of affairs. I didn't know what or who or how, but I was ready to change. I was tired of being depressed, lonely, sick."
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