In late November of last year, I awoke in the wee hours coughing up blood, so my wife had to drive me to the emergency room where I endured several invasive procedures and spent a week in the hospital. Even after my recovery, I never learned the cause of my malady. Perhaps, the medical team thought it was a virus. They still don’t know. All I know is that I could have died, again.

In the summer of 2023, while vacationing?, I was diagnosed with acute, fulminant liver failure caused by sudden autoimmune hepatitis, had transplant surgery, a neurotoxic reaction to one of my anti-rejection medications, and multiple near-death experiences.

Only a tiny percentage of people suffer from the autoimmune issues that almost killed me and most of them die before they get a transplant. Very few people have the toxic reaction to the medication that almost cost me my mental capacity, and a sizable portion of transplant patients don’t make it to the one-year mark post-surgery.

I survived all these experiences, which left me feeling both like the unluckiest and the luckiest person alive, granted the gift of new life by an unknown stranger.

I was dying. And then I wasn’t. Now I am aware that, even with medications to control the worst of my symptoms and make sure my body doesn’t reject my new liver, for the rest of my life, every moment is tentative and precious. During this ordeal I learned that the future is always uncertain, becoming and ending and becoming again.

As the Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön tells us, although “we are not in control” and are forced by circumstance to recognize that “stable, solid reality is an illusion,” what her wisdom tradition illustrates is that deeply engaging with “impermanence” and “all pervasive suffering” does not inevitably lead to despair but puts us face to face with the “wonderous flow of life and death.”

Seeing this flow at the center of a universe where “everything falls apart” enables us to admire the joy and beauty at the heart of the dance of life and death. We can stop our constant running away from and resisting reality and adopt “a new way of seeing our [lives] as dynamic and vibrant, an amazing adventure.”

I lived and am living this.

Amidst the chaos of this ongoing saga and the deep trauma and post-traumatic stress that accompanied it, the one thing that kept me going with some degree of equanimity, in addition to the love and support of family and friends, was writing.

From the time of my first diagnosis on vacation in Maui, to the life-saving surgery and the subsequent toxic reaction to my medications, to my battle with an undiagnosed lung infection two months later, I processed it all through writing in a notebook, on my laptop, or the leather-bound journal I kept by my bedside.

Something about simply documenting the experiences in the raw moment helped me find some manner of grace under pressure. Whether it was the cold shadow of my potential death, the texture of pain, the contours of suffering, or the pleasure of small glimpses of hope and healing, I did what I could to capture the feeling of it. So, I tapped away at my laptop in the antiseptic spaces of a series of hospital rooms in between IVs and treatments or scribbled with pen and paper in the chair in my study.

It was my book of the damned and my tale of redemption.

Some of it made it to the pages of The San Diego Union-Tribune as part of its Community Voices columns as well as posts in other venues, while other bits of it took the shape of a small book of poems, Into the Bardo, that was recently released into the world. In that volume I trace my journey from “trembling in paradise,” to occupying “a space between life and death,” to making my way back “step after step” until I reached the point of “knowing that everything we need / is always / right here / in front of us.”

And as we make our way toward another Thanksgiving in a world that frequently gives us little comfort, despite it all, “I just know that / this very instant / has always been / and will always be / so full and / glowing with love / that it blinds us / to see it.”

Miller is a professor of English and Labor Studies at San Diego City College, an author and vice president for the American Federation of Teachers, Local 1931. He lives in Golden Hill.

The author will be reading from Into the Bardo and Paradise and Other Lost Places at The Book Catapult, 3010-b Juniper St., on Thursday, Nov. 21 at 7 p.m.