The Coolness of Josh [Paperback] [2012] (Author) Marc Swift, Joshua David Swift

by Marc Swift, Unknown Author

Paperback

About the author

My first really happy memories were after my parents moved to Paris in 1966, when I was eight. I could speak French fluently after 6 months. The city of lights became a giant playground for me. I bombed all over the city in the metro and on the bus to see movies! My father was a Yale graduate. He wanted his son Marc to follow in his footsteps and he reasoned that in order for me to be accepted at Yale, I would need a mastery of the English language and a really good score on the SAT. That was not possible in France or America (too far). I would have to go to one of England’s finest boarding schools. In school there, I studied French, English and Art. After living in Paris for five years, things did not go well. By the time I was done, yes, I did get into Yale and Brown. I went to Brown and graduated four years later in 1980, with a BA in Semiotics (film and communications), though it took a lot of willpower and decisiveness to graduate, as I ended up needing to have a brain tumor operation the summer of my freshman year in 1977. I found out about the brain tumor after having five epileptic seizures. The seizures were a nightmare. I was almost happy to find out I had a brain tumor so they could get rid of it and put an end to the seizures. When I came out of the hospital I weighed 120 pounds.
The biggest pain was that I lost all my hair. I had long hair, I was the wanna be rock star type. So here I am, starting my sophomore year, with a bald head with scars on it, walking around the Brown campus wearing a white bandage on my head. I felt like a mutant.
Amidst all this pain and almost losing my life arose a longing for meaning and a search for God. My roommate in college – who dropped out of school – returned in the spring to tell me he had been born again and that Jesus was wonderful. I became born-again at the beginning of my junior year, leading the worship with my guitar and singing, during the Brown Campus Sunday Catholic mass, and for the Brown Christian Fellowship meetings. The surgeon told my parents the tumor would grow back, and I had only five more years to live. One year later, I was miraculously healed at a healing service. The yearly CAT scan which followed this blessed event revealed no scars, no lesions, no signs that my brain had ever been operated on. I was healed and I am still alive today, forty years later. Thank God! I spent 1 1/2 years dedicated to be a Franciscan (Catholic) priest, which was not for me. After 1 year at ORU to be a youth minister, I decided that physical work was the only way I could become strong again, after being weakened by the brain tumor operation and losing 50 pounds. To make a long story short, I started an auto detail business in Tulsa, OK. I taught my two sons from an early age to detail and for many years we had a father and sons team! I needed a hands-on connection with the car and polished each car by hand. According to my customers, I lead the industry standard in Tulsa on the cutting edge of quality and excellence for 25 years. In 2010, my 24-year-old son Josh, my best friend, died peacefully in his sleep. I scaled back from detailing, to focus on writing the life-giving story of our father and son relationship, The Coolness of Josh.
To celebrate the release of the book, I went to spend Thanksgiving week of 2012 with my parents in Winter Park, FL. Once again, my life was to be changed forever as my mother asked me to stay and help my dad, now in his third year of Alzheimer’s. Against all odds, I searched for pathways of healing to save my father out of the isolation that he was dying from. He did re-connect with me, with his wife, with himself and with God after I was able to outsmart his brain, reach his heart and free his body memory.