Cover Story Thirty-four years ago, as Frank Bolak was riding his motorcycle to his wedding shower, he was struck by a car and dragged 300 feet. Later, in the hospital, Frank says he died and had an experience that changed his life and shaped his faith. I was dead for 20 minutes By Nancy Schertzing
	Feature Barbara and Frank met each other in a bereavement group in their parish. Find out how friendship and mutual support blossomed into love. Both of their spouses died: how they found a new life with each other By Bob Horning
	Feature Sue strruggled to take a breath for years. Genetic emphysema had diminished her lung capacity to 20% - find out how a double lung transplant breathed new life into Sue's body and soul After her lung transplant, God breathed new life into Sue's soul By Marybeth Hicks
	Culture Anticipate spring by coaxing bulbs and branches into bloom. To live again - forcing bulbs and branches By Patricia Majher
	Exclusive As I have swapped sories with other converts over the years, certain themes come up again and again. What's a slider? This former Protestant 'slid' into Catholicism By Heidi Hess Saxton

I was dead for 20 minutes
What Frank's brush with death
taught him about life and God
By Nancy Schertzing | Photography by James Luning

“The difference between me and most people is that they have faith [in God]. I just know.”
– Frank Bolak

On October 16, 1971, Frank Bolak was riding his motorcycle to his wedding shower. Frank was the picture of invincible youth, cruising along on his Vespa Super Sport bike. As he approached an intersection, the car in the next lane swerved. At almost the same instant, a Rambler barreled through the stop sign from his left, hitting Frank’s motorcycle and trapping him and the bike under the car.

The driver continued down the road, dragging Frank beneath the vehicle. After about 300 feet, she stopped, threw the vehicle into reverse, and backed up. Frank, still trapped, endured every inch. When she returned to the intersection, the woman put her car in park and climbed out. Frank’s broken body flopped out from underneath. She walked around to where he lay, nudged him with her foot to see if he was still alive, then climbed back into her car and drove away.

In shock, Frank felt no pain, although his mind raced. His dislodged helmet covered the right half of his face, so he tried to shift it back into position, but found he couldn’t move. For the first time since he was hit, Frank opened his left eye. He saw his foot lying against his cheek.

Frank’s shattered left leg, still attached to his dislocated knee and hip, was wrapped over his neck. His neck and back were broken and he was hemorrhaging internally.

He came to as he felt his body being loaded into the back of a police car. On the way to the hospital, Frank’s heart stopped. He slipped into a coma that lasted three weeks.

During this time, Frank’s doctors staunched his internal bleeding, repositioned his leg and administered numerous blood transfusions.

The day before Thanksgiving, Frank endured one more surgery to rebuild his mangled left leg. His orthopedic surgeon operated successfully, then departed for the long weekend. Frank remained immobilized in the hospital, as pain from his injuries ravaged his body. As the weekend progressed, Frank’s pain grew more intense and seemed to be spreading up from his leg. When the doctor unrolled Frank’s bandages on Monday, he found massive gangrene.

The doctor told Frank he would have to amputate his leg to try to save his life. Swearing, he left the room to prepare for an emergency amputation. As Frank lay in his bed in excruciating pain, he lost hope for the first time. He told his roommate that he was done. “It’s over, George.” Then, says Frank, he died.

Immediately, he felt he was above the bed in his room. He watched as his roommate ran down the hall to the nurses’ station, pleading with someone to help. In the next instant, Frank was moving at what seemed the speed of sound.

For about a minute, he felt himself soaring, though the surrounding darkness betrayed no movement. Frank describes this journey as “an enlightenment of thought,” moving him toward some point – intensely focused on a destination he no longer remembers. Then just as suddenly as he started, Frank stopped.

“Like I was on a tether and the line had run out,” Frank recalls, “my forward motion just stopped. I tried to keep going, but something was blocking my way. I willed myself forward to push on when suddenly a loud, determined voice boomed all around me. All it said was, ‘NO.’ Then, as if at the speed of light, I was slammed back into my body.”

“There was no more pain,” Frank said. “I felt heavy and a little numb, but I knew immediately that my body was fine. Jenny, a candy-striper student at the hospital, was holding my hand and crying. I opened my eyes, looked at her and asked, ‘What are you crying for?’ She fainted.” Frank chuckles, “A minute later the doctor came in, looked at me and said, ‘He’s back. Good God, he’s back!’ I found out later I had been dead for about 20 minutes.”

Frank’s doctor told him he would do the surgery immediately so Frank didn’t end up like that again. Frank told him there was no need. Though the doctor persisted, Frank calmly assured him he would keep his leg. The gangrene was gone, he said, and he lifted his blankets. Frank says the holes where the gangrene had eaten away his flesh were healthy pink and his leg showed no sign of infection. Four weeks later, Frank walked out of the hospital to celebrate Christmas Eve.

Frank went on with his life, rarely thinking about his ordeal or the various players in it. He enjoyed success as a mechanic and got married. He and his wife, Laurie, lived comfortable, though somewhat superficial, lives in their early marriage. When they welcomed their first child, Frank and Laurie decided they wanted a strong faith life for their new son. They attended a variety of churches before settling at St. Joseph Shrine in 1980.

About the same time, Frank embarked on a career selling tools. As part of his professional development, his district sales manager encouraged him to attend a career-development seminar that included back-to-back weekends of intensive life-examination exercises and goal setting. Sitting in the front row at his second weekend session, Frank suddenly felt God’s presence within. In another “enlightenment of thought,” Frank realized God was guiding him, helping him understand his life experience clearly. From his turbulent childhood to the accident and its aftermath, God guided Frank to look honestly at each life experience – many for the first time. Sitting in the seminar, Frank sobbed uncontrollably.

Oblivious to the training around him, Frank cried with God over the next two hours.

In a later exercise, Frank listed 50 lifetime goals. To his surprise, many of his goals related to church and community service. He returned home to his family and set about achieving each item on his list.

In the years since, Frank has used his guidance to touch countless lives around him. His personal trials haven’t stopped – he’s now fighting hepatitis C. Yet he has translated his experience and knowledge of God into an extraordinary life of service. For example, he has:
• led hundreds of young men through the ranks of Scouting,
• provided myriad 10th-graders with a solid religious education at St. Joseph Shrine,
• inspired thousands of adults at speaking engagements throughout the country,
• served his community through Kiwanis,
• trained many auto mechanics in the trade he so loves, and
• raised a beautiful family with his beloved Laurie.

His lifetime achievement awards testify to his tremendous success. They include the Silver Beaver Award and St. George Award, Scouting honors, The American Legion Award of Merit, Citizen of the Century for the Onsted community, Kiwanian of the Year and more.

Looking back over his amazing story, Frank pauses for a moment, then says, “I believe that during my out-of-body experience I was given a second chance to do something different with my life.

“I’m a lowly mechanic,” Frank smiles. “I fix things for a living. Now I help others take the tools they’re given and make concrete achievements in life.”

Frank continues, “It’s OK to make mistakes. We all do. We’re human. But it’s not OK to leave those mistakes unfixed, because clutter builds up in our lives when we avoid responsibility for our mistakes.”

He smiles again, “I know.”

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How can you comfort the sick?

If you are interested in making hospital visits or taking Communion to patients, call your parish and ask about their ministry to the sick and homebound.

If you would like a visit from a priest or parish minister when you are hospitalized, make sure to alert your parish that you will be in the hospital, or have a friend or relative call for you. Under current regulations, hospitals are limited in the information they can release – and your pastor may not be advised that you are in the hospital.

both of their spouses died:
how Frank and Barbara grieved –
and then found a new life with each other
By Bob Horning | Photography by Christine Jones

When Barbara’s husband, John Riordan, died in May 1994, she knew she would never marry again. “We had something extremely beautiful, and it was over.”

The end

John had developed a brain tumor fifteen years earlier. “Initially, it caused seizures,” Barbara says. “Then the last six or seven years it became increasingly serious. I cared for him at home most of that time, with the help of hospice in the last days.”

Though Barbara knew her husband’s death was coming, she was still numb when he died. “I didn’t know what I would do with my life. I had no sense of the future, of goals, of planning for tomorrow. I figured I would be single and with my family.”

“John died the night of our [youngest] son John’s high school honors convocation,” she says. All I could think about was getting him through his graduation and then through college. Apart from that I had no purpose. I couldn’t even get interested in finishing my master’s in pastoral ministry, although I had only a paper to complete.”

For Frank, the scenario was similar. Doctors discovered in 1984 that his wife, Betty Anne, had a rare lung disease. “She was determined to beat it, but it was like being strangled to death over ten years. The last few years she needed an oxygen tank.”

Frank says he was so busy being a dad (the two youngest of his four children were still at home), teaching math at the University of Michigan Dearborn and caring for his wife, that he didn’t have time to think a lot about death. Besides, they both were holding out hope for a lung transplant.

Betty Anne died in March 1994, two months before John. “It was a Monday,” Frank recalls. “The funeral was Thursday, the interment on Friday and I was back in class on Monday. I have no idea what I said in the lectures, but I had to get out of the house. Otherwise, I would have stood there staring at the walls all day.”

Like Barbara’s focus on her son, Frank’s focus on teaching was a big factor in getting him through. He didn’t expect to remarry; he assumed that his life would go on with his children and with the math department.

Frank likens the grieving process to detoxification. “You can’t grieve all at once. It has to be worked out over a long period. There were times I would be driving in my car on a perfectly normal day, and suddenly something would trigger my emotions. I would have to pull over and cry my heart out.”

The beginning

After a while, Barbara’s pastor, Fr. Roger Prokop, asked her to help with the bereavement ministry at St. Thomas Parish in Ann Arbor, where Frank was also a member. They talked often. “The emphasis wasn’t on us,” Barbara says. “We never thought of our friendship as romantic. It was just more comfortable to talk with him than with anyone else I knew.”

“It seemed, though, that the Lord had other plans,” Frank says.

One night, Barbara was at Frank’s house for dinner. At some point, he put on a musical-parody CD. “We both laughed, for the first time in a long time,” Barbara says. “It felt good.”

Fr. Roger encouraged Barbara to begin entertaining again, something she enjoyed, but hadn’t done in a long time. So she arranged a dinner party, inviting Fr. Roger, Frank and some other friends. The day before the party, Frank and Barbara were talking when he tentatively took her hand. He recalls that “it felt odd at first to hold another woman’s hand after 29 years of marriage. ... After that evening, we finally realized that we were falling in love.”

Fr. Roger, who had presided at the funerals of their spouses, observed the development of their relationship. “Although neither one was searching for a new partner, they naturally flowed from friendship to love. A lot of us close to them saw the direction they were headed, though they themselves were unaware. ... It was touching to see.”

At the party, Frank ended up staying longer than everyone else. After helping clean up, he surprised Barbara by proposing, and she surprised herself by immediately saying “yes.”

They married on April 27, 1996.

Then came the inevitable adjustment. They both laugh thinking about it. “Between us, we brought together over a century of life, so we had things to work out,” Frank says. “It’s not like marrying when you’re young and have no established habits.”

The adjustments were slight compared to the happiness and help they brought to one another. Frank says, “It’s nice to have a companion to share life and goals with. I know that if I hadn’t married Barbara, for instance, I would never have become a deacon. I would have been too caught up in teaching and day-to-day living.”

After having to do everything herself for so many years, Barbara likes the fact they can help each other. “We can even do ministry together. And it was Frank who encouraged me to finish my master’s program when he found out I only had a little left to do.”

When Frank is asked how long he has been married to Barbara, he replies not in years, but in days. The day I interviewed them, he told me, without stopping to count, that they had been married 3079 days.

“I keep track because every one has been precious,” he says.

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Beginning Experience –
A Weekend Away for a Lifetime of Change

The loss of a loved one through separation, divorce, or death is one of life’s most traumatic experiences. It can result in nearly unbearable feelings of loneliness and grief.

Beginning Experience is a weekend program to help grieving single-again persons move from the darkness of their grief into the light of a new beginning and to see the future with renewed hope.

For more information, visit www.beginningexperience.org or call toll-free (866) 610-8877.

I survived my alcoholic husband:
why I remember him with love
By Marybeth Hicks | Photography by Tom Gennara

One dark night,
fired with love's
urgent longings
- ah, the sheer grace! -
I went out unseen,
my house being
now all stilled.

–St. John of the Cross,
Stanzas of the Soul

Sue Ramseth has spent many a dark night wondering about God’s plan for her life. Alone in her home, she’s wept and worried while questioning the meaning of her suffering. Yet even when God seemed to want Sue to breathe easy, she was gasping for air. Sue Ramseth had emphysema.

Before receiving a double lung transplant in 1998, Sue’s lung capacity had diminished to less than 20 percent. Suffering from a genetic form of emphysema, she couldn’t walk from her house to her car without becoming breathless and fatigued. Inside her body, Sue’s lungs degenerated to dead tissue.

But as her lungs wasted away, Sue says God breathed new life into her soul, invigorating her faith and inspiring her to find purpose and meaning on an unexpected journey.

“I was a person who put a lot of value on being productive. My work was my life. I never married, so I really immersed myself in my job,” Sue says. “My illness forced me to redefine who I thought I was. I had to find my self-worth in something else.”

Her transplant experience put Sue on a journey to discover God’s true purpose for her. “I realize I have touched thousands of people through this experience,” she says. “It’s a journey that keeps growing and growing.”

Sue’s lung disease was diagnosed in 1990, at 32, when she finally was referred to a pulmonary specialist. Earlier, doctors had assumed she suffered from asthma and bronchitis, typical diagnoses for her condition. “On average, it takes seven years before an accurate diagnosis is made,” Sue explains. Once identified, there is little that can be done to treat emphysema. The disease destroys elastins in the lungs that enable the organs to contract and expand. The effect is suffocating. By 1995, her health deteriorated so badly that she was put on the waiting list for a lung transplant. And then she waited.
A year later, in an effort to improve functioning in the healthier portions of her lungs, Sue underwent lung reduction surgery. The operation was successful, but four months later, Sue contracted pneumonia. She recovered, but the illness left her unable to work.

“This is when my spiritual journey became really active,” Sue says. “I began to question ‘why am I going through this if just for a transplant?’ I remember standing in my kitchen in what felt like a battle for my life, sliding down to the floor, telling God ‘I don’t understand.’”

At the time, Sue was trying to learn to let God take control of her life. “I was a control freak. I had heard it was a good thing to let God take control of your life but I didn’t know how to do that.”

What came next was an experience she calls a “God thing.” As she sat on the floor, her refrigerator simply died. “I started saying, ‘Please Lord, I have no money, I can’t move this thing to clean it, I have no help.’” What followed was a full-scale temper tantrum. “I started yelling at God and then I sat on my couch with a phone book and decided I had no choice but to buy a new refrigerator.”

Just then, with no explanation, it restarted. “The weird thing was, I had left the circuit breaker off,” Sue says. “I decided if God was going to run my refrigerator, I’d let him take charge of my life.”

Sue related to St. Paul, a strong, forceful person who became physically weaker, even as his faith became stronger and more evident throughout his letters. “I began to contemplate why God would take a strong person like me and make me so weak I could hardly function.”

Sue’s journey brought her to a Christian bookstore in December of 1997, where she found a book called What Does God Want?

“I figured that was a good place to start,” she laughs. At the same time, she ordered Cardinal Bernardin’s book, The Gift of Faith. Sue read it in one sitting.

“I had been struggling to make a total commitment to Jesus,” she says. “That book prompted me to say it out loud – ‘God, I still don’t know what you want of me, but whatever it is, I’m yours.’”

“I remember getting ready for bed, and feeling myself in a conversation with the Holy Spirit. I felt he was asking me questions and I answered out loud.”

“Would you still feel you were God’s if you never get your transplant?” Sue said, “yes.”

“Would you still feel you were God’s if you have the transplant and it doesn’t go well?” Sue said, “yes.”

“Will you still feel you are God’s if the transplant is successful?” Sue said, “yes” again.

At 4:27 that morning, the phone rang and a voice said, “This is Jenny from the University of Michigan Hospital and this is the call you’ve been waiting for.”

What followed was one of U of M’s best transplant success stories. Home after only seven days, Sue set their record for a speedy post-operative recovery. She began a strict exercise program, building up to a 12-mile bike ride, an hour of calisthenics and a three-mile walk every day.

But what looked like a medical miracle was not to be.

“It was so discouraging,” Sue recalls. “In 1998, I lived like an athlete in training, but by 1999 I felt my disease was back.”

Trips to the hospital and nearly three years of diagnostic investigation brought no answers, only skepticism on the part of her trusted physician.

Through Sue’s persistence, her doctor finally discovered the cause – side effects from the anti-rejection drugs.

Her struggle to find the cause of her ongoing illness brought Sue to a new low point. “I had been so sure of God, so sure he was with me, but I came to feel he had abandoned me,” she says.

Her spiritual struggle recalled St. John’s “dark night of the soul.”

“For nine weeks, I felt God had left me,” Sue says. “If there was a God but he didn’t want me, what was the point of living and dying?” It was this sense of total abandonment that caused her to beg God to return.

“I said, ‘I can’t stand it any more. Please come back to me.’ But I realized he had been with me all along. The devil can make you believe God has left you, but he never does. He is completely faithful.”

Regaining her spiritual center, Sue devoted herself to getting well. She quit the few activities she had tried to maintain, such as volunteering at her parish, and instead gave herself permission to rest and regain her strength. “One day, I realized I was a bit stronger. I could begin to go out and tinker in the yard,” Sue says. This was a major accomplishment after days and weeks of bed rest.

Her journey brought her to a new place, out of darkness and into the light of understanding that God’s will for her meant sharing her experience with others. “I realize while I may not be able to go out into the world much, God sends me people and I’m certain I am put on their path for a reason.”

These days, she stays connected to the world and her parish through her computer, serving as the volunteer Web master for St. Joseph Shrine. She also finds reasons to tell her story to show others the hand of God at work.

Sue takes a long, leisurely breath and asks, “What would be the point of going through all this if not to help others?”

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“Organ donation after death is a noble and meritorious act and is to be encouraged as an expression of generous solidarity.” (CCC 2296)

There is no greater gift you can share than the gift of life. Becoming an organ and tissue donor costs you nothing, yet reaps dividends forever. Talk to your family about your decision, sign the back of your driver’s license, and visit www.tsm-giftoflife.org for more information.

to live again
forcing bulbs and branches reminds
us that a new life with the Lord is coming.

In the dark days of winter, when the light is low and Lent is upon us, it’s easy to allow despair to overtake us and to forget that this season of self-reflection and repentance will lead us to a new life with the risen Lord.

One way to underscore this lesson is to coax spring bulbs to bloom – a process called “forcing” – before the snow even leaves your lawn.

All you need to gather are bulbs, soil enhancements and a pot with a drainage hole.

There are many types of bulbs you can plant. Amaryllis bulbs are the easiest; they don’t require a dormant period. And narcissi do well with just two weeks in a cool, dark place. Other bulbs require a bit more time to rest; crocuses, grape hyacinths, and freesias will need four to six weeks, tulips and hyacinths eight to ten weeks, and daffodils about 12 to 14 weeks.

1. Pick a pot of any material that is at least twice as tall as the bulbs you’re using – that way you’ll be sure to have room for the roots to develop properly. Wash the pot and place a shard over the drainage hole to prevent the soil from washing out.
2. Using a porous potting mix – made of equal parts vermiculite, peat moss and packaged potting soil. Fill the pot halfway, then place the bulbs on top as close together as possible. Lightly add more soil to cover the bulbs, letting their “noses” stick out.
3. Place the potted bulbs in the vegetable crisper of your refrigerator. Don’t store fruit and vegetables in the crisper at the same time; they give off ethylene gas that can damage the bulbs.
4. Water the bulbs every two or three weeks, or whenever the soil dries out. When roots are visible through the drainage hole and stems are about two inches high, the bulbs are ready to remove from the refrigerator.
5. Place the pot in a cool, sunny room, ideally at a temperature of 55 to 65 degrees. Warmer temperatures may cause the plants to have weak stems.
6. Keep the soil moist and give the pot a quarter turn every day to keep the stems straight as the plants turn toward the light. Within days (for the shorter flowers), blossoms will open and beautifully illustrate the lasting lesson of the Resurrection.

a prayer to plant by

Dear Lord, like the bulbs we plant, we descend into the depths of darkness to await your return. In the solitude of our souls, we reflect on our sins and repent for them. We make sacrifices in your name and are strengthened by them. You breathe life into us and around us, and sustain us through this solemn season. We look for you, we long for you, our resurrected Savior, our reborn King. Amen.