Transcript
For my dark time in '89 until '93, I never lived a day
without wishing I was dead, thinking about killing myself,
or just hoping I would fall asleep and not wake up.
And then one of these children I brought up,
one of my sister's children, had a child and I saw her
when she was an hour old at the hospital.
From the moment I laid eyes on her, all of that left me.
I felt the darkness go from the soles
of my feet through my body.
I've never had a feeling of hurting myself
or that life wasn't worth living since that moment.
She's my miracle child.
She's one of closest relatives I have.
She's a 17-year-old wonderful young woman who has been with me
for 17 years and has gotten me through one
of the roughest times of my life.
I'm so grateful for her and tap into anybody you can find
that will do that out for you because they're out there.
She represented everything fresh, new, innocent, wonderful,
future, everything that I needed at that very moment
and I just stood when laid eyes on her and cried
and have never felt about myself that life wasn't worth living,
that I'm not worthy of life, that I should have made it back
from Vietnam like I did and that that was all right.
Up to the point of seeing her, like I said, I hadn't seen
that for years or felt it.
I felt like I should have died in Vietnam.
Why did I live?
I felt a lot of guilt about living but a lot
of that went away once I laid eyes on her.
And once I held her in my arms, I was taken.
She overtook me.
I've never felt as bad.
I still had a lot of rough times to go through but she helped me.