My friend, Otto Lang, died last week. He was born in 1908. You may have heard about Otto. He is legendary for having opened his own ski school at Mt. Rainier, Washington, in 1936, as well as for his film-making career. If you want to know more about Otto, just search his name on the internet and find hundreds of articles. In his later years, he lived in West Seattle, which was also my home until recently. We worked on a book together, and I grew to adore this humble, good man who had such a rich life experience to write about. I remember one day we were sitting on my front porch talking about life, and Otto said to me that he thought after you died, there was nothing. I wondered how a man who had lived such a full life traveling the world, teaching movie stars how to ski, producing films, and so on could think that all that living would culminate in a final end. How could he think that all that living was for nothing? What about all the things he learned about life? Was that all for nothing?

I wonder what my friend, Otto, would think about the book I just finished, Voices From Eternity, had he known about it while he was here. I could have given him a copy, but I think I was a little fearful of what he might think, or maybe that he would not understand it. Having known him for almost 20 years, I don’t think he would have assumed I had gone off the deep end, but he might not have understood it—although he seemed fairly open-minded in his old age. Anyway, I didn’t show it to him, and now he is gone. He probably could have given me some good pointers on how to sell it, having successfully published many works of his own.

”There must be some point to it all. It simply cannot culminate in a dark, empty void of nothing.”