My first really happy memories were after my parents moved to Paris, France in 1966, when I was eight. I learned French in 6 months and went to a bi-lingual school for 5 years. I loved the rich vocabulary of the French language. At home, we had two languages to draw from. The city of lights became a giant playground for me as I went all over seeing movies, exploring and having great adventures.
My father was a Yale graduate. He wanted his son Marc to follow in his footsteps. I would need a mastery of the English language and a top score on the SAT. That education was not found in France. I would have to go to a boarding school in England. I studied English, Art and French at Rugby School. After living in Paris for five years, I could not have been more out of place personally and culturally. I have written about these events in From Alzheimer's With Love. I was not happy there.
By the time I was done, 5 years later, I did get into Yale-and Brown. I went to Brown. I graduated from Brown University in 1980 with a degree in Semiotics-film and communications. It took a lot of willpower and decisiveness to graduate as I ended up having a brain tumor operation the summer of my freshman year in 1977. I found out about the brain tumor in a hard way – 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, and I was a wanna be rock star-definitely a British influence..
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. I became a punk rocker, took drugs, and for a while ran 3 miles a day, rain or shine to deal with my anger. Depression followed and amidst all this pain and almost losing my life arose a longing to find meaning for my life, resulting in a search for God. My roommate in college dropped out of school and returned in the spring to tell me he had been born again. He had been even more wild than me and the change in him impressed me deeply. Jesus had done a wonderful miracle in him. I became born-again at the beginning of my junior year.
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! That healing prepared me for more difficult years to come, as I married the wrong woman, after spending 1 1/2 years dedicated to be a 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 still weakened by the brain tumor operation and losing 50 pounds.
To make a long story short, I started my own small auto detail business in Tulsa, OK in 1987. I did love the creative expression that the art department offered me in England, and detailing was like doing 3-D art! And I knew I could make a living-and get stronger-detailing cars. I taught my two sons from an early age to detail and for many years we had a father and son team! I needed a hands-on connection with the car and polished each car by hand. According to my customers, I raised the industry standard in Tulsa to the cutting edge of quality and excellence. 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 the Thanksgiving week of 2012 with my parents in Winter Park, FL. Once again, my life was to be changed forever, when 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. I had to think like a child again to reach his heart-and free his body memory. He was able to re-connect with me, with his wife, with himself and with God.
I am enjoying the tropical climate of Florida after 25 years of 16-35 degree, cold winter car washes. My latest exciting new development has been to put together a recording studio and record my books as audio books. I love narrating and editing. Thanks to the help of Made For Success Publishing, The Coolness of Josh is a beautiful audio book, which includes a 17 minute recorded phone conversation with my beloved son, Josh and my song, I Love The Way You Love Me... On April 1st, 2017, From Alzheimer's With Love was released, a seven and a half hour audio book.. With so much variety of emotion in the 40 chapters, narrating and editing this book was a real 'tour de force.' (I have to use my French somewhere!) I loved making it, as well as the process of editing the manuscript with the incredibly talented team I was privileged to work with.
2012 RADIO INTERVIEW, in TULSA, OK
Karol: Marc, thank you for being on our show. I understand you were raised in Paris, France! What an experience that must've been. You moved there when you were eight.
Marc: Imagine arriving in Paris at the age of eight after being in Connecticut! Paris in 1966 was amazing, the city of lights. I loved it so much that I became fluent in French in six months. It was just like this giant playground for me. We lived by the Museum of Modern Art and near the Eiffel Tower. I had a great time as a kid bombing all over the city taking the bus and the Metro.
Karol: What did your Dad do?
Marc: My Dad was a management consultant and his firm asked him to move to Paris and help open up a new office. He spoke good French, which he learned at Yale and spoke as a liaison officer in the US Army in France and my Mom was French so it was a winning combination.
Karol: From your voice I would never know that you have such a strong French influence.
Marc: Well, I can do ze Franche accen if you waont! Maybe you can't hear it but it definitely influenced my writing. The French language is rich with many different words and ways of saying things. Actually I grew up speaking this mixture of English and French just to use the best word to describe the situation. The French also have a philosophy for living, while in America people seem to base their life more on opinions.
Karol: Your son, Josh writes with a strong belief system that is very refreshing. He talks about life being "a gift," that, "no one can live your life for you," and that he, "wants to be friends with Life." It's really powerful stuff. The book really made me think.
Karol: Josh was a real king. I called him, "the King of compassion." Talk about someone changing your life. His love and caring changed my life.
Karol: Yes, you said all the suffering he went through shaped him to be a very beautiful man. You had your own suffering. I read the back of your book and I quote: "Marc Swift was miraculously healed after being given five more years to live following a brain tumor operation in 1977." Can you tell us about it?
Marc: Yes, Jesus is amazing. He's the reason I was able to write this book. He saved my life at the age of 19. Jesus is as alive now as he was back then, because he rose from the dead and he is alive forever now. He completely healed my brain two years after I had a brain tumor operation. The doctors had given me only five more years to live. That was back in 1977. Here I am now. That completely changed my life around.
Karol: Yes, that would change my world around! So from the years of 1977 to 2008 when you began to restore your relationship with your son, Josh, what did you do?
Marc: I ended up having a fairly dysfunctional marriage, which was mostly contentious and undermined a lot of my efforts. Josh wrote about it brilliantly in a short story in the book: "Ah, the flavor of my family. Nutty, spiced heavily with resentment and hostility. With an aftertaste of pure insanity." That's pretty much how it was.
Karol: Yet, during that time of 25 years, you operated a successful auto detail shop out of your house called Mr. Polish Detail.
Marc: I always felt very responsible for taking care of my family and I was really good at detailing cars and the Lord was with me.
Karol: Yes, Josh talks about how hard you worked for them and that you never lacked anything material.
Marc: I was able to pass on this craft to my sons. I started teaching Josh how to detail when he was five! It did us all three a lot of good to work together. There were so many things I wanted to pass on to my sons. We had all kinds of talks during that hour or hour and a half we spent together. No matter how difficult things were, this time was always solid because it was my business, and I had a deadline to meet and I required workmanship of excellence. They naturally rose to my level of expectation and they always did amazing work, even faster than me sometimes!
Karol: Eventually things fell apart though.
Marc: At 19, Josh felt very alienated and left the house. Things got very weird between my ex-wife and my other son Michael. Thankfully, God stepped in and helped me when things were at a low point. The Lord made me strong again and I was able to come out of it and reach out to Josh.
Karol: And your ex-wife and Michael? How did that turn out?
Marc: They left for Colorado after she divorced me. The great thing was that God allowed me to be so healed before they left, that didn't take away some piece of me with them.
Karol: That also enabled you to reach out to Josh, then. I don't want to spoil the book for anybody but it is amazing how that all works out. But overall how would you describe what your book is about in two or three sentences?
Marc: It's a love story. Of the love between me and my beloved son Josh. Of God's love for Josh. God's love for me.
Karol: What made you start writing about Josh?
Marc: Just when things were really good between us, couldn't be better, and Josh was the happiest he'd ever been, he died in his sleep, at the age of 24.
Karol: I'm sorry. I cannot imagine how difficult that must have been for you.
Marc: It was extremely painful. Yet he died at such perfect moment, when he was so happy. And he went straight to be with God his heavenly Father. I felt this peace when I found him. It was so strong. Stronger than concrete. I've never known anything like it. I couldn't even get upset, not for more than a third of a second. And the glory of God was all over the room, all over the house. And there's more, a lot more. It's all in the book. When you go through something like that you just see death differently. You see life differently.
Karol: So is that what made you write the book? Did you start writing right away?
Marc: Not right away. I needed to keep Josh alive and I looked to find him in all his friends, his teachers that knew him, his aunt Gloria, my Mom and Dad. Josh still was alive in those people. I could see him in them. I wanted to hear them share their stories about Josh.
Karol: To celebrate his life?
Marc: Yes. For Josh's life celebration. a bunch of his friends and I went down to Casa Bonita. We had a feast in honor of him. Everyone shared their stories. It was great. I paid for a professional film team from TCC to film the event on their HD cameras and edit it. It was a great tribute to Josh. I showed it at Josh's Life Celebration service April 20th (2010). Then I went to Video Revolution and made copies of the service and sent the DVD, along with a note thanking them for being Josh's friend, to a really large number of his friends. Some of them had been at the service; quite a few of them had missed it. That was my way of honoring Josh. I told them to celebrate life like Josh did, and to live their life to the full the way Josh would've wanted them to.
Karol: Wow, that was really positive. You were like a dad to his friends. What did make you start writing the book?
Marc: About two weeks after the life celebration service was over, one of my father figure friends took me out to lunch. He was delighted to hear all the stories about Josh. He said, "Marc, write these down. Do it now. If you don't, in a year you will have forgotten all of the stories." I was having trouble sleeping anyway. That night, at 3 AM I just woke up and went to the kitchen table and wrote down about eight pages and then went back to sleep at 7 AM. I got up about eight times in all and ended up with 55 pages of a handwritten manuscript. Then I found a treasure. I discovered a bunch of writings, lying at the bottom of Josh's desk, that he had written about his life for an English Literature class at Tulsa Community College, the fall before he died. At that point I realized how important it was for me to tell our story.
Karol: So the book grew to include the written account by Josh of his life. You found a way to incorporate his writings into your narrative.
Marc: Yes, that's right. It became more punchy, more real; almost a journalistic way of faithfully putting forth the truth. I only used references that were integral to the experience we shared. Josh was a great writer. Being able to include his writings was like connecting with Josh. He had a say in the story. If anyone doubted my words, they could not refute the evidence of his (written) words. It was very powerful. I also found a cassette tape recording of a phone conversation we had, one week after Josh's traumatic revelation. I put it all in the book. Almost ten pages. I transcribed pauses, timing, everything. I tried to keep the feel of that amazing talk we had.
Karol: I really got next to Josh after reading that. I want to say 'hearing' that!
Marc: Actually, you will be able to hear it! I will be doing an Audio book, which I will be narrating and editing. I will include the actual tape recording of Josh talking with me. Now, you will really hear his voice.
Karol:Wow! How cool! I can't wait to hear it.
Marc: Yes, Josh is talking, my son... It was so amazing that I ended up with that tape recording. Talk about a gift! There were so many gifts from God that made this book work. Like all the baby pictures! I still had a photo album tucked away that I found with those precious pictures. Then Josh talked to me after his death very clearly at certain times. It was amazing, I treasured those words. I wrote them all down, word for word.
Karol:That conversation you have with Josh in Heaven was as real to me as these recent movies about Jesus and Heaven. Was this really real for you?
Marc: Josh totally surprised me one night as I was writing! I sensed his presence with me. He had something to say. I grabbed my pen to write down his words exactly. "It's just like you said, Dad! Just like you said!" I knew I wasn't making this up! There I was with Josh talking about his experience in Heaven. Wow! The book was never the same after that. Neither was I!
Karol: The whole book is very healing that way. Very, "So this is who God is?!!" So merciful, so welcoming, with such open arms. Like your quotation says from T.L. Osborn, "God has a very big heart and a very big soul."
Marc: Josh embodied that to me by the end of his life. Because of his great love.
Karol: Great love. Yes, you must keep telling this story. We started talking about a love story. This is a beautiful love story. Very transparent and heartfelt. It is a beautiful book,
Marc. Thank you for writing, "The Coolness of Josh." This will be a healing book I am sure for many, many people.
Marc: Thank you Karol. You are very kind. Thank you for having me on the air.
Karol: Thank you Marc! Let's close with Josh's favorite toast. "To Life!"
Marc: "To Life, Karol!"
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