I Saw My Dead Friend Brad Alive

The last time I saw my friend Brad Allen was on Friday, October 10, 1958, at around 2:30 p.m. on a beautiful fall afternoon in Berkeley, California. We were both second-year seminarians at the Church Divinity School of the Pacific, riding our motorcycles to Tilden Park in the Berkeley hills to play a friendly game of flag football with other Bay Area seminarians.

The next thing I knew, I was in a recovery room at Kaiser Permanente Hospital in Oakland, California. It was 6 a.m. Even though I weighed around two hundred pounds (I was a competitive weightlifter), I felt as if I had been hit by a big truck. Later that day, I learned that a fire engine responding to a brush fire had broadsided us. Brad was killed instantly.

I’m vague about the event because I have retrograde amnesia. My brain doesn’t want me to remember this terrible accident. I’ve tried everything, but my brain says, “No way!”

On December 13, 2025, at 5:50 a.m., I saw Brad, still in his early thirties, wearing a white button-down shirt and dark trousers. His hands were in his pockets. He looked directly at me and said, “This wasn’t the way I had planned it!” That was it.

Brad and I had served together at Marine Corps Air Station Kaneohe Bay, both as captains—he in the air wing of the First Marine Brigade and I in an amphibious tank company. We were both PKs (preacher’s kids, the Episcopal kind). The main difference between us was that Brad was married to Annette and had three children and a fourth on the way, and I was single with no familial responsibilities.

I never had a chance to mourn Brad’s death. I was too busy trying to put Humpty Dumpty back together again and stay in seminary. I had a badly broken right leg, cracked ribs, and a fractured right hand. The doctor wanted me hospitalized for two months. I told him, “A week.” I was released in nine days.

A few people have asked me whether I have ever had survivor’s guilt. I haven’t. Maybe as a Marine, to stay healthy mentally, you don’t play those head games. My basic theology is that we are all terminal every moment, so we should make the most of every minute of every day.

I share this story because I’m fascinated by it. Why, after sixty-seven years, did Brad suddenly appear with the message “This wasn’t the way I had planned it!”

Here are my conclusions:

• Maybe my brain is finally going to let me relive that accident. I would like that, I think.
• I was reminded how lucky I was. It should have been both of us who died.
• Some god had nothing to do with the accident or the outcomes.
• Annette wasn’t so lucky. She was left to raise three boys and a daughter as a single mom. She died about five years ago. (A few people thought I was going to marry Annette out of a sense of responsibility. I didn’t.)
• They shouldn’t be called motorcycles but murdercycles.
• I am a faith-based person, and my faith says that bad things happen. We move through them and don’t allow them to define our lives.
• I disliked the Episcopal priest who asked me, the day after the accident, what Brad and I had done to deserve this. (He was insinuating that God was punishing us for not being perfect.) In retrospect, his idiotic theology forced me to divorce his god, a Santa Claus–like monster who is alive and well today in most Christian churches, and find a twentieth-century concept of god: Creation.
• The accident was the beginning of my journey to becoming a progressive follower of Jesus, the historical one.

I wonder whether Brad will show up again.

 

PeaceLoveJoyHopeKindness

Bil

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P.S. People often ask me provocative questions about current events, both religious and secular. I have found that some of these questions are being asked universally. I’ll be periodically alternating regular articles with one of those questions and my answer. I invite you to send me your question to bilaulenbach@yahoo.com.

 

Photo by Constante Lim on Unsplash