I was thinking of everyone I love dissipating into darkness—the terror and sadness without horizon. I floated away, arms akimbo, death and awareness locked in some impossible war. How could both exist at once? That’s where my head went for a moment as David Valenzuela told me about the time he died—how he coded in the ambulance, how he was pulled upward until the air thinned to nothing.
We’re in the backroom of the well-refrigerated gatehouse where Valenzuela has long been employed as a security guard—now a supervisor, overseeing seven others. I’ve known him from afar for seven years; he knows our children. He has always moved with careful deliberation—almost monastic, though unordained. Soft jowls, roundish face, always benevolent. His voice is unhurried, and carries weight without insistence. When he talks about his childhood, seminary college, or his years in computer manufacturing—semiconductors, processing chips—or his shift into security work, he often uses the blanket phrase, “it was good,” like a quiet deflection.
But the story of his death first.
Thirteen years ago, Valenzuela was readying for work at this very job at the Skyline Country Club Estates. Chest pains made him phone 911. Heart attack.
He died. Stayed that way for many minutes. He tells me what he saw—his parents. Spoke with Dad, who said it wasn’t time. Tried with Mom but couldn’t connect. He saw his grandparents, uncles, and cousins who had passed. He says he wasn’t scared, was more at peace.
“I was blessed, actually. I was told what I went through—dying in the ambulance, waking in the hospital, the electric shocks to my heart.”
Doctors said he’d been gone a long time, lucky to come back at all, much less with no organ or brain damage. Valenzuela laughs, “They said I was being watched over. And they freaked out when I told them what I saw. They even brought in a psychologist.”
His family was shocked too, by his reportage from the other side. A cousin in Phoenix had died around the same time, something he couldn’t have known.
Anyway. Who knows what happens when we die. Who can see it, smell it, feel it pressing against the chest. Our senses swear death is real. But who—what mind—can touch time’s edges and see what comes?
Valenzuela was released from the hospital after five days, which included surgery to repair a rupture in his stomach. That repair got infected. Just as he was getting ready to leave, he started turning yellow and feeling sick. He spent the next three and a half months sedated, going through nine stomach surgeries. They inserted some kind of mesh to help his stomach. Doctors told his family to start planning the funeral. “Then my brother asked the doctors to take out ‘whatever you put in him.’” They did.
“Then I came out of it,” Valenzuela says. “It saved my life. I’d lost 110 pounds, and I wasn’t overweight before. I looked like a skeleton, down to almost 100 pounds. I was fed through tubes.”
He left the hospital in December 2012 and returned to work Jan. 5. The residents in the Estates put up a banner: ‘Welcome Back, Dave.’ Residents would get out of their cars to welcome me back.”
A few months later, a doctor asked him to speak about his death experience. Seventy people attended.
The morning sunlight shifts across the gatehouse floor, muted and familiar, while the world moves just outside the windows and sliding doors. Early Motown rises from one of the computers, interrupted occasionally by a truck motor idling down outside. A little plastic duck in a hat presides over hanging clipboards and neatly arranged office accoutrements on an L-shaped desk. Monitors show cars and license plates drifting past. A small fridge hums in a cubby across from the bathroom, Valenzuela’s chicken-and-coleslaw lunch scenting the air. Everything in its place, steady as day.
Valenzuela is steady too. He eats his lunch and talks freely about himself: he has never touched alcohol or drugs—not even weed in high school—and, like his brothers and sister, believed sex was only for marriage. He wasn’t interested in parties. “Not drinking made dating hard,” he says. He wanted to be a priest, hell. His life choices meant, he laughs, “lots of cold showers.”
The one true love of his life was a Japanese-American woman he met in his 20s, at work making power supplies. A month before the wedding—new house picked out, Hawaiian honeymoon planned—her father pulled the plug, having arranged a marriage the old-world Japanese way. Valenzuela was devastated, for a year at least. “I felt betrayed. But I understood. She would’ve been disowned by her family. She took it really hard.” He continues, “Her mom liked me. I thought her dad did. And I was trying to learn Japanese!”
He never spoke to her again. Astonishingly, the 66-year-old is still a virgin.
This is how it goes for a guy who, after three and a half years in a California seminary college preparing for Catholic priesthood, bailed to care for his ailing parents. He wound up caring for them for years, paying for their caregivers while he worked in computer electronics. Long work days and then home to his parents’ house. Mom was suffering from dementia and years later died of a heart attack, and Dad, who’d put 35 years in at Southern Pacific Railroad, and a lifelong smoker, died of emphysema two days after his wife. “From a broken heart,” Valenzuela says.
He adored his parents. Caring for them was equal parts hard work and sacrifice, and later, grief and mourning.
“Dementia is something really hard,” he says. “I took care of her, and worked with what she had.” He holds a beat, adds flatly, “I took responsibility for my parents because they took care of me when I was growing up. That’s what you do for your parents.”
For the seminary he says he received some funding from a local diocese, relocated to San Jose for the schooling and visited home on holidays. “I felt close to Christ,” he tells me. “I thought I’d be a good priest for the people.”
Before all that, he was a Tucson-born Mexican-American who wanted to be a priest since childhood, attending services with his family, which includes three siblings. He grew up in South Tucson (“lots of good families in the ’60s, kids to play with”) then on the northwest side, and attended Cholla High, where he played football and baseball. On whether he was any good at those, he laughs. “No! But playing was good.” He was bagging groceries at 13 and from there upheld a staunch work ethic. “My parents taught me to be independent, to work for what you have. It was family, work, family, work.”
Out of high school he got hired at IBM, and later Texas Instruments, and studied multi-theology at Pima College. Then he left for seminary school, valuing the students he met from all over the world. If he broke down simply what he got out of the seminary, he says it would be this: “Understanding, love, kindness, and how to take care of people. There isn’t much else, especially the way the world is going now. It ain’t good.”
This is a guy who rises at 3 a.m., at the gatehouse by 7 a.m., gone by 3 p.m., Monday through Friday. He starts with the daily reports, keeping track of everything passing in and out. He oversees maintenance and landscape crews, fields resident requests and complaints, and part of his gig includes name-checking or ID’ing some of the thousand or so cars that roll through the visitor lane each day. To the residents, he waves, sometimes pauses to talk—he knows everyone. Sheriffs appear in a flash, though there’s rarely a call: the occasional speeder, a loud music complaint. The security team is unarmed. No break-ins ever on his watch. The man is a strict follower of protocol, his days folding into themselves, same as yesterday, same as tomorrow. He has logged 17 years here.
Today at work, Valenzuela rolls himself around on a walker—knees bone-on-bone, surgery done, tissue-growing injections—still aching, but spirits alive. He wears a blue HBS Management Solution button-down, a belt-clipped gate remote, a logo-free black ballcap, and specs. Maybe he tore a meniscus decades ago in high school baseball—never knew it, and it came back to haunt him. In a few weeks he figures he’ll be walking again, back to normal. Sort of normal, anyway, because the stomach trouble is back too. Doctor visits, now talks with a lawyer—maybe there’s a malpractice case buried in there. The years since 2012 may have blurred his stomach problems but not the pain. He recently threw up blood. A sonogram and an MRI later, he says it’s a “hematoma with a mystery infection,” holding his hands a foot apart to show the spread. Maybe the antibiotics will fix it. Either way, he sees a surgeon in a couple of weeks.
The knee pain must be immense. He just learned he has arthritis too. “It’s like you’re a walking weather station,” he laughs. “People come through the gate and ask, ‘hey, Dave, is it gonna to rain today?’”
Valenzuela takes ibuprofen for the aches and throbs, says it keeps the pain level at a “five” on a one-to-10 scale.
“He doesn’t say boo about any pain,” says Kim Wolford, the other security guard on duty. She’s spry, gray-haired and alert. Shakes her head in disbelief. “He never complains. He just smiles.”
Older residents here phone up the supervising security guard, lonelies who need someone to talk to. “I get a lot of that,” he says. He looks out for the security staff too—buying lunches, Thanksgiving dinners, whatever they need.
Pious—Catholicism shaped a rhythm in his life—but not self-righteous. His intentions are consistently good, almost saintly, like some Mister Rogers reincarnate: remembering details that matter, offering help before anyone asks, listening with a patience that asks nothing in return. A kindness quietly beats beneath his movements.
“I’m no saint,” he laughs. “People talk to me at stores or wherever I go, but I try to care for everybody. If I can help them, I help them.”
He tells a story about a guy he met in the hospital who’d lost a limb to diabetes. Valenzuela talked with him, shared stories, helped him through a blackness the man couldn’t shake. Later, the guy sent a text, thanking him for being there.
He lives alone in an apartment complex that has a gym, which he uses even with bad knees (“I take it slow”). Saturdays are for laundry, Sundays for Church. He watches comedy shows—George Lopez his fave—and is an unironic fan of yacht rock, ’70s and ’80s. “Today’s music kinda sucks. Sorry.” He drives a 2023 Chevrolet Colorado truck, a birthday present to himself.
Valenzuela laughs. “My mom told me a long time ago I live a monk’s life. I have friends, family. I’m comfortable with that. I don’t get depressed, I’m not lonely. I have a lot of faith.”
Just then, a gust of wind blows open the backroom door. For a moment, he lets it pass. He smiles, says, “That’s God.”
This article appears in Aug 21-28, 2025.