So I began it with an image drawn exclusively from the idea that I was nearing death. Like this:

The road I’ve taken has an end, but it is not yet clearly in sight. Picture it with me this way: It is a cool late afternoon in early autumn and the splendid trees that line a country lane are still full of color, albeit fall colors, yellows fading into browns, reds into black, green into darker greens and browns and black. The road is a little slippery because of the already fallen leaves. The sky cannot make up its mind whether to shine, and the milky coming-winter sun is still playfully filtered by serious blue clouds that move as if choreographed by some grand dancer used to working at such heights.

I have just turned onto this lane, my last lane. I am walking slowly.

As is my habit, I don’t edit while writing (interrupts the flow) but instead return to the beginning of whatever I’m working on when I’ve come to end of a chapter and edit the whole of it. So imagine my surprise when, after rereading that “nearing death” opening, I simply deleted it. For one thing, it is a tired if not entirely clichéd image. What was I thinking? Must have been the painkillers.

But the second reason for deleting it was that it no longer “rings true.” As a representation of “what it is like to” live by stories and as a way to get readers interested in reading more about it, the whole “nearing death in autumn” thing fails. Fails badly.

It was a beginning in need of a better … beginning. 

***

By the end of my writing session I had crafted a new beginning, this one subtler about the issue of why this book has the word “final” in it. The prose itself has a lighter feel to it. It’s more like “the old Bud” in some ways but it also has a brand new something – something ineffable – about it. Something that moves the idea of a boy’s adventure to a man’s quest. When I read over it again this morning, I realized that my newly acquired remission status had exerted a powerful influence on how I now framed my story. And to how I now see my life in relation to those big questions. 

A miracle will do that. 

A miracle and me. Not only are these two nouns joined together in the same sentence fragment, but they are joined together in the same fragmented life. It’s as if I’ve been given another chance to get it right.

Getting it right with my life as well as with my life as a story. Getting it right as a new beginning for that story, a story that takes on some big questions – God, the Quantum Universe, Love, War, Politics, and Death – and this time tries to answer them. 

***

See what you think. Here is the new version of that revised beginning:

Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.

-- George Bernard Shaw

I am a writer, a storyteller, an academic who uses the reading stories and the study of narratives to enrich and to better live my life. I am also a fellow who freely and happily admits that he understands the world and people, as well as himself, through those stories. Final Draft is a book about how I turned those stories and my relationship to them – to borrow a line from the literary theorist Kenneth Burke – into “equipment for living.”

This book is one part memoir and two or maybe three parts reflection on the stories that have made memoir possible. It is about “what happened to me” as I lived my life through and with stories. It answers the question about how I acquired that special “equipment for living” and then crafted a rich and meaningful life out of it.

Fair warning: As Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. says: “All of this happened, more or less.” Memoir is always a tricky business, as we all know and are annually reminded by the missteps of those who don’t know, relying as it must on selective memories that have been edited and reworked through a lifetime of mulling over them. So my story will be about “what is like to” remember life in this way, rather than “what it was” under the bright lights of an imagined life-police interrogation or that could be produced under oath as “the whole truth and nothing but.”

In memoir, there is no such thing as “the whole truth and nothing but.” But that doesn’t mean I have a license, or even the inclination, to make things up. What I do have is a story about the truth of my experiences.

The truth is in it, because as Vonnegut, Jr. and I agreed earlier, “all of this happened, more or less.”  But so too is this a story about how I think about the truth that I now find in it, which of course I couldn’t have known or found or thought about in the same way back then. Or maybe I just ignored it. Or denied it. Or maybe I was just doing something else. No matter. In this way the story I am now telling is, as the late great novelist Barry Hannah put it, “a many-storied story.” It is that story and it is this story, and there are other stories it draws on to pull the whole thing together.

One more preface-y thing. As will become apparent to you, this many-storied life story is a blend of the real and the fantastic. It evokes and represents a way of being in the world that is less about a clear division of fact and imagination than it is a blurring and merging of those categories in narrative time.

***

Why did I want to write this story? It’s a fair question.

I want you to consider two seemingly disparate concerns. One of them is a need we have as humans to sum things up when the end of our lives is in sight, and within that final summing up to provide our own final answers to age-old and yet enduring questions: Who are we? Where did we come from? What’s it all been about, Harold?

If you, like me, are a narrativist, that need for summing up may be satisfied by coming up with a “final draft” like this one – the story of your life with those final answers in them. The point of writing it down is so we pass it along to others.

The second concern comes with having lived an academic life. In this regard, it too is about summing things up as one nears the end of a career, but the inflection is toward making a final contribution to “the literature.” Or, at least to our friends.

In my case, this need to make a final contribution “to the literature” and to my friends has a practical as well as an academic goal. I want to be explicit about how we can better link what we have learned about the power of narratives – as well as about our singular role in the universe as storytellers equipped with them – to what Gregory Bateson once called “the further reaches of human nature.”

There’s more. For the stories we tell and retell, the stories we believe in and pass along, and the stories that persuade us to live our lives by them are not merely accessories to the real work of life. They are the instruments we use to accomplish the real work of our lives as well as the instruments we must use to ensure the sustainability and future well being of the planet.

And there is more work to do. The story of us out here among the stars so far as physicists tell it is a complex quantum narrative. Increasingly though, it is a story that is less about equations than it is about consciousness. For the quantum universe is alive. And if there is a meaning or purpose to it all, chances are good that the stories we learn to tell are part of it. There may well be an afterlife to our sentences beyond our wildest imaginings.

Final Draft is about all of that. It is a personal narrative about the stories that made me who I am tied to a larger narrative made up of many stories that speak to an ongoing evolution in human consciousness.

In this way, this final summing up also has an exit strategy. My hope is that this book can help motivate readers to move the theory of narrative out of its insular academic gated community and into a world that is clearly desperate in its need of a better story.

*** 

That opening for the new book isn’t the only thing about me that changed. The further I get away from chemo treatments, the better and stronger I feel. I still have neuropathy, but I no longer have the anxiety I associated with Monday mornings, because Monday mornings are no longer associated with chemo. I still have numb taste buds, but I no longer wear a fanny pack for 46 hours at a time. I sleep better. I sleep a lot better. San sleeps a lot, lot better.

I do miss my oncology team and very much look forward to seeing them again, but this time I’ll be wearing my new “cancer free” outlook and bearing. I’ll be one of those guys with a happy story to share with and maybe to inspire or at least give a little more hope to those still in treatment.

I know it’s only a remission, not a cure, but my symptoms are gone and I am fast getting used to “the new normal.” 

I hope you like the newly revised beginning of my story … just wait until you read what follows from it!

***