Still Walking

In late 2006, David told people he sneezed. He was stopped at a red light in New Jersey traffic when his foot came off the brake and his truck rolled into the car ahead of him. A sneeze was easier to say out loud than the truth - that his awareness had flickered for a fraction of a second, long enough to lose control at the worst possible moment. He paid the other driver cash to avoid a police report. He drove home holding two versions of what happened at once. Then he called his mother, and before he'd finished the sentence, she stopped him: "That wasn't a sneeze." She'd spent twenty years learning the difference between the two, and she wasn't going to let him call one by the other name.

Weeks later, on a snowy January night in a church parking lot, the pattern he'd spent years managing around finally caught up with him. He collapsed into a full seizure while starting his truck to warm it for his daughter. He woke up in a hospital with three permanent scars and no memory of the fall. His mother flew out from California and stayed three and a half weeks. He has not driven since.

Still Walking is built from moments like these - the ones he minimized in real time and could only name honestly years later. It's a book about what it costs to keep managing a body that won't cooperate, what it means to finally stop performing competence, and what's left of faith when the version of your life you were fighting to hold onto has to be let go.

This is a book for anyone who has told their own version of the sneeze story - to a doctor, a boss, a spouse, or themselves.