It seems so very much like Cameron Fathauer to turn the anniversary of a near-death experience into a celebration of literally writing a new chapter in his life.
So that is precisely what the Columbus native will do at 7 p.m. Wednesday for a free book signing event for “Saving the Subject: How I Found You When I Almost Lost Me,” his multi-layered, debut, faith-based release.
The informal gathering at Columbus North High School’s Judson Erne Auditorium, where he also will speak for about 20 minutes, will unfold exactly nine years to the day after a car struck the then-North senior on his skateboard near his parents’ home. It left him with a traumatic brain injury, yet later also somehow left him with a dramatic ability to overcome.
“After the accident,” he said, “I found myself on anther planet.”
Many would argue that the 26-year-old New Albany resident is still there on another planet. He overcame losing a third of his skull and struggling through three weeks in a coma after being diagnosed with a traumatic brain injury to earn a law degree and become a successful personal-injury attorney.
“(My wife) Chelsea said the accident rounded me out,” Fathauer said. “It brought me to a new world.”
He is hardly one to revel in such victories without pointing to a God that he passionately believes made such possible. In the book, he does so with a decidedly intellectual, questioning bent, almost like a solid lawyer.
“I would just love and would thoroughly enjoy teaching on this book,” he said. “It contains a lot of philosophical, ontological questions that I don’t exactly make super explicit.
“Because I certainly don’t want to scare people away.”
He blends a gauzy perspective of philosophy, spirituality and psychology to examine how his life has turned from tragedy to triumph, from fractured to fulfilled — and allows for a textured complexity much like the human brain itself.
Yet, he acknowledged that he is hardly the most patient person with his writing or anything else.
“To me, a month is a long time,” Fathauer said. “A lot of people with traumatic brain injury want everything to actualize immediately.”
Keep in mind that this is a guy who employed painstaking patience after his accident just to relearn social cues and multiple and basic aspects of everyday life that others take for granted.
He wrote the book’s table of contents in a coffee shop in June 2023. The fact that he mapped out seven chapters was linked in part to the Christian concept of seven being the number of wholeness. And the project hints at wholeness amid myriad challenges, including severe depression from his traumatic brain injury and the severe adversity of law school.
Today, the heaviness of his brain-injury-induced depression has partially lifted.
“I took to writing at my feelings instead of writing about them,” he wrote.
New Albany attorney Matt Schad represented Fathauer in his accident case and inspired Fathauer to pursue law. He hired Fathauer to work in his firm. Schad chuckled when asked what his employee might do for a next step in his life.
“The truth is that you can’t really know what he is going to do next,” Schad said of Fathaauer’s multi-dimensional pursuits that once included brain-injury support groups. “He certainly has surprised me before.”
The book overflows, like many of Fathauer’s blog posts, with him easily and readily finding both trial and triumph in the Christian life — and seeing a distinct purpose in both.
“If you see God in the darkness,” he wrote in the book, “you won’t miss him in the light.”
