THE WORDS THAT FORMED ME

EPILOGUE

You Aint Seen Nothing Yet

I have already selected the opening music for my funeral, although I prefer to call the occasion a celebration because “funeral” sounds as though everybody will be expected to behave themselves. There will be no need for a mournful organ, a solemn procession or someone pretending that I was a far more dignified man than the available evidence supports. I want Bachman-Turner Overdrive’s You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet¹ played loudly enough to make anyone who arrived expecting hushed respect wonder whether they have entered the correct room. It will not deny that I am dead, because even the human Jeff must eventually accept a conclusion supported by that much evidence. It will simply suggest that death should not be permitted the final word without at least having to compete with the soundtrack.

The choice carries precisely the right degree of swagger, particularly because it will arrive at the one moment when I am no longer required to prove it. I will not need to outline the next book, announce another project or explain why retirement was never going to mean sitting quietly while the interesting part of life disappeared over the horizon. The song will make the claim on my behalf, leaving everybody else to decide whether it was confidence, humour, denial or one last act of mischief. It will probably be all four, which would make it a reasonably accurate summary of the man they have gathered to remember. By then, even the analytical Jeff should concede that a little ambiguity is good for an audience.

Age has never impressed me as an argument, although it has occasionally presented some persuasive supporting documentation. The body does things now that it once would have considered an administrative error, and illness has placed restrictions around days that I would prefer to have spent without reading the terms and conditions. Retirement has also tried to suggest that the main performance is over and that whatever comes next should be described as a quieter phase. That may suit people who have always dreamed of quiet, but the radio in my head has never shown much respect for program schedules, closing ceremonies or sensible broadcasting hours. It continues to transmit, sometimes with meaning, sometimes with nonsense and occasionally with a selection that suggests nobody responsible for quality control has reported for duty.

The Black Dog remains somewhere near the studio as well. I do not pretend that writing this book has driven him permanently from the building, because he has ignored stronger eviction notices than that. There will still be mornings when the signal weakens, when the songs stop and when the silence feels less like peace than an empty frequency waiting for something unwelcome to arrive. Yet there will also be mornings when a line returns after fifty years and suddenly explains why it refused to leave, or when a song I thought I understood reveals that it had merely been waiting for my life to catch up. The fact that I cannot defeat the Black Dog does not mean I have to surrender the microphone to him.

That may be what these words have been doing all along. The poems, plays, songs and fragments did not enter my life carrying neat labels that explained their purpose, nor did they arrive in the order required to produce the man I eventually became. Horatius did not announce that he would one day help me think about courage, responsibility and the bridges ordinary people defend without anyone writing poems about them. Hamlet did not know he would be required to share space with an accountant, the Black Dog and a feasibility study into whether existence remained a viable proposition. Flavius Maximus certainly offered no guarantee that a private Roman eye speaking in dreadful wordplay would eventually contribute to Not Your Ordinary Accountant, although in retrospect he may have left more fingerprints on the scene than anybody suspected.

The songs were equally unwilling to explain themselves. Some spoke clearly when they arrived, while others sat in the back of the mind for decades waiting for the right question. A few lied, or at least made promises that life could not be relied upon to honour, and even those became useful because disappointment taught me to listen beyond the chorus. Others supplied courage, anger, tenderness or permission to ask why the world insisted that flowers must be coloured according to somebody else’s instructions. They did not form me by giving me answers. They formed me by making it increasingly difficult to stop asking questions.

For much of my life, the answers were expected to come through the language of numbers, tax law, business systems and consequences. I became good at that language, partly because it offered structure and partly because a correct answer can be a reassuring place to hide. Yet the people sitting across the desk were rarely only financial problems waiting to be solved. They were frightened, embarrassed, hopeful, exhausted or trying to preserve something that could not be measured on a balance sheet. The words I had borrowed from songs, poems and performances helped me recognise that technical accuracy was only useful when another human being could hear it without feeling smaller.

That recognition became part of the voice I eventually used in business, in books and in the questions I directed at the world. I could challenge an accepted practice without writing like a tax manual that had developed anger-management issues. I could discuss depression without pretending it was poetic, discuss failure without treating the person who failed as the failure, and make ordinary lives meaningful without talking down to the people living them. Humour allowed serious matters to enter the room without ceremonial fog, while logic prevented emotion from becoming an excuse to believe whatever felt comforting. The two Jeffs still argue over which contribution matters more, and the continued disagreement probably improves the broadcast.

I do not know how much time remains for that broadcast, and arithmetic is of limited assistance because mortality has never respected a spreadsheet. What I do know is that there are books still unwritten, questions still annoying me and ideas presently wandering around without the language needed to explain why they matter. There are memories that may yet step forward from somewhere behind the songs and demand a hearing. There are also songs whose meanings have not arrived, despite having lived inside me long enough to claim squatter’s rights. I am not finished simply because a calendar, an illness or a description such as “retired” finds it convenient to place me in the past tense.

Nor do I require everything ahead to be bigger, easier or more successful than what has already occurred. The future does not have to outperform the past to justify its existence, and I have spent enough time around business forecasts to distrust projections based entirely upon optimism. There will be brick walls, wrong turns, silent mornings and projects that never become what I imagine when enthusiasm first takes control of the planning meeting. There will also be unexpected people, extraordinary things still to see and do, and moments that justify remaining in the audience for another act. The story need not become triumphant to remain unfinished.

A Year in My Shoes began when I woke on 1 July 2024 and listened to the station already playing inside my head. At that point, I was still treating the music as something being sent to me, an unexplained selection from a library accumulated without proper cataloguing or adult supervision. This book has taken me back through that library and shown me that I was never merely receiving the broadcast. Each time I interpreted a line differently, translated complexity into ordinary language or wrote something that allowed another person to recognise themselves, I was transmitting as well. The borrowed voices had not disappeared; they had become ingredients in the voice speaking through the microphone.

Perhaps that is the only understanding I need. I may never be completely understood, and the analytical Jeff would point out that the evidence accumulated so far does not make complete understanding the most likely outcome. It may be enough that somebody hears the broadcast, steps outside their usual place in the world and briefly looks back at themselves as a logical bystander. They may question why they accepted something, why they reduced themselves to fit a room or why they mistook conformity for safety. My voice does not need to tell them what to think if it can help them notice that they are still entitled to think.

The internal radio remains on, and somewhere beyond the noise another song is already waiting for its meaning to arrive. I am no longer content merely to listen and wonder what the station recognises in me, because I have finally accepted that my own voice belongs among the selections. The microphone is live, the signal is travelling and there is still time to say something worth hearing before Bachman–Turner Overdrive opens that final celebration. Until then, age, retirement, illness and the Black Dog may make their submissions, but none of them has been appointed program director. The story continues, and despite everything that has already filled these pages, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

Notes

1. You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet was written by Randy Bachman and recorded by Bachman–Turner Overdrive. It was released in 1974 on the band’s third studio album, Not Fragile.