Composing a Further Life

represents the future.
    Today the human imagination roves further, connecting the past as it might have been with multiple possible futures. Next to these ideas of an orderly succession of stages there is also often a sense that any given life can be seen in terms of multiple layers of story, rather than following one single plot, and that the many roads not taken somehow continue to be available for wonder or regret. Even chronological narratives can have multiple versions as first one theme or interpretation is stressed and then another, each representing a way of seeing the past that offers a different approach to the future. In that sense, each significant choice made is a comment on what has come before, just as it is a partial determinant of what can come next.
    When I began to think about this book, in 2006, I had become interested in the way people have thought about the future in terms of future generations and the need to take responsibility for the future far beyond their own lifetimes. I had decided that I would want to include among those I interviewed a partnered gay man who had, at some stage before coming to terms with his sexual orientation, been in a traditional marriage, had children and, eventually, grandchildren. This, in turn, meant finding someone whose life had spanned the years of gay liberation and who had survived the epidemic of HIV/AIDS and was willing to talk about it. None of my gay friends fit this multilayered description, but one kindly made an introduction, and I flew to California in May 2008 to meet Dan Jepson and his partner, Michael Crowe, and stayed as a guest in their home. I had originally meant to focus on Dan, but I ended by interviewing them both. Dan and Michael have been together for over a decade and have celebrated their union twice during the brief periods when this was possible in California. It was Michael who got me thinking about the way our ideas about the past can shape the future.
    Michael is a slim, elegant man with a neat mustache and a wide, engaging grin, who has worked for the National Park Service dealing with cultural and historic sites. He grew up in Cincinnati and has been involved with architectural history and preservation for most of his life. In 1985, at the height of the AIDS epidemic in the gay community, when many of his friends began to despair, he learned that he was HIV positive and made a number of decisions. As he told me, “I thought, I’m not gonna be that way. This is not gonna rule my life. It was shortly after that that I started working for the park service. I set out to think positively, and once you start to do that, you find circles of people that are like-minded.” Michael began seeing a hypnotherapist and learned how to meditate, struggling toward a form of spirituality very different from the Catholicism he grew up with.
    “I’d first become acquainted with the idea of reincarnation when I was preparing to go to India in the Peace Corps,” he told me. “It was so different from being raised Catholic, you know, because I’d pretty much given up on that. I got intrigued with the idea and took a class in psychic meditation when I was still living in Cincinnati, which involves meditating and working on understanding your current life as possibly influenced by past lives that you had.… I’d been reading a book on reincarnation,
Many Lives, Many Masters
, by Dr. Brian Weiss, 10 who wrote about spirit guides as well. He was a hypnotherapist.… In a couple of sessions that he was having with his patients, they started talking about these lives, and he couldn’t figure out what was going on. And he realized that they were talking to him about previous lives that they had had.
    “So after a trip to Australia, when strange things seemed to be happening, I had this real urge to do something to understand all of this experience.… It turned out that I had had a previous life in Australia. I’d been transported in childhood from Ireland as an orphan, for stealing bread. And I could tell the hypnotherapist exactly what had happened to me.… And that’s how I ended up finding Dan, who offered to help me get in touch with my spirit guides.… The Catholic equivalent would be guardian angels. At one point I found out that Dan had saved me from a disreputable life as a prostitute in medieval Italy. There are many people that you meet and think, Oh, I’ve known you for a hundred years—you know the kind of thing? You probably