Wild GooseAgency

Lawrence A. Decker, Ph.D.

Come On In. The Water Is Fine.

At eighty-three, after fifty years helping other people understand themselves, I thought most of my writing was behind me. Instead, I found myself writing the most personal book of my life after finally discovering — with regret, but also a determination to change course — that I had never learned how to experience life fully.

TEST
Genre
Memoir
Rights available
World English / Translation / Film & TV
Audience
Adult
Word count
61,000 approx
Narrative style
First-person, reflective memoir blending lived experience with psychological insight.
Narrative tone
Intimate, candid, warm and self-questioning, with moments of humor.
Timeline
Childhood to the present day
Setting
Various locations across the United States
Narrative Perspective
First person, primarily past tense, with present-day reflection.

Comparables

When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi — for its exploration of mortality, medicine, identity and what it means to live fully when the body forces the question.
Maybe You Should Talk to Someone by Lori Gottlieb — for the perspective of a mental-health professional who turns the examining

Synopsis

For much of my life, I stood on the shore. I became very good at watching, thinking, understanding, and helping other people with their lives while keeping a certain distance from my own. Those same instincts helped me become a psychologist and executive coach. They also helped me perform calm when I was terrified, stay busy when I didn’t want to feel, and convince myself that observing life was almost the same thing as entering it.

Then my heart forced the issue. Come On In. The Water Is Fine. is a memoir about the people who gradually called me off that shore—a father whose late transformation inspired me, heart surgery that forced me to face my vulnerability, and especially my wife, who for forty-five years has kept extending the same invitation: 

“Come on in. The water is fine.” At eighty-three, I am still discovering how much of life becomes available when you stop trying quite so hard to stay safe and dry. 

Author's Note

I came to this memoir late in life, which may be part of what makes it unusual. I am 83 years old. I have spent more than fifty years as a clinical psychologist, executive coach, teacher, and author, helping other people understand the forces that shaped their lives. It took me considerably longer to become curious about some of the forces that shaped mine.

For much of my life, I thought of myself as resilient. I could handle things. I worked hard, stayed useful, solved problems, took care of other people, and kept moving. Those qualities helped me build a career and a family. They also helped me avoid looking too closely at what constant vigilance and self-control might have been costing me.

My heart eventually made that harder to ignore.

I underwent quadruple bypass surgery nearly thirty years ago and have had additional cardiac procedures since. Somewhere along the way, I began asking a question that medicine alone could not answer: Did the way I lived—always watchful, responsible, prepared, standing just a little outside my own experience—have something to do with what happened to my heart? I do not pretend there is a simple medical answer to that question. But it became the emotional question behind this book.

The title, Come On In. The Water Is Fine., comes from my wife, Louise. For years, in ways both literal and figurative, she has been inviting me to stop standing on the shore and participate more fully in my own life. I did not always know that was what she was doing.

There is another late-life story behind the book. My father, Robert Decker, was a disabled veteran, teacher, counselor, psychologist, and author. Our relationship was complicated. What stays with me most now, however, is that he continued changing almost until the end of his life. His late transformation became one of the most important lessons he ever gave me: people are not finished simply because they are old.

I have also saved rejection letters for more than sixty years—college rejections, graduate school rejections, postdoctoral rejections, publisher rejections, and literary rejections. There are a lot of them. I used to think they documented failure. Now I think they document something else: I kept raising my hand.

That is partly why I am still sending out a memoir at 83.

I have written six books, worked with thousands of people, raised children, made mistakes, repaired some relationships and failed to repair others. Yet this memoir may be the first book in which I stopped being the psychologist looking outward and allowed myself to become the subject.
The question underneath it is not really whether I finally figured myself out.

I haven't. It is whether, late in life, a person can still move from watching life to entering it.

I think the answer is yes.