Don West died for twenty minutes and was brought back to life by a team of firefighters. He spent the next 48 hours in hypothermia in the ICU and the following three weeks in step-down/rehab. Death and resurrection had left him an outsider to himself. He was unable to return to certainty. The centrality of his need for human dignity and understanding about how to live with one another had been forever shattered.
Untethered, a sexually explicit emphatically honest memoir, is his coming-to-terms with death. But even more importantly, it's the indispensable catalyst for a 75 year old man, searching his repressed personal history to describe the events that had made him the man he was before dying, and now illusion-less, the man he has become, before facing his death a second time.