Cameron Michael Fathauer

The Class of 2015 at Columbus North High School wasn’t technically my graduating class. I graduated early in December of 2015, so I didn’t belong neatly to the Class of 2016 either. And the circumstances surrounding my graduation make it all the more peculiar….

I started the fall 2015 semester with plans to graduate, pursue ministry, and get married. Then came the speeding Lexus: September 18, 2015, and my whole life changed.

My senior year lasted about three weeks. That’s it. The rest of it was spent in a coma.[1]

Time had gone on, but I hadn’t. My friends were in class, preparing for homecoming, making senior memories. I was relearning how to stand up, how to swallow, how to live again.

I didn’t come back. Not for a final semester. Not for prom. Not for senior awards. I took no photos with my friends. It’s all gone.

Here are additional facts surrounding my high school disappearance:

• In early January 2016 –– just a couple weeks after the doctors put my skull back on my head (cranioplasty) ––I was dropped off at seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. Just me, an apartment, and the quiet weight of everything that had happened. I was barely stitched together, physically and otherwise.
• On March 26, 2016—less than six months after the accident—I married Chelsea.

My high school life evaporated overnight, and my adult life started without warning.

To this day, I don’t know how I made it through that season. Everything changed—my body, my brain, my beliefs. And it all happened fast

And for all the updates that filtered out over the years—through Facebook, small-town news stories, or word of mouth—neither the Class of 2015 nor 2016 really saw any of it. They knew I was gone, maybe heard I had survived, maybe saw a wedding photo, maybe nothing at all. The whole thing had a strange mythic quality to it: Cameron disappeared. And somehow, Cameron came back.

It’s taken almost a decade for me to realize how much I’ve lacked closure from those high school years. Nevertheless, I was mixed about attending this 10-year reunion.

But then I saw the location—Mill Race Park—and the date: August 2, 2025. That is exactly ten years to the day I proposed to Chelsea.[2] In the same park. In the same spot. And I knew I had to be there.

I didn’t go to sell books (though I brought some). I didn’t go to make a scene. I went because there was something incomplete I needed to finish. A presence I needed to offer. A goodbye I finally needed to say.

When Gwen, the former student body president, called me up to speak, I kept it short. I began by mentioning the significance of the date and the chosen location: “I proposed to my wife 10 years ago to the day in those bushes over there.”

I told them that time froze for me in 2015.

I explained how they are the ones I think of when I think about my high school experience.

I emphasized that their class meant more to me than they probably knew.

I then passed around a 3D model of my fractured skull: not to impress or shock anyone, but to invite them into the reality of what happened after I disappeared.

Some people were visibly emotional. One classmate, Daniel, told me afterward that he’s starting law school in ten days and that he remembered me back then as an “unimpeachable Christian.” It was encouraging, and that word stayed with me, because it reminded me of my heart and who I was trying to be before everything changed.

People commented on how different I looked. Taller. Stronger. More grounded. A few of the guys who used to pick on me seemed caught off guard. One of them actually stuck around to talk, and I could feel something shift. The old categories no longer applied.

But maybe the most significant conversations I had were with the ones still sitting off to the side: the old choir kids, youth group friends, the ones who still seem to orbit the edges. I made sure to talk to them; not out of obligation, but because I remember what it’s like to feel unseen. And because everything I believe about subjectivity and personhood starts there.

This wasn’t just a reunion. It was a reckoning. A return to a place I had left in silence, without meaning to. The Class of 2015 didn’t just represent a yearbook photo or a class rank (although I never had either of those myself) —they represented the “before.” The version of me that had dreams and goals and people I truthfully admired . . . right before it all went dark.

In short, I didn’t go back to be remembered. I went back to remember. And I’m very glad I did.

[1] coma for about 3 weeks, then rehabilitation, then some paperwork from a tutor who came to my house, and lastly pickup diploma at the school office in December 2015 (generalizing).

[2] Check out Chapter 5 from “Saving the Subject” to see the story for how I proposed to her in “those bushes” and how I wish I could do it over again. There’s additional high school narrative material in Chapter 5 as well.