Why Am I Still Here

Why Am I Still Here? is both the book’s title and its central unanswered question: what can survival mean when it begins in loss and is followed by further suffering? The phrase links the author’s childhood grief to Jensen Brick McCall’s extraordinary survival at birth, then follows him into a life marked by abandonment, violence, and bereavement. Its answers are offered through faith, testimony, and love, but the question remains emotionally active rather than being resolved by a single explanation.

A Question Born of Loss

The title first emerges from the author’s account of losing two sisters, one at six months and the other at three years old. Their deaths left the narrator wondering why God had taken them and not her; she says that she spent much of her life searching for an answer. The question therefore begins not as an abstract reflection on destiny but as a child’s attempt to make sense of unequal survival within a family.

That private grief opens into the book’s wider address to readers. The author presents the book as a reminder that every person has a purpose, including people shaped by streets, foster homes, homeless shelters, prison, or crack houses. Purpose is framed as something a person may not yet recognize, but which God can reveal. The title’s question thus carries two related meanings: why one person remains alive when others die, and what that continued life might be for.

Jensen’s Survival and Grace McCall’s Testimony

The story gives the question a second, concrete beginning in the account of Jensen Brick McCall’s birth. On December 4, after twelve abortions, a nurse covering the shift sees a row of infants left to die. Six are Black, five white, and one Hispanic. As the hours pass, the nurse checks each infant for a heartbeat and records the time of death. One brown baby continues to cry and kick. After eight hours, he is still breathing; the nurse checks his health, wraps him, and recognizes his survival as a miracle.

The event is narrated by Grace McCall, who had assisted with late-term abortions and understood the babies to be human lives. She had watched infants die after being placed on a table, sometimes within minutes and sometimes after hours. She closed their eyes, marked their foreheads with water and a cross, and prayed over them, while taking Valium and Percocet to endure the guilt. Against that repeated scene of death, she whispers a plea for even one baby to live. Jensen’s survival answers the immediate plea, but it also leaves Grace with an enduring burden: she says she never stopped the others from dying and calls herself a murderer.

Grace interprets Jensen’s survival through religious language. She tells him that a baby who survives a botched abortion and remains healthy has a purpose, and says that the abortion solution changed the color of his eyes but caused no cerebral palsy, seizures, or other condition. Her claim makes survival a sign of divine intention. Yet the testimony does not erase the circumstances of his birth or the guilt attached to it; it gives Jensen a powerful account of why he might have been spared, while leaving him to decide what that account means.

Survival Does Not Settle the Question

Jensen’s own account resists an easy equation between being alive and understanding why. He describes sleeping on library steps, being raped, enduring uninhabitable conditions, and being treated as a foster child moving from home to home. He calls the woman who gave birth to him his murderer and says that finding her became part of his search for purpose. The question of survival is therefore bound to a second question: how can a life be called purposeful when it has included so much abandonment and pain?

The book’s structure makes that search part of Jensen’s story rather than a conclusion supplied from outside it. He says his life began when he left Syracuse, not when he was left for dead. He also hopes that telling his story will help a young man on a similar path grow, live, and pursue happiness and freedom. In his formulation, society may see him as a dead man walking, while his faith gives him another possible identity: someone on a mission. The act of telling becomes a way to recast a life defined by injury without pretending the injuries did not happen.

The Question Returns in Relationships

The title’s logic recurs when Jensen mourns Chyna and the friends he has lost. He feels responsible for Chyna’s death even while recalling that she had covered for him, and he describes the pain of losing friends who had once treated him like a human being. In one exchange, he says that people die every day except him. The line turns survival into a source of isolation as well as evidence of endurance: being the one who remains means carrying the memory of those who do not.

When Janae tells him that he is here for a reason, Jensen challenges the reassurance. He has heard that claim throughout his life, he says, but nobody knows what the reason is. Her playful suggestion that he may be here to get on her nerves does not provide a theological answer; instead, it makes purpose part of a living relationship, expressed through humor and attachment. The scene sets two forms of response beside one another: certainty that survival must mean something, and honesty about not knowing what that meaning is.

An Answer Held Open

The book’s religious language repeatedly casts survival as providential. Grace prays for one infant to live, calls Jensen chosen, and urges him to fulfill God’s purpose. Elsewhere, a loved one thanks the Lord for finding him, and a blue crystal is offered as something with healing powers. Such moments show faith operating through prayer, gratitude, reassurance, and objects of comfort; they do not make the suffering that precedes them disappear.

Near the end, Jensen tells his mother that he has forgiven her and that they are well, while urging her to recover and emphasizing that the family is together. This is a consequential change in their relationship, not a final explanation for why he survived. The title remains open because reconciliation can alter how the past is carried without resolving the original question of why one life continued when others ended. Its lasting force lies in that tension: the book affirms purpose and the possibility of healing, while allowing Jensen’s uncertainty to remain part of the testimony.