There Are No Answers Here, Only Questions by Charles Bruce McIntyre

There Are No Answers Here, Only Questions by Charles Bruce McIntyre

Release Date March 1, 2023

This is the true story of two life-altering events and the personal transformation that resulted from their unlikely collision. It’s the story of an owner preparing to sell his business and retire just as he is diagnosed with cancer. Faced with the choice of continuing with the sale and waiting to deal with cancer or putting the deal-making on hold while treating cancer, our business owner decides to take on both at the same time. Is this possible? Perhaps, but only if he allows others to step in while he steps back, and that’s never easy when you’re the boss.

Bruce calls St. Louis, Missouri, his hometown, but his father’s work required frequent transfers. Bruce, an only child, often moved with his parents in those early years.

He completed his education at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, and quickly found his way to Cincinnati, Ohio, and Proctor and Gamble. Like his father’s work, P&G required relocation. While living in Indianapolis, Indiana, he met and married his wife, Joyce. More moves followed: Kansas City, Kansas; Palatine, Illinois (a Chicago suburb); and Winston Salem, North Carolina.

Bruce then decided to leave his nomadic corporate life and start his own business. The couple chose Charlotte, North Carolina, as their new forever home and have been a part of the community since 1979. His business, McIntyreSales, was a foodservice sales and marketing agency that grew to represent manufacturers like Nestle, Smuckers, Otis Spunkmeyer, and more.

Joyce and Bruce have two children and four grandchildren. The couple, a gregarious golden retriever and a shy indoor cat live happily in a small retirement cottage. Bruce believes in storytelling and in “story listening,” and how it is in the listening that we start to understand. He began posting his stories on Choices Do Matter, a weekly blog that ran for four years. He has now written his first book: There Are No Answers Here – Only Questions.

In reading other people’s memoirs, we learn essential truths about the human condition, the ability to pivot, make a new future, and change people’s lives in ways that are good and bad, but overall, for the better. I hope my story will cause you to reflect on your life and pull away a few important ideas. And I dearly hope that, in the end, my story will inspire you to share your story. Because, after all, at the end of our lives, all that is left are our stories.