David McElroy

When I was a little boy, I was obsessed with an unusual question. I wanted to know why I was here — and why I was part of my family.

Most children ask a lot of “why” questions. I did, too. But the question that fascinated me most wasn’t why the sky was blue or why birds could fly. I wanted to know what I was supposed to be — and to answer that, I first had to answer a more fundamental question: Why was I here?

Somehow, when I was about 3 years old, I reached a conclusion. I don’t remember how I arrived there, but I became convinced that I was part of my family because I was there to help.

One day, my parents were unloading groceries from the car. While they were carrying bags into the house, I quietly went outside, got a huge box of Tide detergent out of the trunk and tried to carry it inside myself.

The box was much too heavy, so I found my little red wagon. By the time my mother discovered what I was doing and took a picture, I was struggling to load the box into the wagon so I could pull it to the house. I managed to drag it only a few feet before giving up in tears.

Looking back, I don’t think that’s just a cute story about an overly ambitious little boy.

Nobody had asked me to help. Nobody had assigned me a chore. My behavior flowed naturally from the answer I had reached to a single question. I believed I was there to help, so helping simply seemed like the obvious thing to do.

I’ve been thinking lately that this may be true of all of us. The quality of our lives depends less on the answers we’ve found than on which questions we’ve chosen to organize our lives around.

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I remember the moment when my first real love died.

The relationship had been on life support for about a year. I had wanted out, but I couldn’t bring myself to say so. And then one autumn afternoon, everything ended. Even though I had wanted it to end, I felt a pain unlike anything I had ever felt. This must be a mistake. But it was over.

Years later, another love ended. There had been other loves along the way — smaller loves, maybe —  but this one felt more powerful and more real than anything I’d ever felt. Things got complicated. I backed out of marrying her. She moved on. Things got messy. The pain was even more intense than the losses that had come before.

I thought there would never be anyone else. Unexpectedly, there was. It was someone I had casually known in the past. She sent me a message out of the blue. Before long, I had fallen head over heels for her. She said she loved me and wanted to marry me.

And then — suddenly — she didn’t want a future with me. There was no explanation. Not then. Not ever.

I was left feeling all alone. Missing someone I couldn’t have. More hurt than I had ever been in my life.

But despite the pain — and despite the pain that had come with the end of every love so far — all I wanted was to fall into the grips of love again.

Against all of my experience, I believed that love could finally come and stay. For me.

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