David McElroy

Today is my father’s birthday. If he hadn’t died two years ago, he would have turned 90 today.

There was nothing really wrong with him physically when he died. After he went into the hospital where he spent his final weeks, a nurse told me doctors didn’t really know what to do with him, because he had no real condition they could treat.

Six months before then, he had been healthy and active. He had still been dating off and on. He was still meeting women online through profiles on a couple of dating sites. The photo above is a selfie he took for one of those women. (He never was great with technology and obviously didn’t know to look at the mirror and not the screen.)

So what happened? How did a man with no real health issues go from actively trying to find companionship all the way to giving up on life — enough that he stopped eating for months and had become an emaciated shell of himself by the time friends discovered him?

He died of a broken heart. He’s the strongest evidence I know that unhappiness can kill a man — by making him give up on life.

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Five years after it came out, the Sufjan Stevens album, “Carrie & Lowell,” is still the most beautifully melancholy album I’ve ever heard. I’m biased since it deals with Stevens coming to terms with his feelings about his mother after her death. I don’t know the full story, but she had some sort of mental issues and she left him at some point in childhood. His story isn’t just like mine by any means, but there are strong echoes of similar feelings in his experience, so I can really identify with it. I hadn’t listened to the album lately, but I just played it all the way through and it had the same effect on me that it always does. It’s beautiful and it’s sweet, but it’s also heartbreaking — and it leaves me with images and powerful feelings about my own late mother. If you have bittersweet feelings about a dysfunctional parent you’ve lost, you might identify with it, too.