We can’t control timing of death, just what we do as we’re waiting

By David McElroy · September 7, 2014

Three stories caught my eye in rapid succession Saturday night. They were all three about deaths of people I didn’t know, but they left me with an uneasy feeling that I’m not really living my life. Maybe I’m just sitting around waiting to die.

The first was about a victim of the serial killer Jack the Ripper. Although she’s been dead for 126 years, I saw a picture of a man with the blue and brown shawl she was supposedly wearing when she died.

The next story was about a theatrical actress in Chicago who was killed Saturday when a falling tree struck her as she rode her bike. I don’t know anything about the woman, but her piercing eyes stared at me from the picture.

The last of the three stories was about a 34-year-old mother of two in Chicago who was killed this week when a stone gargoyle fell off an old church and hit her as she walked by. She was on her way to have lunch with her fiancé, who was the mother of her children.

None of these women realized she was about to die. One was unexpectedly murdered. The other two were victims of what could only be considered freak accidents. Seeing their stories in rapid succession like that made me think about the rest of us, including myself.

I have no idea when I’m going to die. I honestly believe I’ll be here for many years to come. Maybe it’s simple denial, but I’ve always thought I’d be one of those freaks who lives until 120 or something. But I have no way of knowing.

I could die in my sleep tonight. I could be struck by a car while I’m on a routine trip to get lunch next Tuesday. I could have a heart attack next week — or next month or next year — while I’m working. I have no way of knowing.

Death is waiting for me and will take me whether I’m ready or not. So why do I still act like a teen-ager who thinks he’s going to live forever? Why do I spend time on things that don’t matter to me — instead of making the time I have count?

What did I do Saturday? I watched a football game. (It was boring.) I slept late since I stayed up Friday night for absolutely no reason. I even napped a little Saturday afternoon. I spent a lot of time browsing Facebook, Reddit and other websites. I listened to some music. I sat in a restaurant for a few hours and browsed online. I chatted with a few people, but I neither said nor heard anything of consequence.

For the most part, I wasted a day. The only thing I can think of that made me happy and felt important was when I shot pictures of sunset. (It was a beautiful sunset. Here’s one of my pictures.)

When I die — whether it’s next week or 50 years from now — nothing I did today other than that one beautiful picture will matter to me. And that’s been the case for far too many days over the last five or six years.

The late Steve Jobs told a story in his 2005 Stanford University commencement speech that has stayed with me. (The speech is only about 15 minutes. I highly recommend the entire thing.) He said that every morning when he got up, he asked himself whether he was going to spend that day doing the things he would want to be doing if it were his last day on earth. He said if he had too many days in a row when he wasn’t doing what he would want to be doing if it were his last, he knew he needed to make changes.

I wouldn’t want what I did today to be my last day on earth. It’s been quite a long time since I’ve had a day that I felt that way about. Depending on which standard I used, I’d have to go back at least several years, maybe six or seven years.

The things that really matter to me are love and connection with another person and creating beauty in various forms. Other things matter, too, such as books and ideas and movies, but only when they’re supporting love and beauty in some way.

If I were to die right now and death were taking me away, I would ask myself why I wasted so much time reading other people’s arguments on Facebook. I’d wonder why I worried about other people being wrong. I would ask myself why I didn’t understand love and other people early enough to accept a woman who wanted to love me. I’d ask myself why I didn’t find someone who still did want to love me — someone who wanted to have children and create beauty and life together.

And I wouldn’t have good answers for myself.

I’m not ready to die. Not only do I simply fear my lack of adequate understanding of the entire process, but I haven’t done the things that will have made my life worthwhile. I’ve spent too many days and weeks and months and years stuck in idle.

I need to love and be loved. I need to understand a woman and have her understand me. I need to have children to love and nurture. I need to create beautiful things. I need to write things that might influence people and give them hope that their lives can be worthwhile. I need to find ways to change my corner of the world.

I need to live. Too much of what I’ve been doing is simply waiting to die.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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