Dead man’s watch always there to remind me of my own mortality

By David McElroy · February 3, 2015

When I was about 10 years old, I saw a dead man right after his car had been hit by a train. It happened near where we lived at the time in Anniston, Ala. I’ve never gotten that image out of my head.

We lived away from the city and suburbs, out in a little community called Choccolocco. At the turnoff from the main road to get to our house, there was a railroad crossing. We came upon it one afternoon after an accident had happened. We had never before stopped at an accident, as far as I remember, but since my father worked for the safety department of Southern Railway, he had a reason to check it out. And I think he also wanted my sisters and me to be very aware of the danger of being unsafe around trains.

I still remember the unnatural stillness of the accident scene. Even though there were people standing around watching, everyone seemed dead silent. The man’s body was placed onto a stretcher to be taken away.

As the ambulance attendants walked the body toward a waiting vehicle, they had to pass within inches of where I stood. I could have reached out and touched the body. Right as they passed, the body shifted slightly and the dead man’s arm dangled off the stretcher — right in front of me. On the dead, hairy arm was a watch.

In the surreal vision of my mind’s eye, the arm dangled in front of me for what seemed like an eternity. I saw the second hand still moving on that watch and it’s an image I’ve never gotten out of my head.

The ticking second hand seemed important even to my child-mind, even if I didn’t understand quite why at the time. Over the years, I keep reinterpreting the image of that ticking watch. There’s some sense it represents to me that time ticks away for all of us and that it will keep ticking after we’re dead.

It somehow seems to be a reminder that my time is limited — that I’ll one day be dead when my allotted years and hours and minutes have run out.

I have death on my mind Tuesday night because I got a bad diagnosis for a sick cat at the vet late Tuesday afternoon. My oldest cat, William, has suddenly lost weight and now he’s lost interest in eating. It turns out he has a tumor in his abdomen about the size of a lemon, maybe two inches in diameter by the vet’s estimate.

If the steroid treatments and some kind of new food can help William start eating again, he might have months of good life ahead. If we can’t get him to eat again, I’ll lose him in days. Maybe a week or two at most.

Losing somebody or something I love always makes me think of death and the passing of time, and that’s where my mind has been tonight. Once again, I’m seeing a “watch still ticking on a dead man’s wrist,” to use an oddly coincidental phrase from Steve Taylor’s 1989 song about Jim Morrison.

The tick-tock of that watch is still strong for me. It makes me feel as though time is both a resource and my enemy — and I feel frantic with the feeling that I’m not doing enough to experience love and life while that time ticks away.

I want to experience more of what I want and need before I’m hit by a train or I’m struck down by a disease or my time simply runs out.

As I sit here raging against a coming death for an animal I love, I’m angry and I’m hurt and I’m needy, about things that have nothing to do with William. Some of it is with other people — for times when I feel I haven’t been treated fairly or lovingly — but I’m mostly angry with myself for decisions I’ve made which have cost me time and cost me love.

Without knowing what I’m going to do about it, I sit here in the silence watching the surreal mental image of time on this eternal watch ticking away. And I cry for more time for that dead man — and more time for me.

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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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