Cycles of our lives sometimes bring us back to places where we’ve been

By David McElroy · March 19, 2018

It was just before noon when I got a voicemail from a man I didn’t know.

“I’ve been renting an apartment for the last three and a half years to your father and he is very ill,” the man said after giving me his name. “He’s being transported currently to Regional Medical Center in Anniston and the EMTs that are here believe that he’s passing away.”

I’ve been estranged from my father for most of the last decade, but this is a call nobody wants to receive. He has no family left and he’s all alone in what might be his final hours or days. I felt very conflicted about what to do. As I thought about it, my mind returned to an incident from my childhood.

I was about 5 years old when a drunk man ran a stop sign and hit our car. I was the only one injured. We were traveling from Birmingham back to Atlanta, where we lived at the time. We were about an hour east of Birmingham on U.S. 78 in Anniston. I had been next to my father in the front seat. When we were hit, the force of the impact knocked me into the dashboard.

I don’t remember the impact, but I do remember the pain and the blood. I remember crying. My father wrapped the upper part of my head in a blanket or sheet of some sort. The injury was on my forehead and there was a lot of blood. Or it seemed like a lot to a scared little boy.

My mother stayed with my sisters at the wrecked car. My father picked me up and found a passerby to take us to a nearby hospital. It was Anniston Memorial Hospital — which is now called Regional Medical Center.

When I got the call today, I realized he was dying in the same hospital — at the same emergency room — where he had carried me decades ago.

I didn’t want to go to that hospital today. I can’t tell you what I felt when I got the message Monday from his landlord. I can’t put it into words. I felt a range of emotions and I felt very disoriented. But I suddenly decided that I had to go.

The hour drive to Anniston was a blur. I felt a wide range of emotions, some that I can’t even explain. Sorrow. Anger. Regret. Bitterness. Love. Rage. Confusion.

It was just a couple of weeks ago when I found out my mother died almost two years ago. The last remnant of my dysfunctional childhood was now slipping away as my father was dying.

I spent a couple of hours at the hospital. For much of the time, I doubt he knew I was there. I don’t think he knew anybody was in the room. But there were times — especially toward the end of my stay — when his glassy eyes locked on me in full, sharp focus and I knew he recognized me.

At one point, a nurse needed help restraining him while she drew blood from one of his arms and he was unconsciously trying to fight her. As the only other person in the room, I held his free hand down by holding it. There was something very strange about holding the hand of someone who once cared for me as a baby in the tenderest of ways.

It’s hard to reconcile my memories of what he was in the best times with the man he was in the times that forced me to cut off contact with him. It would be easier to deal with if he had always been a monster and if he had been a terrible abuser. It’s the unpredictability of what he was that made his so difficult to deal with.

But the truth about my father is far more complicated than what I can tell you here. And it’s something I will spend a lot of time coming to terms with.

As I write this Monday evening, he is still alive, but I have no idea what tomorrow will bring. My heart hurts from the turmoil of the mixed emotions of the day. And this story isn’t over yet — for either one of us.

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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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