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David McElroy

An Alien Sent to Observe the Human Race

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A month after my father’s death, it doesn’t feel real that he’s gone

By David McElroy · May 17, 2018

At dinner Thursday night, I saw a man walking into the restaurant who looked a lot like my father. I had the same reaction I’ve had for the last eight years. Every time I saw someone who looked like him, I thought he had found me and was coming to confront me.

It took me a couple of moments to remember that it couldn’t be my father this time — because my father was dead and cremated.

I suspect it’s going to take a long time for me to accept that he’s dead and that he can’t show up at some unexpected moment to scold me or tell me I’ve done something wrong.

Over the last year or so, my father showed up at my house multiple times — despite me making it very clear I wouldn’t talk with him except with a counselor. I had a serious concern that he would show up at my office and make a scene.

He had no understanding of boundaries — and even less respect for other people’s clearly stated boundaries. He ignored other people’s wishes if they conflicted with his own. He genuinely didn’t seem to understand that he didn’t have a right to exert control over people — and he especially felt he had the right to try to control his children.

When I first moved away from living with him, it took me years to relax in my own home. I can remember sitting on my own sofa with my feet propped up on my own coffee table — something which would have brought an angry condemnation from him — and feeling the irrational fear that he was going to see me through a window and scream at me. This sort of fear was common for years.

One of my sisters recently suggested that all three of his children suffer from a form of post-traumatic stress disorder. I had never considered that, but the more I think about it, the more it seems probable. I have emotional triggers that other people can’t understand. I can get lost in my fears when one of those buttons is pushed — and then I feel a corresponding anger rising before I realize what’s going on.

A month hasn’t been enough for me to completely realize that I’m free of his trying to force himself on me, but how long is it going to take me to feel free of that old fear?

His death has also left me thinking even more about my own mortality. I expect to live for many more decades, but the death of parents seems to have this effect on many people.

I know we all have to die — and I accept that — but I’m nowhere close to being ready for death, because I haven’t done so much of what I had intended to do years ago. I haven’t achieved things that matter to me and I don’t have the family that I want so much.

There’s so much that lies ahead of me.

I have another reason that death is on my mind tonight. Or maybe it’s more appropriate to say that I’m thinking about how lucky I am to be alive — and about how I need to take advantage of this life.

I read a couple of days ago about the death of a woman who worked in the real estate industry here in Birmingham. I had met her but I didn’t know her well enough to even wonder what happened to her. But as I was walking in to the restaurant for dinner tonight, someone called to tell me what he had heard.

She was about 35 years old and she had to have her gall bladder taken out — exactly the same surgery I had in early January. The surgery seemed to go fine and she went home. Then she developed a fever and she felt awful.

The woman went back to the hospital, where it was determined she was suffering from sepsis. The infection had spread rapidly enough that her organs were shutting down. Doctors were able to get everything working again except her liver — and that killed her.

It’s a sobering story to me because it makes it clear to me how close I came to dying in January.

Hours after the surgery was over, the surgeon told me that my gall bladder turned out to be so diseased that it would have broken open and caused sepsis if I hadn’t had the surgery quickly. As a result, my surgery took three hours instead of the planned 30 minutes. He said I was very lucky that it hadn’t already ruptured, because that would have caused sepsis. He told me I very likely would have died.

It’s scary to me to think I came that close to possible death.

I feel saddened that my father’s death meant as little as it did. There were a few people who were certainly concerned about him, mostly those around whom he had been living for the past few years — those who knew nothing of his lies and dysfunctional past until he went into the hospital and the truth slowly started coming out.

Since his death, I’ve had his old MacBook Air and I’ve kept checking his various email accounts periodically. I thought I would eventually run across some friend who had been concerned and had written to check on him. Despite the fact that he’s been offline for two months — with no warning — not one single person has written to say, “Are you OK?”

My father’s death seems to have mattered little — but only because of the way he had lived his life.

I don’t intend to be like him. I want my death to matter to some people who love me — and I want to earn their concern and care by the way I live my life with them.

I can see my father’s life in a lot of different ways. I know I don’t yet have enough perspective about it, but just one month down the road, his death mostly seems like a cautionary tale — reminding me vividly to live my life in a way that I won’t end up alone and unloved.

His death teaches me a terrifying lesson. I don’t want to die alone.

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It was five years ago tonight when Lucy first rode It was five years ago tonight when Lucy first rode in the car with me. She was on her way to her “forever home” with me, but she didn’t know that, so she was terrified that night. It was a much happier and braver girl who took a ride in the car tonight so we could go through a drive-through window and order a hamburger for her — to celebrate five years with me. She had a great time. If she could remember five years ago tonight, she would be proud of how far she’s come, too. #dog #dogs #dogstagram #dogsofinstagram #cute #cutedog #pets #petstagram #petsofinstagram #instadog #ilovedogs #birmingham #alabama
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Briefly

It was five years ago tonight when Lucy first rode in the car with me. She was on her way to her “forever home” with me that night, but she didn’t know it, so she was terrified. It was a much happier and braver girl who took a ride in the car tonight so we could go through a drive-through window and order a hamburger for her — to celebrate five years with me. She had a great time. If she could remember five years ago tonight, she would be proud of how far she’s come, too. If you’d like to know more about Lucy’s journey from scared dog to brave queen of the household, here’s something I wrote after her first year with me. I’m hoping this girl will have many more happy years with me.

I’ve never been attracted to skinny women. There’s nothing wrong with someone who’s naturally thin, but it’s never been my preference. What has shocked me, though, is the judgment I’ve heard from women all through my life — about themselves and others — about who’s “fat.” I concluded long ago that most women in our culture have been brainwashed to believe that skinny is attractive — and that anything other than skinny is ugly. I first assumed that I was the oddball — for preferring women with bigger and heavier bodies — but I’m coming to the conclusion that most men naturally feel this way to one extent or another. I just ran across new research by a couple of Northwestern University psychology professors that shows that women seriously overestimate how much a straight man will be attracted to a skinny woman. In a perfect world, we would all be at a healthy weight, but when it comes to attractiveness, too heavy is more attractive than skinny. At least to me — and to a lot of men, too.

Years ago, I heard a question that seemed very insightful at the time. You’ve probably heard it, too. What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? The question is intended to help you uncover things you really want to do, but which you’re afraid to try — for fear of failure. In an interview today, I heard the great marketing guru Seth Godin give a different point of view. He said the better question is to ask what you would do even if you knew it would fail. That struck me as far more insightful than the original version. We ought to be doing what we know is right, not what will maximize our success or praise from others. There are some battles that are worth fighting even if you believe you’re doomed to failure. Those battles are often for love or important ideas or our children. Some things are simply worth fighting for — and the truth is that you might win anyway. Do the right thing. Take the chance.

The more I understand about myself, about human nature and about the nature of reality, the more I realize I’m a radical by the standards of both Modernism and Postmodernism. Seeing the things which I’m stumbling toward makes me an enemy of many of the core ideas upon which contemporary culture is built. It exposes the culture as a monstrous lie — like a dangerous infection that’s slowly destroying what human were created to be. My “inner observer” has always known that truth was found in the ideas of the Enlightenment, but I’m slowly finding words to explain what has merely been instinct until now. The Enlightenment was humanity’s great leap forward, but shallow and arrogant thinkers for the next two centuries threw away the fruits of that achievement. We can’t go forward as a species until we go back to correct this intellectual and spiritual error — and part of that is acknowledging that our collective attempts to do away with our Creator will always fail.

I’ve come to believe that some of us — including me — aren’t very good at knowing how to be happy. I don’t mean that in the sense that happy talk and positive thinking should be able to make us happy regardless of the circumstances. I mean that some of us had so much experience with being unhappy when we were young that we were trained to be unhappy — and that being happy is an unconsciously uncomfortable thing. When I look at times in my past when I should have been happy, it rarely lasted. I believe now that I found reasons to be unhappy — and caused real problems for myself — because being comfortable and happy felt so foreign to my programming. If I’m right, this means that some of us have to do more than just change our circumstances. It means we have to learn how to accept the happiness that we unconsciously fear we don’t deserve.

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