The more I see of death, the more determined I am to live life fully

By David McElroy · April 26, 2020

There’s nothing in the world which teaches me to appreciate life quite the way death does.

When I was young, death seemed so far off for me that it didn’t seem real. Although I have a vivid memory of seeing the body of a man who had just been killed when I was about 10, that didn’t seem like something that could happen to me. It was only years later that I really found meaning in that.

I was one of the lucky ones who never had anybody in his life die other than the people we expect. My mother’s father died when I was about 5. I remember going to the funeral home and touching his cold body, but death didn’t seem surprising with an older person. All the other deaths I saw in the coming years were older people who were related to me. Not a one seemed surprising or “too soon.”

Some people experience a rough early introduction to death — especially those who unexpectedly lose a parent, a sibling or a close friend — but for me, death was almost an abstract concept.

Until the last few years. Death seems very real to me now.

Once you get into the middle years of your life, you see more and more people dying — and everything looks different. I wrote about that sensation awhile back when Leonard Nimoy died, and it seems as though I’ve thought about it a lot since then.

The wife of a former political client was killed in a car accident. I knew her well and fought with her constantly. We were even business partners briefly. But it was a shock when she was killed.

I was once negotiating to buy a small community newspaper from a man when I got word that he was dead. I had put my latest counteroffer in a letter and sent it to him, so I was waiting for him to call me. Instead, he went outside of the building which was both his home and his office — and he shot himself.

I could go on. A former close political friend in Birmingham. The audio producer who recorded and produced the audio mix for my film. People I went to high school with, at least one by suicide. The list seems to go on and on.

And I’ve had several brushes with death for myself, even though it’s still hard for me to believe I could have died.

I had breast cancer (and surgery) a decade ago. I had serious blood clots in my lungs four or five years ago. I could have died. The doctors and nurses were annoyed with me that I kept joking about it.

“Do you understand that this could kill you?” one horrified nurse asked.

Death is very real to me now — and it makes me desperate to give meaning to the decades of good work and personal time that I have left. I want to get all the living and meaning and loving that I can out of every single day — and I often don‘t do that. Not yet.

One friend’s step-father died this week and she was devastated by that. Another friend’s father died. She flew hundreds of miles to be with him and it appeared he had recovered, but as soon as she got home, she got the call that he had died.

I can’t find meaning in life — not the kind that I want — in the pursuit of money and worldly success which seems to mean so much to so many people. I would still love to make a fortune as a byproduct of doing things that are important to me, but I can’t make those things my measuring stick.

I realize this puts me out of step with this culture.

More and more, I am realizing that my real struggle in life is against a culture that has values and aspirations which violate everything that I believe is important. I find myself looking to pieces of the past that this culture has rejected and discarded as meaningless — and I realize that meaning for me has a lot more to do with the things that mattered to people a few hundred years ago than it does with what my culture teaches.

Over the last 10 years or so, I have slowly put together bits and pieces of the message that I have for the world. It’s not primarily political. It’s not about success or being moral or anything of that nature.

My message is about thinking for yourself — questioning the culture which you have been taught to blindly accept and then seeing whether meaning is found instead in going back to values and community practices which our modern culture sees as worthless.

This is where meaning is found, at least by my reckoning. But thinking in these terms and living with these values is a lost art. That’s why I have to keep digging and why I have to keep finding meaning and why I have to keep preaching more of this meaning as I uncover it.

This life offers tremendous meaning and joy and happiness, but only if you’re willing to reject the values which are leading a once-great nation to moral and personal ruin.

So when I see death around me, I just see how far I still have to travel to accomplish this work. I love this life and I love the meaning I find in it. I want to still be finding new meaning — and joyfully sharing that meaning with others — on the day I die.

And if I live my life as I should, I will find myself surrounded by dear people who love me when that dark day finally comes.

Share on Social Networks

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?

For four years, Donald Trump’s supporters screamed that everything that went wrong was the fault of Joe Biden. They were sometimes right and they were sometimes delusional. (Anybody who knows me understands that I can’t stand Biden any more than I can stand Trump, just for different reasons.) But for two months, Trump has rampaged through U.S. political life — vandalizing pretty much everything in sight — and the vast majority of his supporters are silent at best. Many watch as he blows up the world economy and they make excuses for him. They’re in absolute denial, even about things that Trump is doing very intentionally. Anybody who understands economics and history knows that tariffs are a terrible idea from a pragmatic point of view. Anybody who values individual freedom knows that tariffs are massive taxes on individuals — and they’re a tool of political control over the ability of people to trade freely. Trump is the antithesis of everything which political conservatives stood for just a few years ago. It’s far past time for people who claim to be conservatives to reclaim the principles and values which they used to claim — and stop this mad man before he can accelerate the day when we experience economic and social collapse. Open your eyes to reality and reject this lying narcissist.

Related Posts