Once you’ve found the right love, build your whole world around her

By David McElroy · June 27, 2020

I used to be arrogant enough to believe that my death one day would be front page news all over the world.

I imagined all the great things I would have done by the time I died — the political power I had won, the businesses I had built and the influence I had had — and I thought that many millions would mourn me. I even thought I’d make the history books.

I have a very different view today of my obituary. I haven’t yet had the great success of my fantasies — not yet — but a summary of my life would sound interesting and successful. I had a wonderful run in newspapers, starting from reporter and quickly rising to publisher. I got into politics by accident and had a couple of decades of financial success getting candidates elected to powerful positions. I’ve owned small companies. I’ve made money and lost it. The story would be colorful.

But the one thing I now realize is most important to this earthly life would be missing. If I died today — which I certainly don’t expect anytime soon — a brutally honest obituary might say, “A lot of people liked him. A number of people will miss him. But he died without anybody who loved him. He died alone, with no family.”

And that feels like failure.

I understand something about life now, but I might have learned it too late. The things which I used to value so much — which I used to hope would be in my front-page obituaries — are worthless. The only thing that really matters is who loves you enough to choose you — which person wants to build a life with you.

I’m thinking about this tonight because I was scanning some obituaries earlier and wondering who these people were. The thing that stuck out was how many of the families talked about the person being surrounded by loved ones when he died.

And that made me feel empty.

For some reason, that empty feeling made me remember a conversation with a woman not too many years ago. We had both seen “Sleepless in Seattle” before, but we were watching it together that night. And I remember getting really emotional hearing the words to a song used in the film.

Fame if you win it,
Comes and goes in a minute.
Where’s the real stuff in life to cling to?
Love is the answer,
Someone to love is the answer.
Once you’ve found her, build your world around her.
— Betty Comden and Adolph Green, “Make Someone Happy”

As the movie was finishing, I quoted that last line to her — “Once you’ve found her, build your world around her” — and then I said, “That’s the way I feel about you.”

“I knew you would be thinking that,” she responded. “You’re getting me all weepy now. I still can’t believe we found one another.”

I used to want to build my life around achievements. I have nothing against achievements, but I will never again live for them. I’ll never again make them the most important things in my life. I will never again forget what’s most important — and what will be even more important when I finally die.

I don’t care whether my obituary one day says anything about what I’ve done with my life. By then, I certainly won’t care. I don’t see why anybody else would.

But I hope it can say that someone who loved me was there until I died — or that I had been with her until she died. Either way. And I hope it can say that I had family who cared enough to be there for me — people who loved me and who I loved, too.

Finding the right person is less about figuring out something complicated and more about simply recognizing what’s obvious and right in front of you. Then — if you’re lucky enough for her to recognize you as her love — it’s time to build a life around her. It’s time to build a family and a loving life that will give life its ultimate meaning.

I’m eager to play the triumphant final scene in my sappy romance. I’m ready to recognize her — to have her recognize me as well — and I’m ready to build my life around her.

If I have that, none of the rest will matter when I die.

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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.

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