My fears are less about death than about my own ‘unlived’ life

By David McElroy · July 6, 2020

I’m afraid of dying.

It’s not that I fear the process of dying or what happens after death. It’s not that I fear there’s nothing that lies beyond this world after my body is still and cold.

My fears aren’t about the next world. My fears are about this life — a life that I haven’t yet lived. A life that I’ve half-lived, like a man sleepwalking through an experience that should be filled with love and joy and the ecstasy of mortal existence.

I’m afraid of dying before I ever really live.

I hate what my life has become. Every choice I’ve made seemed to make sense in the moment, but the choices have brought me to a place of unhappiness. Depression. Emptiness. Regret. Hurt.

I hate the experience of living the life I have created, but I don’t want to die. I love this world too much. I love what I know my life could be. And I hunger for the life that would allow me to die in peace one day — knowing I had loved and created joy for those I love.

I seem to live like a man who doesn’t want to go on living. As I’ve become less happy and more despondent about elements of my life — the life I’ve created through my choices — it’s harder to push myself to take care of my health. It’s harder to want to rise to the things I’m capable of. It’s harder to even care enough to get through each day.

But don’t mistake that for suicidal ideation. I’m desperate to live. I’m desperate for life to mean what I’ve always known it could mean. I’m desperate to be the man who God created me to be and to bring love and life to others.

But I don’t quite know how.

For weeks now, I’ve needed to go see a doctor about something which is easily treated. It’s something that won’t affect me in the least if I take care of it. But it’s something that could kill me if I ignore it.

On the way home from work, a long-time friend asked me why I was so unhappy that I would have ignored the problem so long. I scarcely knew where to start. I didn’t want to blame anybody else, because I am responsible for what I have and don’t have.

I asked him to remember what we wanted and expected when we were much younger, not just materially, but in terms of the people around us. Then I described what I expected of myself back then — what I expected my life to become — and I contrasted it with where my choices have brought me.

The gap between my realistic expectations in the past and what I’ve let myself become is painful for me. I’ve allowed myself to slip into a life which seems like some strange version of purgatory on Earth. It’s not quite living, but it’s not quite death.

Back in 1935, Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger created a paradox of a cat in a box. He was trying to describe his view of quantum physics during conversations with fellow physicist Albert Einstein. He asked Einstein to imagine a box with a cat inside and then he imagined a scenario in which a random atomic action could cause the cat to be poisoned or not.

To oversimplify Schrödinger’s argument, he said that the cat was both alive and dead. The cat existed in a state of what he called “superposition.” Once you opened the box, the quantum state would “collapse” and the cat would be either dead or alive. But until a human looked, the cat was both dead and alive.

I am Schrödinger’s cat.

I’m living in this box, but it’s unclear whether I will actually live my life or die without ever having lived.

To Schrödinger and others who argued the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, it’s the action of the observer which causes the wave function to collapse into a normal space function — for one of the two quantum states to become objective truth.

I am Schrödinger’s cat.

I’m both dead and alive. I’m a failure who threw away too many opportunities or I’m the talented genius who achieves the greatness that others expected.

I can’t be both. It’s one or the other. Somebody has to open the box. The observer has to create the circumstances by which the quantum superposition collapses into one state or the other.

But I desperately want to live.

I want to be what I was made to be. I want to love and be loved. I want to create things which touch other lives and which change lives. I want to find ways to show others the beauty and possibility of what this world could be. I want to be satisfied that I found my best possible way of bringing love and light and joy to the people around me.

I don’t want to die. I also don’t want this miserable half-life and half-death. I desperately want to fully live, but I haven’t figured out how to find my way home to love and joy and peace.

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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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