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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After I wrote last night about being happy, I thought of an old song that mirrored what I was feeling. After listening to the entire album, I found it remarkable how well the emotions of that music match my own heart at this point in my life. Bob Bennett’s “Matters of the Heart” came out while I was in college. Even after all these years, it holds up really well, and you can listen to the entire album on YouTube. The specific song which matched my feelings last night was “Madness Dancing,” but I still find every song on the album to be strong with the exception of the eighth and ninth. (The song about his parents, called “1951,” is especially poignant.) In fact, the opening and closing songs paint a picture of my heart at its best now in these lines: “A light shining in this heart of darkness, A new beginning and a miracle, Day by day the integration of the concrete and the spiritual.” It’s old music that you’ve probably never heard, but it means a lot to me.

Narcissists tend to turn their children into narcissists — and since a narcissist doesn’t realize he or she is a narcissist, there’s no bad intent. How does this happen? I watched a YouTube video over the weekend from an Australian psychologist who does a nice job of summarizing how it works. None of this is new to me, but I thought it was useful for those who haven’t spent years digging through books and articles about it. The same psychologist has an excellent summary of something which confuses a lot of people about narcissism. You’ve all seen examples of the loud, boisterous and overbearing narcissist, but what about the ones who are more introverted and vulnerable? This type is called a covert narcissist (or a vulnerable narcissist), and this is what my father was. In the first video, I strongly see myself in the ways my father treated me and in the second video, I see what my father was almost successful in making me become.

It’s National Dog Day in the U.S. and Lucy is here to remind you to go express love and appreciation to your favorite canine. Not only does your doggie friend give you love and affection, but he or she also protects your home from intruders — such as birds, squirrels, mail carriers and other undesirables who deserve to be barked at vigorously. Where would we be without that? And if you think this service is actually unnecessary, ask yourself how long it’s been since your home was the victim of a vicious squirrel attack. See? The doggie defense works. Keep barking at ’em, Lucy.

I’ve spent a tremendous amount of time over the last couple of years thinking and writing about love and connection. I’ve come to understand that this lack of love and connection is at the root of a lot of human tragedy and unhappiness, including addictions and depression. As I talked with others and researched the psychology behind the issues, I ran into the surprising fact that researchers are increasingly using psychedelic drugs to allow volunteers to have experiences which are giving them a sense of connection which they’ve lost — something that allows them to feel connected to love and God in a way they didn’t understand before — which is having dramatic effects in combating things such as depression and addictions. In this 15-minute TED talk — without an audience in the age of COVID-19 — Johns Hopkins researcher Mary Cosimano shares her experiences with guided psilocybin sessions being used to treat addiction, depression and end-of-life issues. One of her key observations is the importance of love and connection. She said that it seems love is literally part of the answer. In her role as director of guide/facilitator services for the program, Cosimano is responsible for training and supervising session facilitators.

It’s something I wrote four and a half years ago — in the desperation of loneliness — and it’s become my most popular article. It’s not my best writing. It’s raw and unpolished. But it seems as though a lot of people can identify with it. It’s called Missing someone creates intense physical sensations in my heart. Just to give you an idea how many people still read it, I had 11,586 people visit the page last month — from 2,907 cities and towns around the world. London sent the most readers for it, followed by New York, Westminster, Los Angeles, Chicago, Kuala Lumpur, Melbourne, Sydney, Toronto and almost 3,000 more. I’ve noticed something interesting. It always gets the most hits from an area of the world in the late hours, right after midnight, and that breaks my heart — because I understand why. All these people are so lonely and are missing someone so much that they turn to a search engine looking for answers, so they stumble upon this piece. I wrote this late at night on the day after Christmas because my heart was breaking. I needed to express how much I missed someone, and a lot of people seem to identify with it. If you’re one of those people, I have no way of knowing who you are, but I empathize with you. I know why you hurt. I wish I could do more to help. I hurt with you, because after all this time, I still feel the same way.

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