Time is the most unrelenting enemy that any of us will face

By David McElroy · August 24, 2020

Cora often called to chat, so it wasn’t any big deal when I heard her voice on the phone in March. I was driving to work and we chatted for about five minutes. She reminded me that she wanted to take me out to dinner sometime.

As she was about to hang up, Cora said, “I love you. You’re such a good neighbor!” And I told her that I loved her, too.

Cora has been my neighbor for a bit more than five years. She’s a feisty and strong-willed black lady in her 70s who was a high school English teacher before she retired.

She’s always pestered me to find out about any women in my life. When she’s seen a woman at my house, she always wanted to know whether this is “the one,” and she was always disappointed when I told her otherwise. As she was about to leave my porch one time in May, she looked at me very seriously.

“I’m going to find a good-looking white girl for you,” she said. “I know a lot of rich and powerful white people, you know.”

She’s always seemed determined to find “a white girl” for me. But I found out tonight that this is very unlikely to ever happen. In fact, it’s unlikely I‘ll ever talk to Cora again.

About six or eight months ago, Cora had some sort of episode — we never knew what happened — that caused her to go walking through the neighborhood and then stop at a house of someone she didn’t know.

She had walked into the house of these strangers and had been very confused about where she was and how she had gotten there. She was in a hospital for a week or so after that. By the time she returned home, she was mostly back to normal.

In the coming weeks, she seemed to be doing better. She was tired and she wasn’t as physically active, but her mind was sharp.

Roughly two months ago, she felt good enough to take another trip — she traveled constantly to see family and friends — so she went to Texas for a visit. By the time she got back, something was wrong. Doctors suspect she had a couple of “mini-strokes” while on her trip. While she was in the hospital, she had a full-blown stroke.

I didn’t know about any of that until one of her daughters called to fill me in on it. She told me Cora was about to come back home, but because of the virus scare right now, we decided it would be best if I didn’t come see her.

Once she was better, things would return to normal. Or so we thought.

One of her sons brought me up to date about an hour ago. He was at her house cutting the grass and he stopped to give me the news when I got home.

Cora isn’t herself anymore and doctors doubt she ever will be. She doesn’t talk coherently now. She doesn’t seem to recognize her children. She requires full-time care and she has a feeding tube.

Three days ago — while I was at work — an ambulance took Cora away, but I didn’t know it. For now, she’s living about four hours from here — with one of her sons — in Mobile, Ala. Her son was talking to me tonight about the possibility of selling her house. Although they hope something might change, nobody expects her to ever live alone again.

They don’t believe there’s any chance Cora will ever return to the little house across the street.

As her son told me all this, I felt bad for Cora and I felt bad for what her eight children are going through. But I also felt a little stab in my heart for what this felt like for me.

I kept thinking about the fact that Cora and I had talked for close to two years about going out together sometime. We had settled on going to Cracker Barrel on a Sunday afternoon. She wanted it to be a Sunday because she would still be dressed up after church.

Several times we made plans about when we were going to go, but something always got in the way. She was more active in trying to pin a date down than I was. I wasn’t avoiding it, but I just never got around to firming something up.

The timing didn’t seem to matter. We could do it any time.

I’ll probably never get to go out with Cora now, and I bitterly regret that I wasn’t more diligent in making sure it happened. It was something I wanted to do, but I could always do it next week. Or the week after. Or next month. Or after this virus scare dies down.

And now I’ve waited too late.

Time is going to run out for every single one of us. It never feels that way. In fact, we live as though we we’ll be here for eternity.

We act as though we have forever to do the things we want to do. We live as though we have forever to love in the ways we say we want to. We seem to believe there’s always tomorrow to do the things that matter.

And as I look at Cora’s dark and empty house tonight, I’m faced with the reality that we don’t always have tomorrow.

We need to love the people we want to love. Right now. Not next month. Not next year. We need to love. We need to do the things that matter to us.

That’s not just advice for other people. That’s not just for older people. That’s for you and me, too.

Because before we know it, time is going to run out for us, too.

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Six years ago this evening, a scared young dog came to live with me. She was so terrified on the ride to my house that she pooped in the back seat of the car. She had originally lived her life on a chain as a puppy. Then she lived among far too many other animals in a cramped apartment, where she was pushed around by bigger dogs. I was told she would always be a “special needs dog” and would probably never be much more than the scared girl she was then. But with a lot of love and patience, a very different dog emerged in the coming months. Now that she’s been with me for six years, it’s hard to imagine her any way other than she is today — as the World’s Happiest Dog®. One day, she’s going to tell her own story on her own podcast. You’ll subscribe when she gets started, won’t you? This loving girl deserves it.

It was obvious to me in the late 1990s that western society is heading toward social and economic collapse. When I told other people back then, most thought I was crazy, because they saw their society as stable and booming. But more and more people have slowly been coming to the same conclusion. And now, even the wealthy and powerful seem concerned. A new report from the World Economic Forum says the erosion of “social cohesion” is what we should fear right now. (Full report here.) Although I disagree with a lot of political spin that these elites put on the dangers ahead, I feel certain that we are headed toward social collapse. And most people will not prepare for it. The book that started me down the road of thinking about this came out in 1993. I thought its reasoning was impeccable, but that the time frame would be longer than the book expected. I still find that book a useful foundation for thinking about the issue — “The Great Reckoning,” by James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg — even though its predictions are out of date. Dark days are coming. Smart people are going to have a plan to get out of the way of what’s coming. Will you?

Since I posted my audio discussion a couple of nights ago about some recent realizations I’ve had about myself, several people have asked for more about what I quoted from Jordan Peterson. The Canadian psychologist is controversial to some — and I don’t always agree with him — but I’ve found his lectures about art and its relation to psychological archetypes very useful. You can find him here talking about art being more about process than just result, which contains the material I quoted. Here’s another video from a lecture in which he discusses how artists mediate for the rest of society between the known and the unknown. And here’s another portion of a lecture at an art exhibition in which he talks about the necessity of artists for society. And if you missed my audio from two nights ago, here’s a link to my discussion about some things I’ve learned about myself and some things I need to change about myself as a result.

I just realized it was four years ago today when I came uncomfortably close to dying. I don’t remember how blunt I was publicly about this at the time, but the surgeon who operated on me made it clear afterward that I had been much worse than he had thought. My gallbladder was inflamed and I had been in tremendous pain, but what the doctors didn’t know until they started is that the organ was close to rupturing. Surgery that was supposed to take half an hour took two or three hours, because my gallbladder was so diseased — the surgeon’s word — was falling apart as he tried to remove it. I had gone to the emergency room at St. Vincent’s Hospital (the same one where I was born) and was kept for emergency surgery the next morning. I should have been home that night, but I had to stay in the hospital three days instead. The weird thing is that I never really believed I could have died. Maybe it was just denial, but I didn’t feel as though it was my time. I thought I still had a lot of life left to live. Four years later, I’m grateful to be alive, but I feel as though my life is still on pause. It’s been a blur. I still feel as though I’m waiting for “the rest of my life” to start.

Is “The Nightmare Before Christmas” really a Christmas movie or a Halloween movie? It’s both, making it a delightful mashup of themes and images from two very different holidays. Although Danny Elfman’s score was nominated for several different awards, Elfman wasn’t a typical composer for film scores. Up until he started working on films with Tim Burton, Elfman had been a rock-and-roll artist best known as the leader of the new wave band Oingo Boingo in the 1980s. Just this week, I heard an interview on the podcast Song Exploder on which Elfman explains how he came to write the music for the movie, including why he approached the music for the film very differently than he had approached writing rock music. I enjoyed the 20-minute interview and if you happen to love the film, this Christmas would be the perfect time to learn more about how the score came to be. Tap or click below to listen. Listen here.

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