We all live with a death sentence, but we act as if we’ll live forever

By David McElroy · April 10, 2023

Nothing is more certain than death — so why does the approach of death always surprise me?

People die of cancer every day. The disease is so common that most of us don’t even think much about it. I certainly don’t. Even though I had breast cancer more than 10 years ago, I still don’t think about getting cancer and dying from it. And I don’t think about it happening to my friends.

I have a friend who had a routine cancer screening — a lung scan — about a year ago. He was a smoker, so it was supposed to give an early warning if there was anything wrong.

The scan showed what could be a couple of small tumors on his lung. After a biopsy confirmed it was cancer, those two small nodules were removed through surgery. Then he went through months of chemotherapy. And now he’s had another scan to see whether it worked.

He found out this evening that the cancer has metastasized — to his lymph nodes and his liver. And now that I fear death might be coming for him, I don’t know what to feel. In the end, nobody cheats death.

I’ve understood since I was a child that everybody will eventually die. I was a very small boy — maybe 4 or 5 years old — when my mother’s father died. At the funeral home where his body lay cold and still, my mother brought me close to his casket and talked to me about death.

I felt his cold skin and saw how lifeless the body felt. Mother explained that this was natural and that it eventually happened to everyone. I wasn’t afraid and I wasn’t traumatized. But I felt in her grief that it was painful to lose someone you love in this way.

As I grew older, death became a routine and clinical thing. I got accustomed to the idea that old people died. I learned about accidents killing people early. I saw death on television and read about it in newspapers and books. I grew numb to death in all of its forms, especially since I never unexpectedly lost anyone who was close to me.

I’ve always known — in the theoretical sense — that anybody could die at a moment’s notice. You can get hit by a bus. You can be a victim of a crime. Or you can develop some disease in your body that our medicine can’t yet cure.

But even though I went through my brush with death — when I had surgery for breast cancer — it’s remained something that happens to old people and to people I don’t know.

I act as though I’ll never die. And I act as though my friends won’t die.

I hide death from myself, as though looking at it would keep me from living. I don’t consciously acknowledge that the people I care about are all going to die. I act as though we are all going to be here forever. And I’m really good at hiding the truth about that from myself.

But I can’t hide from death tonight. Even though I don’t know how long my friend has left, I feel as though a curtain has been pulled back — at least briefly — to force me to see a truth that I avoid. And I don’t like the way it makes me feel.

I don’t believe death is the end for the human soul. I think I’d have serious trouble living — and feeling as though life had meaning — if death were the end of the soul’s existence. But I do believe we carry on in another world, one which I don’t pretend to fully understand.

But despite that, this is the world I know. This is the place I know how to exist. Despite how much this world hurts and how difficult it sometimes seems, I don’t want to die. And I don’t want to lose those who I care about.

I guess that’s why I don’t know how to feel tonight. I can make plans to deal with problems that arise in life. I know how to do that.

But I don’t know how to accept that death is going to take my friends away from me. And that forces me to think about — at least briefly — the sobering reality that death is one day coming for me, too.

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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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