David McElroy

making sense of a dysfunctional culture

death

Few things scare most humans like the prospect of living, dying alone

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I never met Jimmy Grammer. As far as I know, we were never even in the same place at the same time. But I find myself wondering tonight who this man was.

This was his driver’s license photo, but I can’t say he looked very happy when it was taken. Maybe he was having a bad day. Maybe the camera operator pushed the button before he was ready. We’ll never now.

Jimmy Grammer was found dead last Tuesday at the age of 70 — in the cheap motel in a seedy part of town where he had lived since 2011. As far as anyone knows, he had no family.

Motel employees hadn’t seen him in a few days, according to the newspaper account, so someone went to check on him and found him dead in his bed.

Every time I see a story such as this one, I feel a shiver of dread. I look into the eyes of the dead man or woman and I wonder how this person ended up so alone in life. But it’s not just empathy for strangers, of course. Their deaths scare me.

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Brush with high-speed blowout leaves me thinking about death

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The technician looked at me as though he had seen a ghost.

“You almost got yourself killed,” he said quietly.

I was almost back to my suburb Friday evening when I had a blowout on I-20 east of Birmingham. I was going faster than the law prefers when I heard a sudden noise that I find hard to describe. That noise immediately turned into a loud rumble. The car was hard to control. I can’t remember exactly what I did, but once I regained full control, I was on the exit to my neighborhood.

My regular car repair place was already closed, so I pulled into the Walmart auto center. An hour later, I was facing the technician who had pulled the tire off the car. He wanted to show me the hole in my tire — and he wanted to know how I had avoided losing control and killing myself.

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I feel anger and hurt, but I mostly wonder how I came from this man

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After three days of rather detached and clinical responses to my father’s death, I’ve finally had a tremendous flood of emotions about him tonight.

I’m angry. I’m hurt. I’m filled with rage. I don’t have adequate words to describe how shaken I am.

I picked up his last worldly possessions late Friday afternoon. He had little enough remaining that it all fit into his car, a white 2001 Toyota Avalon. I drove home with something like a sense of dread. The people with whom he had been living told me they had gone through his things — looking for a will or something that might give instructions about his wishes — and discovered journal entries and letters which I would find interesting. I haven’t looked for those yet.

But when I got home, I started his old MacBook Air. What I’ve found so far makes me sick.

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