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“So who’s gonna watch you die?”

Fifteen years after I first heard that line in the chorus of a Death Cab for Cutie song, it remains one of the most devastating questions I’ve heard. It was a gut punch to me because I didn’t know the answer for myself — and I still don’t.

In the song, “What Sarah Said,” the singer recalls being in a hospital watching and waiting as a loved one dies. (You can listen to the song below.) He recounts all the sights and sounds and smells of the intensive care unit. Then he says what’s really on his mind:

But I’m thinking of what Sarah said:
“Love is watching someone die…”

I’ve been thinking about life and death even more than usual lately. I keep thinking that the real answer to the question — of who’s going to be there — is about mutual trust. So who do you trust — who also wants to trust you?

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I vividly remember the facts of that day — in sharp, clear detail — but I don’t remember feeling anything. My lack of any emotion might be the most noteworthy thing about the day my mother tried to kill my father.

The day was just like any other Sunday afternoon for my family. We had gone to church and had dinner at home in our dining room. We lived on Holly Hill Drive in Atlanta. I was 5. My sisters were 3 and 1.

Sunday dinner was finished. My father went to lie down on the living room couch to read the Sunday paper. Mother was in the kitchen cleaning up the dishes. I was standing in the open entryway at the edge of the living room, just at the place where the room met the hall. The dining room was between the kitchen and the living room. The hall next to which I was standing was another way to the kitchen.

Without warning, my mother came running through the dining room from the kitchen. She had a knife raised in her hand as she ran. I cried out and my father looked up in time to reach out and grab her arm as she tried to stab him.

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For a political partisan, there are only two positions. His own position — parroting the party line of his group — is absolutely correct. Everybody else is lumped together. Anybody who dares to point out something which is outside of his group’s talking points must be shouted down.

Public discourse is a disgrace in this country, mostly because few people care about anything other than their side winning. Almost nobody is interested in another point of view, much less learning something which hadn’t occurred to him before — and which falls outside the bounds of his group’s talking points.

The faux controversy over an editorial delivered by close to 200 local TV stations owned by Sinclair Broadcast Group is a case in point. For instance, New York magazine had this headline: “News Anchors Reciting Sinclair Propaganda Is Even More Terrifying in Unison.” All the other news networks have had similar stories, mostly with headlines darkly reporting that TV anchors at those stations were “forced” to “recite Sinclair propaganda.”

What actually happened?

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