David McElroy

making sense of a dysfunctional culture

Goodbye, Daddy

By ·

My father died a couple of hours ago.

I’ve wondered for years what I would feel when my father died. I still don’t know, because I can’t feel anything about it right now.

I woke up a few minutes ago to find two messages from a nurse at Regional Medical Center in Anniston, Ala. That’s the hospital to which he was taken a little more than a month ago.

When I called back, the nurse told me he died at about 4:30 this morning.

In the end, it was his lungs that failed him. The nurse couldn’t tell me much more about the medical situation at the end, but she did say he was comfortable and not in pain. There’s no way to put this on a medical chart, I suppose, but the truth is that he had lost the will to live.

Keep Reading

Share on Social Networks

Related Posts

Influence of Bradbury’s classic novel pushes me toward change

By ·

No book has ever had as much continuing influence on me as Ray Bradbury’s brilliant short novel, “Fahrenheit 451.”

You can’t understand me without knowing the intellectual and emotional roads I’ve traveled with this book since I was a teen-ager. And I’m not sure how you can consider yourself an educated person if you haven’t read this work of genius and thought deeply about it.

When I first read the book, I was in either the eighth or ninth grade. I was drawn by the plot, because I read a lot of science fiction — pretty much everything in our school library. It took me years to discover the deeper layers of complexity that Bradbury wove into the book. And it’s those deeper layers that keep changing me.

I’m going through a struggle right now that keeps bringing to my mind a key crisis for the protagonist. I can’t get it out of my head lately. I experienced exactly this same struggle when I made the huge decision to get out of politics — and I’m at the same sort of crisis point right now. I handled that crisis poorly. I must handle this one in a smarter way.

Keep Reading

Share on Social Networks

Related Posts

What if we planted for future instead of spending for today?

By ·

For an 8-year-old, it seemed like a lot of work, but I didn’t mind, because it seemed important.

My father and I left Meridian, Miss., early one morning on a mission to plant pecan trees. My father’s job kept transferring us to different places — Meridian was the fifth city where Southern Railway had sent him — but planting the trees held the promise of something more permanent.

I don’t remember how many trees we planted that day, but it seems as though there were around a dozen. We were planting them on land which we had inherited after my mother’s father had died. He had owned a farm in the country — where my mother had spent her summers when she was younger — and we now owned part of that property after it had been divided between his three children.

My father’s plan was for us to move there one day. We were planting trees for what would be our future home.

Keep Reading

Share on Social Networks

Related Posts