David McElroy

making sense of a dysfunctional culture

Widow: ‘Things that mattered yesterday do not matter today’

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At 1:24 p.m. Friday, Terra Pinkard received a text from her husband, Josh.

“I love you,” the text said. “I’ve been shot at work.”

Terra called Josh’s phone. There was no answer. She tried FaceTime. Nothing. Then she called the Aurora, Ill., plant where her husband was the manager. The woman who answered the phone told her she was barricaded in her office and police were everywhere.

Terra said in a Sunday morning Facebook post that her heart dropped at that point. She grabbed her children and drove to the Henry Pratt Co. plant, where police couldn’t yet tell her anything. She went to the two closest hospitals and could find out nothing.

She waited for hours. She said her pastor, chaplains, neighbors and Josh’s co-workers sat with her and held her hand. She eventually got the news she had feared. Josh was one of five people killed in the shooting.

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Why do humans run away from things we really need the most?

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My life isn’t what I want it to be. If I’m honest with myself, it never has been.

I have a narrative that I like to sell myself. It’s based on truth, but I can’t tell whether it’s the complete truth. I doubt any of our personal narratives are the complete truth. But here’s my persistent narrative.

I can see a time in my past when I was on the right track. It was a time when I was doing things I was proud of and I thought I had a great future. Then I got off track. I rebelled against something. Maybe it was against The Man. Maybe it was against my father. Maybe it was against culture telling me what I had to be.

I jumped off the treadmill leading to worldly success and I’ve been running away ever since. My narrative tells me that I’m just around the corner from finally succeeding — my own way — without doing what The Man said I had to do.

You have a narrative, too. It’s probably very different from mine. But we almost certainly share something important. We both know something which we desperately need — something we’ve always needed — and we keep finding all sorts of reasons not to reach out and accept whatever it is.

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When you’re finally facing death, how many people will love you?

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Warren Buffett is one of the world’s richest men. He’s widely considered to be among the world’s most successful investors.

But what does Buffett consider to be success? Is it your net worth? Is it some measure of cash liquidity? Is success found in being one of the top 1 percent of earners? Or something else?

In her biography of Buffett, writer Alice Schroeder tells the story about a time when Buffett was asked that question. He had given a presentation at the University of Georgia and was answering student questions at the end.

“What’s your definition of success?” one of the students asked.

Buffett’s answer said nothing about money or land or stocks or comparisons to other people. He was concerned only about who loved him. He told the student that when you reached the point at which you faced death, your only measure of success should be whether the “people you want to have love you actually do love you.”

He elaborated.

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