David McElroy

Today is my father’s birthday. If he hadn’t died two years ago, he would have turned 90 today.

There was nothing really wrong with him physically when he died. After he went into the hospital where he spent his final weeks, a nurse told me doctors didn’t really know what to do with him, because he had no real condition they could treat.

Six months before then, he had been healthy and active. He had still been dating off and on. He was still meeting women online through profiles on a couple of dating sites. The photo above is a selfie he took for one of those women. (He never was great with technology and obviously didn’t know to look at the mirror and not the screen.)

So what happened? How did a man with no real health issues go from actively trying to find companionship all the way to giving up on life — enough that he stopped eating for months and had become an emaciated shell of himself by the time friends discovered him?

He died of a broken heart. He’s the strongest evidence I know that unhappiness can kill a man — by making him give up on life.

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Five years after it came out, the Sufjan Stevens album, “Carrie & Lowell,” is still the most beautifully melancholy album I’ve ever heard. I’m biased since it deals with Stevens coming to terms with his feelings about his mother after her death. I don’t know the full story, but she had some sort of mental issues and she left him at some point in childhood. His story isn’t just like mine by any means, but there are strong echoes of similar feelings in his experience, so I can really identify with it. I hadn’t listened to the album lately, but I just played it all the way through and it had the same effect on me that it always does. It’s beautiful and it’s sweet, but it’s also heartbreaking — and it leaves me with images and powerful feelings about my own late mother. If you have bittersweet feelings about a dysfunctional parent you’ve lost, you might identify with it, too.

The conversation was making me uncomfortable. I knew what it felt like to be in her position — and I hurt for her, because I knew what she must be going through.

“I’ll give you the moon,” she had said earnestly. “Just give me another chance. Give me time to improve myself. I can be whatever you want.”

This was Sunday evening at dinner. She’s a young woman who I dated for a few months several years ago. Things had ended badly when I broke up with her. She had gotten angry and said some ugly things — and then she called a couple of days later to apologize.

We hadn’t spoken since then, but she recently reached out to ask if we could talk. Just talk, she had said. It didn’t have to be anything more.

Sunday was the third time I’d seen her. I’m not entirely sure why I agreed to it. Part of it was empathy, but part of it was self-interest born of fear. I’ve felt so alone lately that part of me wondered whether I had made a mistake to reject her.

Maybe it would be better to have a partner who really wanted me, even if I didn’t want her. Maybe that would be better than being alone. I agreed to see her.

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