David McElroy

I hadn’t seen my neighbor Harvey for weeks, but that wasn’t unusual, especially for winter.

When the weather got warm each year, Harvey was outside all the time. He was cutting grass, trimming hedges, talking to everybody. But in the winter, I didn’t see him much, especially since he left for work at midnight and worked all night, sleeping during the day.

I found out a few minutes ago that Harvey died about a week ago.

The news of his death hit me hard. It was only a couple of months ago that my neighbor Cora died. I know other neighbors, too, but Cora — directly across the street — and Harvey — two doors down — are the ones I’ve known best. Their deaths make the neighborhood feel very different.

At least Cora had lived a long life. She was a retired school teacher in her 70s. Until the last year of her life, she was active. She dated — and constantly told me about the men who were after her — and she traveled far and wide, visiting friends and her eight children.

But Harvey was younger than I am. That makes his death more uncomfortable for me. His loss is a reminder that death can come at any time. Even for me.

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I knew Laura had a 6-year-old daughter, but I didn’t know the details. At dinner tonight, she told me her story.

“I never had any emotional connection with her father,” she said. “He’s a decent man and he tries to be in her life, but there was never any feeling between us. I was always just desperate for attention from a man — so I kept getting it however I could.”

Laura is 28 now. She’s a strikingly attractive blue-eyed blonde with a successful career in management. But she admitted to me tonight that she has always tried to find something that was missing from her life.

“When I was little, my daddy told me that I was a mistake,” she said. “I was an accident. They didn’t want me. My mom admitted it was true, but it mostly affected me with my dad, especially since he had another ‘accident’ a year after me with another woman. I craved his attention and couldn’t get enough to make me feel like I was loved. So when teen-age boys started wanting me, that was my way to feel loved. I kept looking for more and more — but I never found what I was looking for.”

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my own pursuit of “more.” Laura’s ways of pursuing something more was different than my ways have been, but our motivations haven’t been so different — and this is more common in our society than any of us like to believe.

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What if you knew a secret that the rest of the world needed to know? What if you could change lives with this knowledge? Would you share it with others?

Of course you would. If you saw a tornado coming, any normal person would warn others. If you knew of any danger which others couldn’t yet see, you would almost certainly do everything in your power to raise an alarm. You would tell others what was coming — and you’d warn them to escape the danger.

But what if others didn’t want to hear your warning? What if you knew that others wouldn’t listen? What if you realized they wouldn’t take you seriously — that they might even call you crazy?

If you had that knowledge in your mind — but you found that people around you wouldn’t listen — would you doubt yourself? Would you wonder whether you’re crazy? Would you throw your hands up in frustration and maintain a sullen silence — even though the coming storm seemed painfully obvious to you?

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