The Surgeon General has declared the state of loneliness a national health issue. I read about this in my various news sources, and while I do believe he is absolutely correct, I haven’t felt very much aware of its applicability to me. After all, I have a loyal husband of sixty years, a caring son and his wife, three special grandsons, a sister and a niece, many wonderful friends, a loving black lab, an ongoing and fulfilling teaching and writing career.
Why, many would ask, should I be lonely?
But today, I am. Deep, existential, to-the-bone lonely. My husband has been away, visiting his many relatives in the south, and the house is full of emptiness. My son lives in Europe with his wife, the grandchildren are grown and scattered across the US. My friends are busy and/or far away.
I miss them all so very much.
The weather has been abysmal, the rain the other day so torrential that it seemed like an ark would be useful. I’ve had to wear the heavy down coat I bought on sale for next year every day, it’s been so cold. The yard is full of downed branches, scattered winter flotsam.
An austere landscape, between winter and spring. Mirroring my spirit.
And I’m feeling every bit of my almost 82 years, these days, now that I am home from my halcyon month at Virginia Center for the Creative Arts where age mattered little and was easy to forget as I danced and communed with so many new creative friends. My skin wears on it the tattoos from too much past sun exposure, my back hurts, and the eye infection I got last month has not fully healed. Sometimes, energy in abeyance, I have to push myself to walk the 4-5 miles I commit to do daily, the twice-a-week yoga classes.
But being lonely is not necessarily connected to age. I can remember depths of it at 23 as I sat with my toddler in our spartan apartment, trying to amuse him, day after day. And in my 40’s, after the kids left home for college, my husband and I working hard in our careers, seeing little of each other. Then especially after my younger son died and nothing could soothe me. Also, there have been the years of living in a community in which I have long felt the lack of kindred spirits.
Of course, I could choose not to write about this, knowing a now pervasive mood will pass, and I toy with the idea of not even finishing this post. “Too depressing,” I hear my mother say from her grave. But my heart says, write it, write the hard stuff, as I always tell my writing students. Write what scares you, what’s uncomfortable, expose what you want to hide.
Follow the thread you’ve begun to unravel, see where it takes you.
Pema Chodron (When Things Fall Apart), always my go-to when things get rough, has this to say on the subject: (I notice I have it underlined from a previous reading)
Usually we regard loneliness as an enemy. Heartache is not something we choose to invite in. It’s restless and pregnant and hot with the desire to escape and find something or someone to keep us company. When we can rest in the middle, we begin to have a non-threatening relationship with loneliness, a relaxing and cooling loneliness that completely turns our usual fearful patterns upside down.
She goes on:
There are six ways of describing this kind of cool loneliness. They are: less desire, contentment, avoiding unnecessary activity, complete discipline, not wandering in the world of desire, and not seeking security from one’s discursive thoughts.
It’s the first one that catches me now --“the willingness to be lonely without resolution when everything in us yearns for something to cheer us up and change our mood.”
Maybe that’s what I’m doing by writing about it--trying to change my mood? But no, I have always felt and in fact preached as a therapist, writer, and teacher, that writing from the heart helps us to plunge ever deeper into the difficult and embrace it completely, however contradictory and painful that might feel.
The loneliness I feel today is completely pure, uncontaminated by any other feeling, spare of any thought. It just is.
I am abruptly reminded of a poem I wrote so many years ago:
GRIEF
an absolute purity
within the borders
everything slow
like the shimmer of heat
off summer asphalt
everything dry
like grains of dirt
in a drought
a hummingbird whirring
at the honeysuckle
hollyhocks higher
than the barn roof
all equal now
a shared condition
doesn’t everyone die?
doesn’t everyone seek rapture?
and this is rapture, really
the untainted longing
the total un-ambivalence
the utter, immaculate emptiness.
Yes. That’s how I feel now. Stripped clean, empty.
As always, it’s a relief to name it, capture what has felt uncomfortable, painful, unwanted. And maybe, just maybe, what I’m feeling has a link to this time of year-- after all, Good Friday is this week, and though I no longer practice the Catholic faith I was born into, my girl-bones recall hours of sitting in church on that day, the somberness of the Stations of the Cross, the mournful chanting, the incense, and yes, the profound loneliness of Christ on that bloody cross.
And then arrives E Pasqua! It suddenly comes to me-- why the loneliness, why the grief. We were in Italy 37 years ago with our son at Easter, the last time we saw him alive.
How could I feel anything else?