BEING LONELY

Old age is winnowing away my cadre of friends. This phenomenon is just very mundane. Everyone dies eventually, but when friends die it feels weaponized, if to selectively deprive me of their presence in my life. And as I proceed toward my own inevitable demise these droppings-off feel increasingly less than mere abandonment but rather more like an insensitive shirking-off, a leave-taking without a proper propitiative goodbye, a farewell that would otherwise carry the promise of return. I cannot shout “don’t leave me” to a dead friend, but I want to. I never want them to take that ultimate, absolutely final journey, the one that ends the friendship.

These losses begin to add up. And they can metamorphose into a slowly advancing state of loneliness.

The human costs of loneliness are many: early mortality and a wide array of serious physical and emotional problems, including depression, anxiety, and heart disease, substance abuse, and even domestic abuse. Loneliness peaked during the pandemic. Apparently fifty percent of Americans then reported being lonely. Trends over the past several decades show less community participation and more people living alone. Religious service attendance has fallen dramatically, and marriage rates are down. All these factors cause increased social isolation.

Relationships and community involvements fulfill the deep, intrinsic need almost everyone feels for social connection. With age the paring down of relationships and the decrease in community involvement only potentiates social isolation. Not only is the death of friends a key factor, but so are the difficulties connecting with friends and community activities because of mobility issues. Even hearing loss, as a ninety-year-old neighbor told me recently: attending meetings and plays when unable to hear fifty percent of the dialogue reduces the desire to make the effort to attend. Hearing aids may help but these cannot replace lost neural audio capacity.

It is well known that the death of a spouse in old age is often a terminating factor for the surviving spouse. Widowers, the husband of the deceased spouse, often do not to survive the following year. I believe the cumulative effect of increasing social isolation, in all its forms, accelerates the development of loneliness in the older population. A spouse’s death can be the other’s death knell. Men tend not to develop the intimate social relations that women are more likely to acquire and sustain, making men more vulnerable to spousal loss.

While young adults suffering from social isolation may suffer the gradual onset of all the ills previously listed, the time trajectory, and the opportunity for rectification, is longer than for the older adult population, who might already be medically or mentally afflicted by the time the more radical social isolation of being old.

Even in situations of a large communal event, a wedding, a graduation party, a memorial service, a political event, older participants are often ignored, not given the kind of tacit recognition afforded others of the contingent. An aged person may try to engage a a younger person in conversation only to be sloughed off.

While gravity may be the enemy of age, being old itself is a potentially potent enemy. Loneliness may be a significant, and even increasing, problem for young adults. It can be particularly acute with grievous effects as one reaches their last decades. Perhaps the increase of dementia in the aged is a kind of terrible refuge. With the erasure of memory and the only anchor being the immediate present, one is spared the memory of being alone and lonely. But at what a price!

Best to feast on one’s intact and bountiful memory, get on the phone, join a book club, take a walk with whatever it takes to get there, forgive whoever is on your list of those who wronged you, and befriend someone very young, a person who will at least wonder why you are still on the planet.

Just don’t get lonely.