THE TRIQUETRA OF LIFE: Wisdom, Wealth, and Wellness

Table for Two

On Loneliness, Solitude, and the Company We Keep

Della was in her eighties, couldn’t drive, and rode the city bus every week to a writing group she had facilitated for ten years. Now I sit beside her learning the ropes, smelling the faint scent of peppermint oil she dabbed on her wrists. It is fun but hard work.

She had written and produced about 20 plays, and served on the Patio Playhouse board. I let her critique a play I’d written. She sat with me, her red ink pen scraping across the paper as she revised a bit of dialogue while I held my tongue. She even got me to submit my play Honor Killing to the local theater, but it was rejected as too controversial.

Gradually she stopped coming to the group. Her aching shoulders were partly to blame, locked in a permanent, painful shrug. It wasn’t long before she ended up in a sterile-smelling nursing home, unable to raise her arms to eat. Some of our group would visit her, sitting around her bedside. I once helped her peel a banana, its sweetness filling the room as I tore away its jacket. It was heartbreaking to watch her brilliant mind fade away.

But there were at least 200 patients in that place, wrapped in the heavy, medicinal odor of bleach and floor wax. I would often take a moment to visit the lunch room and chat with another friend who was in his eighties also. The air tasted faintly of bland gravy and overcooked green beans. He’d chat about helping to design gilded, heavy silk vestments for the Catholic hierarchy, running his fingers across the Formica table as if feeling their texture. But usually people ate alone, clattering their metal utensils against cheap ceramic plates. They both died within a year of entering that morbid place with its bland diet.

One day, I noticed the residents in wheelchairs were constantly staring toward the heavy glass entrance, listening for the swish of the sliding doors. I asked the front desk why.

“It’s like this almost every day…. They hope someone will come visit them.”

I began to see that—not isolation—but loneliness is the insidious, incurable disease, something that St. Teresa of Calcutta once said, as she helped feed a poor derelict.

In fact, now that I’m in my mid-eighties, the cold thought of my own passing … weighs on me. I am single, never married, no offspring, and live alone. During the Covid Pandemic, our large group dissolved from fear of infection. Zoom took over our lives, reducing warm voices to flat, pixelated squares glowing in the dark. Some moved out of state, others suddenly died in their seventies. A close long-term friend moved away, then on developing severe ADHD, ghosted me. It was as if she’d died but hadn’t. Another friend got dementia so severe I had to spell certain drug instructions over the phone for her, not once, not twice but multiple times. Then she died. A dozen of my closest friends, cultivated over the last 50 years, died, and that leaves a painful hole in my life. The young seem to want no part of old age, so cultivating new friends is not easy for me.

Fortunately for me, I figured out early on, during my long pilgrimage, that the rigid monastic life wasn’t for me, so I built me a quiet peripheral zone right here in San Marcos, CA. I even have a bustling senior center within a half-mile walk where rooms are filled with the sharp slap of cards from female bridge players, another with the rich smell of turpentine from women painting still lifes, and a group of gals playing Mahjong in the library, tiles clicking like dry bones in a mortuary. Sadly, I’ve read that widowers 75 and older have ‘the highest rate of alcoholism in the U.S.’

(See: https://willingway.com/seniors-loneliness-addiction/)

As if anything is excusable to ward off the painful crucifixion of loneliness.

And you guessed it, not much going on with us older men who are fewer in number there—not that I mind. A Bingo win doesn’t cut it for me, and I prefer writing my vivid blogs and vivacious epics in the privacy of my own home, under the sacred hum of my desk lamp.

Frankly, I’m fortunate in that respect. I know how to inhabit my stories so they come alive. My characters keep me company. But walking into a noisy lunch room over there does nothing for me. In fact, caught in a wave of clattering silverware and overlapping chatter that sounds like buzzing hornets through my quirky hearing aids, I feel more alone and isolated in that noisy crowd. I feel community when I’m intimately alone.

But whence cometh loneliness?

They say it’s a disease not readily found in traditional tribes that have no TV or cell phone. Makes me wonder if screen-face substitutes on Zoom gigs have become as false friends for us all. The psychologists lean on ‘socializing’ as a cure, trying to herd senior adults like me into noisy, stuffy social containers, when true communion and peace often come from carving out a life that honors one’s actual temperament and disabilities. In my case, being hard of hearing turns nearly every conversation I have into an exhausting guessing game. And I’m now unable to facilitate writing groups like I used to.

My silent solitude is by design, entirely different from isolation by neglect.

I appreciate your sitting with me, letting me explain why I’ve been away for so long. That look in your eye is asking if I’m going to be all right living alone without companionship. Yes, because I have an invisible companion. I’ll introduce you to Her when you’re ready.

From the memoir-in-progress, nearing publication:
Path Perilous: My Search for God and the Miraculous
—a spiritual epic for truth-seekers, contemplative mystics, and all who long for God.

Visit www.RMDellOrfanoAuthor.com and pass it forward.