Years ago when I was a reporter for a daily paper I covered a visit by Mother Teresa to the small northern Alberta town of Lac la Biche. I am not particularly religious but she said something to the thousands who flocked to see her that hot spring day that has always stayed with me. She commented that while the land we lived in was vast, and vastly wealthy, we were poor. Poor in the sense that we suffered from the affliction of loneliness that causes so many of us to languish and waste away, hidden in nursing homes, trapped in our houses and apartments, shackled by sorrow, shame and self-defeat. Her words resonated with me because loneliness, then and now, has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. Yet I am one of the “lucky” lonely.
I am not part of the legions roaming the streets, invisible in their poverty, homelessness and despair, nor am I shut away waiting to die alone in a place where strangers are paid to take care of me. I am, however, a woman who is no longer young and rapidly becoming invisible in ways that underscore the fate of most women in a culture that reveres only fertile and beautiful females. Every year I age, I matter less. The same is true for men but it’s true for women cruelly soon. The loneliness of no longer mattering is palpable when I walk through my mother’s nursing home where women are predominant. It is a presence as thick and suffocating as a too-tight collar. I make it a point to talk to residents other than my mother there; the men, many of them too proud to make the first move, and the women, whose eyes focus and shine when they are spoken to individually. I often think of my favourite Katharine Mansfield short story, Miss Brill, when I wonder about the possibility of ending up a discarded old woman. Today, I haven’t been able to get the lyrics of The Beatles’ Eleanor Rigby out of my head.
Being alone is not the same as being lonely
Loneliness is an epidemic that infiltrates all age groups and income levels with devastating physical and psychological effects. Seniors are the most obvious victims, but many children, teenagers and adults also suffer its torments. But loneliness is not the same as being alone. I enjoy being alone, and have spent literally weeks by myself. I’ve gone on long trips to Third World countries where no one spoke English, not even the few tourists I encountered. When I first moved to Vancouver, I was so devastated by personal and job losses that I spent months in a grief-stricken fog with only my cat for company. Yet the loneliest time of my life was when I was in a successful career and a long-distance relationship; the second-loneliest when I was a young teenager with no friends because I had just moved to a new city for the third time in as many years.
I remember going to see The Who by myself in Vancouver and being taunted by a group of teens who seemed personally affronted that I was alone; indeed, as far as I could tell, I was the only unaccompanied person in the large arena. When I became a journalist and critic, I was already used to travelling and eating alone, never mind attending films, plays and concerts by myself. As a woman, I was also used to being alternately harassed or ignored for the social crime of being a “lone” female. I was given bad tables in restaurants, ignored by flight attendants in business class, accused of being a prostitute and asked to leave when I entered the bars of hotels where I stayed on business, treated nastily by other women and men in authority –– it was all part of traversing the everyday world.
I have been told that this ease of being alone, if not lonely, is not “normal.” I once worked with a middle-aged woman who was terrified of spending a weekend alone because in 62 years, she had never been completely alone. That is unfathomable to me. I still spend a lot of time by myself because my husband is either at work, or shut away in his office when he is home.
Alone on a mountaintop
This culture of loneliness is unheard of in some cultures. During time spent in Indonesia and other Asian countries in the late 80s and early 90s, I was surprised that almost no one went anywhere or did anything alone. It used to annoy me when strangers would ask, “Where are you going?,”or would sit right next to me at the top of a mountain when we were the only people there. Then I learned that not only were they just being friendly, practicing their English and occasionally trying to sell me something, they could not comprehend that I wanted to be alone. So strong was their sense of family and community that the thought of a woman travelling with no man and no children was utterly alien to them.
We don’t necessarily share that community connection in western culture where the emphasis is on individualism and materialism. The more we have, or don’t have, the less connected we are to our neighbours and community. This is the spiritual poverty that leads to the terrible loneliness Mother Teresa spoke of, a loneliness borne of fear that ultimately robs us of lives well lived.