Were you challenged by one of your friends, or by an influencer you follow, or by your family, to come up with a word for yourself for 2024?  It happened to me three times, and one friend positively insisted we do this together.  I began to wrack my few remaining grey cells for a word that might represent me or that might satisfy “the cause”.  (If you’re guessing my heart wasn’t 100% in this endeavour, you’d be right.)  All the usual, aspirational, resolution-like suspects popped into my head — Change, Courage, Hope, Joy, Resilience — all pretty much immediately rejected.  Not, as it happens, as easy an exercise as it initially seemed.  Each of those words felt wrong deep down.  I could sense something hovering in my subconscious but it has taken me a good fortnight to name it:  Loneliness!

Loneliness LONELINESS
[Mary Oliver]

I too have known loneliness.
I too have known what it is to feel
misunderstood,
rejected, and suddenly
not at all beautiful.
Oh, mother earth,
your comfort is great, your arms never
Withhold.
It has saved my life to know this.
Your rivers flowing, your roses opening in the
morning.
O, motions of tenderness!”*

Loneliness is my word for 2024 and it is my hope that I can learn to recognise it and then respond to it and engage with love and kindness.

Reading the newspapers and my social media feeds, looking into the eyes of my friends and acquaintances and listening to the meaning behind the comments they make, I realise that a crisis of loneliness -  not limited to any specific province, town or postal code - is upon us. It is very easy to blame COVID-19, but the causes and contributing factors are myriad and complex.  Sadly, and all too often, loneliness = differentness.  One group most affected is our seniors, an unfathomable number of whom are experiencing chronic loneliness which is adversely affecting their health (physical and mental).  Loneliness isn’t, you see, about being alone, more a feeling that you’re not whole, that something or someone is missing.  Alone is a situation, loneliness is a feeling.  That feeling doesn’t necessarily change when other people are nearby — many folks feel wretchedly lonely in a crowd of people. Only engagement can alleviate loneliness.

Grief

Indiana Jones: Brutal couple of years, huh, Charlie? First Dad, then Marcus.
Dean Stanforth: We seem to have reached the age where life stops giving us things and starts taking them away.**

Within my generation in our families, and my circle of friends, there is an unavoidable connection to and empathy with the dean’s comment.  There is nothing comparable to grief in experiencing wave after relentless wave of loneliness and sadly, I’ve a wealth of relatives and friends who have lost their beloved partners in the past five years.

I feel as if the world, and everyone in it, is galloping away from me and I feel powerless to either stop or join it. I know all about the five stages but trust me, there’s no denial, bargaining, depression or acceptance, my grief is all anger at being alone and feeling so damned lonely. Spoken by my dear friend “C” who, last summer, marked the five year anniversary of the death of her partner of 43 years, “S”.  The two met in 1975 through sorority pledging at UofT, immediately fell madly and deeply in love, and were inseparable until the day sweet S lost her battle with cancer.  The floor fell out of C’s world and she’s yet to regain her footing.  She speaks of having spent the ensuing lustrum stewing in her grief and loneliness.  She said, Isolated by my grief, I feel a desperate loneliness.  That confession fair broke my heart.

Another close friend, “G”, explained his grief like this:  When “H” died, my life’s rhythm abruptly ended, and I’ve spent my time ever since in a lonely, graceless place, full of insecurity, sadness and fear.  For the past year, I’ve not seen G in person, only whilst video chatting, but I’m aware of an unmistakeable aura of aloneness about him, a sadness that appears bone-deep.

True that grief affects each soul differently, but a strong commonality is the sense of being adrift — experiencing feelings of abandonment, anxiety, and aimlessness. Feeling lonely even when in the company of friends. Each, in his or her own way, is experiencing profound loneliness.

Differentness

Societal aversion and hostility towards differentness, and the resulting stereotyping and prejudice is the most prevalent (and growing) cause of loneliness.  Also, the most hurtful. Differentness can include race, ethnicity (biracialism in particular), gender, sexual orientation, skin colour, disabilities (both physical and intellectual), biculturalism, creed, clothing, language, body size/shape — each one an opportunity to be judged, harassed and alienated. 

Coping with, and overcoming the social stigma and discrimination inherent with one’s differentness is a lonely, challenging and entirely unfair ordeal. The costs associated with being a little different might be social, economic, physical or mental, but regardless, it is enormous and it is taxing. For example:

• If a business requires that all its employees be available to work all seven days, people whose faith requires that they do not work on Fridays, Saturdays or Sundays may be excluded from employment, even when they're the most qualified and experienced candidate.
• An employer with premises that is only accessible by stairs, or which has only standard toilet cubicles, excludes those with physical disabilities.
• An employer that relies solely (or heavily) on printed matter (instruction manuals, office memos, form completion, etc.) excludes two groups - those with impaired sight and those with some types of learning disabilities.

Each one of those exclusions is a form of isolation and isolation leads directly to loneliness.

Elder Loneliness

Elder loneliness has grown to catastrophic proportions and this is directly attributable to COVID-19.  Many volunteer programs were cancelled during the pandemic; some have never been resumed, others only on a limited basis, leaving these seniors without a regular visitor or contact. Regardless of whether these folks are living in their own homes or a retirement residence or a long-term care facility, their isolation is now extreme.  They are experiencing the saddest possible loneliness.  These seniors talk about feeling crushed by loneliness, and waiting (wanting, even) to die.  

No one, ever, should feel such hopeless despondency.  EVER!

People all around us are lonely.  No one is immune to that struggle. That is why my word for 2024 is loneliness and it is my hope that I can learn to recognise it and then respond to it and engage with love and kindness.  Now, having done my research, and unlike my attitude at the outset, my heart is now 100% engaged in this New Year’s word-to-live-by strategy. I hope you will please join me.  Can you think of someone who might be lonely?  We never truly know anyone else’s life — from our perspective it may look happy, complete and easy, yet on the inside, that person is feeling anxious, afraid, and lonely.  Responding and engaging won’t be easy.  It’s a big ask to take on the responsibility for someone else’s loneliness.  My best advice, Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a harder battle.***

I too have known loneliness.
I too have known what it is to feel
misunderstood,
rejected, and suddenly
not at all beautiful.*

’Til next time, y’all…

*Mary Oliver, Loneliness, page 25 from her collection Devotions.
**David Koepp, George Lucas, Jeff Nathanson (screenwriters), “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull”.
***Credited, variously, to Plato and Ruskin, both philosophers, born more than two thousand years apart, one in ancient Greece and the other in Victorian England. At issue is not the provenance but the pertinence of the advice!