LONELINESS

                                             

“This is for all the lonely people. Thinking that life has passed them by. Don’t give up until you drink from the silver cup and ride that highway in the sky.” Yes, not my words but the words of the songwriters Daniel and Catherine Peek. It says so well what I want to talk about. There is a segment of our population that has always touched my heart and that is the lonely people. Maybe it’s because for a short while, after my wife died, I seemed to be one of them but then in retrospect I’m not sure if I was lonely, as much as I was feeling sorry for myself because in reality my support group was active. The people I really feel sorry for are those who seem to have none.

My father-in-law, in his later years, lived in the Old Soldiers Home in South Minneapolis. At least once a week my wife, or I, would make the trip out there to see him or bring him to our place for a visit. I remember one such trip at Christmas time and as I went into get him I walked by an old man sitting in wheelchair by the entrance. He was crying and I stopped for a moment to ask him if I should go get someone to help him. He said, “There is no one to help me.” I said I was sure I could find someone, that this was a nice place with lots of attendants. He said what he meant was, “It was Christmas and all day families’ had come to take loved ones home for the Holidays,” but he had no one to do that. I was at a loss for words and to this day, I wished I had done, what I didn’t do, and that was not to walk away from him. To make matters worse I remember picking up my father-in-law and going out another door because I was ashamed to go by this man again. When I think about it today, I had options there but they all involved a little work-- I didn’t want to do. I could have talked about him with the staff. Maybe they knew of someone who would have helped him. To be sure I could have asked him to come to Christmas dinner at our house. I could have at the very least taken him to the commissary and bought him a cup of coffee and had a conversation with him. But I didn’t and I regret it. You see I had never really been lonely and didn’t know what he was going through but with his tears he had reached out to me and yet I never took the time to listen.

Last year my brother passed away. Ken was a hopeless alcoholic who lived alone. Hopeless in the fact that he rebuffed any and all attempts to help him. God knows we as his siblings and family tried. I would call him maybe once a week but there would be times when there would be no answer and I knew he was too drunk to talk. Then one day his daughter called from Mesa and said she couldn’t get a hold of him. I told her to call one of his neighbors, that I knew she talked with and have them check on him. She did and Ken was dead. Today the thing that bothers me the most was he died alone, in squalor. Helping Ken was not much of an option because he didn’t want help but no one should have to die alone and that is what bothers me the most.

I’m not a lonely man, even though I live alone. My kids call often and I have Pat and although we both keep our separate households we care a lot for each other. We talk every day and maybe sometimes it’s nothing more then, “what did you had for supper” but it’s a sense of sharing and caring that feels so darn good.