People are reluctant to admit to loneliness, it seems to denote failure. But Loneliness is one of the most universal human experiences. A great amount of research has been done concerning loneliness. These studies have found such interesting facts as: there is greater loneliness among single elderly people living with relatives than among those who live alone; there is no less loneliness in small friendly towns than in the big cities; loneliness is not identical with solitude; many married people feel lonely, as do many college students and high school seniors; etc.
According to Chinese tradition, there are two kinds of people who experience the most tormenting loneliness: the parent who has lost a child and the old widower. The Buddha said, “There is no greater sadness than separation.”
The parents who have lost a child are afflicted with one of the greatest and deepest losses possible to humans. The wound is usually incurable, refusing to be healed. The parents grow old in the missing. Many a father has thought he buried his hopes and dreams when he lost his child. A father said: “Being his father was the thing I was best at, and I find it paralyzingly hard to go on without it.” What he remembered most about the grieving with his wife was the tears. Even much later after the death of their child, every morning he and his wife would awaken and look at each other, and cry for their dead child.
I remember a father trying to tell me about the death of his only child, a college-age daughter. His face took on the kind of desperate and frozen quality men’s faces take on when they don’t want to cry. It’s a tactile fierceness, heart breaking to behold.
I’ve heard mothers speak of how they can’t rest not knowing exactly where their departed child is. One mother told how in her dreams she goes to find the child, often crying out, “Where have you gone beloved? Where are you my little son? Are you afraid, wherever you are? Are you crying? Please God, love him for me, Please God.”
And we wept that one so lovely should have a life so brief…
So gentle and so beautiful should perish with the flowers.
(William Cullen Bryant, “The Death of the Flowers”)
At some point in a long happy marriage something like fusion takes place, and when a wife dies, not only does the person die but a world dies with her. When my wife died my world collapsed like a circus tent unstrung from its moorings. I lost a sense of self; I lost my confidence; my tolerance for stress was greatly reduced. The flame went out; the shoulders folded dejectedly; My memory irrepressible returns to her passing. I could see death in her face. It was as if she were going away from me, and I couldn’t hold her back. She looked at me as if she was bidding me good-bye, then some force drew her over the sill and closed the door, so to speak. Then I heard the nurse’s voice say, “She’s gone.” After that, a growing loneliness enveloped me. Even after so many years, it is always awful coming back to the empty house and being overwhelmed with the recognition that she was gone forever. There’s the dreadful stillness in the house.
There are times when I catch myself looking for her—even expecting to see her. Sometimes I expect to hear her footsteps or voice. Sometimes it feels as if she went on a journey without me, and I feel like calling out: “Where are you? Come back! We have things to do.”
I have memories of certain occasions. for example, feeling her shoulder pressed against mine as we listened to music or watched TV; her helping me get my arms into the sleeves of my coat; rainy day trips home where I found supper waiting, found love waiting. I remember the times together writing a list for the store. Now one of my most difficult times is pushing a cart through grocery aisles, trying to look purposeful.
There are all those mornings of rising alone. It was an effort just to get up and get from one place to another. Long nights and lonely dawns.
Barren of her companionship, there was nothing I wanted to do, nowhere to go. I came to hate having to show up everywhere alone. I measure everything into before and after. I count the years we should have had together. There are the walks never taken.
Grief feels so like fear. The bereft widower is often alone and afraid. It’s not something that ever goes away. It constantly keeps you company. It is something you learn to live with. You work around it. You often use TV to shelter against the inexpressible loneliness. I envy men who could watch their wives grow old with them.
But O for the touch of a vanished hand and the sound of a voice that is still.
(Tennyson, “In Memoriam of M.H.H”)
We say how Jesus understands all our sufferings because of all the suffering he went through. But as someone said, Jesus never lost a child or a wife.
Parents who have lost a child and aging widowers experience the most acute and crippling loneliness. There’s the grief we can’t resolve. It turns even happy times wistful. In certain ways, the wound widens and deepens with the years. Some words from Jeremiah would apply.
Jer.14:19,22: “Why have you struck us a blow that cannot be healed? O Lord our God, we set our hope on you, for it is you who do all this.”
Parents of a deceased child and bereft widowers expect a reunion with loved ones in the life to come. A mother who lost her son at Newtown said that when she dies the first voice she expects to hear will be God’s saying, “Well done thou good and faithful servant,” and the second voice will say “Hi Mom.” I expect to hear my wife’s voice say, “What took you so long?” She was mine and shall ever be.
How long it is since she with whom I lay O Lord, has left for thine my widowed bed.
Yet still our spirits mingle, as our clay, and still half living yet, and I half dead.
(Victor Hugo)
