Jenifer’s Journal: Heavy lifting

Accept your own aloneness and stick to it, all your life. And then accept the times when the gap is filled in, when they come. But they’ve got to come. You can’t force them.” — D.H. Lawrence

It doesn’t seem possible that, as I write this, Labor Day is less than a week away, at which point, for all intents and purposes, Summer 2022 will be over.

I guess if any seasonal transition brings the sweet sadness of melancholy, it’s summer-into-fall. You’d think it would be fall-into-winter, at least metaphorically, when the last flaming leaves have fallen dead and brown and the trees are revealed in their fierce, skeletal dignity.

But who pays attention with all the holiday hubbub? Then there’s winter-into-spring, when we’re so busy trying to outsmart the meteorological vagaries of March and April that we don’t have time for melancholy.

And spring-into-summer? With our impulse-control burned away by spring fever, and all that riotous burgeoning and blooming going on? What transition?

Of course, the calendar, too, conspires to create this annual poignancy. As fall approaches, it seems that humans of all ages — grade-schoolers to grandparents — are moving up, moving out or moving on, sometimes simultaneously.

Ask my daughter, who’s just had the thrill of depositing her beloved first born upstate for his freshman year of college and gone home to struggle with a semi-empty nest.

Vacations, jobs, grades, schools, residences, relationships, a veritable pile-up of beginnings and endings that demand work on our parts, physically, mentally, socially, emotionally, and sometimes it feels like heavy-lifting. No wonder they call it Labor Day.

Personally, I’ve been trying to redouble my efforts to live one day at a time as the only sane response to all the transitions I see occurring in my own life, some voluntary, some not. However, I find that remaining in the now can be slippery on occasion, and I can’t quite get my footing.

I was really caught off balance the other day. I was in the middle of being deliberately productive — staying on-task, running errands on what had become a surprisingly pretty afternoon, less humid, blue and gold, with some of that hyper-clarity of atmosphere that announces the approach of an Island autumn.

All at once, seeing the intense green of the trees pushing up against the uber-blue of the sky, it was like a knife in my heart, and I suddenly realized how excruciatingly lonely I was. I am.

Three years out from losing my husband, Tom, and it seems the grief, which has always been gentled by gratitude, had, at least in that moment, congealed into something hard and sharp-edged. Yes, like a knife, and the beauty of the day had become merciless without someone to share it with.

I’m no stranger to loneliness — is anyone? I learned long ago the shared wisdom that one can feel terribly alone even in a crowd, or most especially in a house where, for maybe a day, a week, a year, two people might be living next to one another without touching.

There are as many reasons for loneliness as there are humans, but particularly for those who are transitioning into old age, and, according to the Columbia Aging Center, particularly now:

“Loneliness — defined as the subjective feeling of pain due to unmet human needs for meaningful, satisfying connection to other people — is a growing problem in all adults, but is especially noticeable in older adults … The portion of older adults experiencing loneliness was between 11 to 17% in 1970 and has ballooned 40% in 2010. One chief reason is the growing number of older adults who live alone. In 2012, 30% of U.S. older adults lived alone, compared to in 1950 when 10% did, another study finds.”

In her article, “Designing a New Social Infrastructure to Combat Loneliness in Aging Adults,” appearing in the magazine, Generations, in 2020 and updated in June, 2022, Professor Linda Fried writes: “Social context is also shaped by our ‘built’ environment, which has increasingly segregated people in the United States by age and wealth, and zoned senior housing to the margins of communities. The creation of suburban communities, without sidewalks or grocery stores or pharmacies that one can walk to, limits personal interaction within a neighborhood.”

It’s heartening to know that there’s increasing awareness of loneliness across the board, and possible solutions to mitigate it, but the fact is that, though some of us may never know the intense devotion of parenthood, or the triumph of major achievements, or the despair and terror of war, we all have felt loneliness.

Perhaps it’s the common thread that binds us together as humans, and knowing that may make the heavy lifting a little lighter, reminding us we’re not really alone after all.