"On Healing" August 2005

Posted on Mon, Aug. 22, 2005
Loneliness: The grief and the gift
By Dan Gottlieb

Dear Dr. Dan: In your last column, you mentioned that loneliness is about missing something. Despite feeling loved by others, I find myself pretty lonely. Maybe it's because I work about half time on the computer at home. Or because the other half of my day is spent with my 15-month-old daughter, who is wonderful but doesn't provide much social interaction.

I am in my 40s and have no siblings. I lost both of my parents to cancer more than 10 years ago. So holidays spent even with people I love make me sad. While working and providing child care alone seem like situations I can change, the sadness around my lack of extended family seems as if it's more of a permanent condition. What to do?
- Anne

Dear Anne: Loneliness is epidemic in our culture. It contributes to divorce, isolation, prejudice and various compulsive behaviors, including overwork.

In his book Shades of Loneliness, sociologist Richard Stivers argues that our loneliness comes from living in an increasingly technological world where we relate more to machines than to people. This would confirm your theory about feeling isolated at the computer. But loneliness can be caused by many other things, including illness, disability, loss of a loved one, and change of environment (many college freshmen complain of loneliness). What they all share is a longing for human connection.

You rightly suggest that your loneliness is a form of chronic grief from the loss of your parents. Your letter also implies that your loneliness is a painful condition that should be remedied.

But if you had the option to feel less sad during holidays, would you want to? There is something about the sadness that helps you feel connected to your parents. Sadness doesn't feel good, but that doesn't mean it is a problem.

As a species, we have a primordial drive to be part of a community. For most, that begins with family. For better or worse, our original family gives us our first sense of who we are. And now you are an orphan. No one can appreciate the relationship you had with your parents and what that loss means to you. But many adults sometimes feel alone, different from the larger world, and longing for what we once had. If you look around, you will see that almost everyone you speak with is a fellow orphan!

Which gets us to what can be done. Nothing can be done about your orphanhood or the sadness and loneliness that sometimes accompany it.

But most books about loneliness have a spiritual dimension. This makes sense because loneliness is an ache for contact, to feel a part of something. An intimate relationship with a loving God can help diminish one's sense of aloneness. But even without the religious element, feeling connected to the larger world can do the same thing. If you could pay close attention to the world's natural beauty around you, eventually you would begin to see yourself as part of that world. You would understand that every time you inhale, much of the oxygen comes from the foliage around you, and with each exhalation, you are feeding the same foliage. And perhaps you could expand your sense of belonging to your fellow orphans. Understand that what drives much of their behavior is that same ache that you feel during holidays.

And don't worry about the sadness. Happiness feels better, but sadness has a way of opening us up to one another.

Posted on Mon, Aug. 08, 2005
Love, loss happen all over; with empathy, peace can too
By Dan Gottlieb

On a recent trip to Israel, the summer heat hit me at our first stop after just 30 minutes on the tour bus. So while my tour mates were seeing the sights, I ducked into an empty, air-conditioned cafeteria. It was about 11 in the morning. I hadn't quite figured out how to order coffee when I saw our bus driver having lunch by himself. We had just met an hour earlier when we arrived at the airport, and he had been very helpful to me with an older, clumsy wheelchair lift in the bus. He was a handsome man in his mid-forties with a dark ruddy complexion and black hair and eyes, staring absent-mindedly as he picked at his food. He seemed pleased when I asked if I could sit with him.

His name is Marwan, and he is a Christian Arab from Nazareth. I found out that he lives alone, ekes out a living driving a bus, and worries about his ailing mother. He told me that since Arafat died he could "smell peace." Later that week, I heard an Israeli use the same phrase. They can't see it, or feel it yet, but they can smell it.

Later I met psychologist Yovav Katz, who had been hosting a call-in radio show in Jerusalem for the last 25 years. He appeared to be in his mid-sixties, had steel blue eyes and a full mane of gray hair.

I asked him what people called about mostly, thinking it would be about terrorism or the economy. He said most people called about loneliness, which is different from what they had called about in the past. Given our experience, we both acknowledged that radio show callers are not necessarily representative of the population.

Nevertheless, he commented that although there was much more poverty in Israel, there were also many more people with wealth. And they tended to be more self-absorbed, which inevitably leads to loneliness. But in my experience, people are lonely because there is something missing in their lives. People with wealth try to compensate by accumulating things, but it's not the things that make people lonely. I wondered what was missing.

I may have gotten my answer the next night.

We had dinner at a beautiful restaurant overlooking the Galilee. When everyone went on a boat ride after dinner, I stayed back and had coffee with Marwan. He was starting to trust me and interrupted the silence by asking: "Have you ever been in love?" After several moments of reflection, I said that I had been in love.

After another long pause, he told me a deeply emotional story of the woman he had loved for 11 years. And then one day she left for work and was killed in a car accident. That was 10 years ago, and still he mourns. He said he has never gone out with another woman because he never met "the right one." What he meant was he had never found the woman he lost. His grief was palpable because he loved and was loved so deeply.

And I thought about this land and how many tears Jew and Arab have shed. And I wondered how many of those tears have turned to hatred? Certainly, Marwan is not the only one who is still mourning.

Over the next several days, I thought a lot about Marwan and his suffering. And I thought about all of the people I have seen over the years who suffered the loss of loved ones.

Later on, when I talked again with Marwan (who now called me "my brother"), I asked him what he thought his lover would say if she came back for just five minutes. He sat quietly for a long time as his eyes welled up with tears. Finally he said: "I don't know, maybe she would say she misses me too. Maybe she would say she doesn't want me to suffer any more because she loves me." And, maybe for the first time, he wept.

At President Clinton's first inauguration, Maya Angelou read a poem that contained the line: "history, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived. But if faced fully, need not be lived again."

May the smell of peace grow to affect all of their senses.

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