These Precious Moments: Day 13 ~ On The Solitary Life, Dear Friends, and My Friendship With May Sarton…

I write, often, about a kind of aching existential loneliness. It is very real to me and to many who live alone, especially in the later part of life. Though I have lived alone for nearly 20 years now it is not a natural state for me. I went from my parent’s home to my married home. We were married for 25 years before separating and 31 years when we divorced. Until the divorce my husband came back and forth to help me with things when I needed help and I never felt completely alone. And then one day I was. And I haven’t quite felt safe in the world ever since. Were it not for my precious pugs I don’t know how I could manage this at all and it is very hard for me to accept the idea, though, at this point I can’t imagine how it could be otherwise, that I will spend the rest of my life alone. And as I look around me there are many in my circumstances.

I woke up this morning, as I do most mornings, a little afraid, and, uneasy, there is nothing for it but to get up and get the dogs out and fed and start our day. But as I sat here with my coffee I thought over the day yesterday and a deep sense of gratitude came over me. I wrote here, yesterday, about having written in to Facebook at 6 a.m. because I felt afraid, and many people responded to me gently, lovingly, and were so supportive I was deeply touched. Many’s the day my Facebook friends make all the difference in this solitary world of mine. And as the day unfolded there was more.

My dear friend Katya, literally the friend I have known the longest who is still present in my life, I have known for nearly 40 years, and we email back and forth throughout the day. We text. We share our lives and writing, we write stories together. She is a beautiful thread running through the fabric of my days. I had a quick unexpected visit from my dear friend Noni who popped in to bring me something she had picked up on a whim for me and it was good to hug her and laugh and talk for a few minutes. She is going to come by tomorrow afternoon to help me hang some little lights on my front porch that I got to make it more festive feeling for Halloween and the holidays ahead. Early afternoon brought a text from my sweet friend Bekah whom I have been meeting with weekly for years now, for some years weekly phone calls that could go 2 or 3 hours and for most of the last year we have met in video chats which are just lovely. It is a wonderful way to deepen a relationship that exists with an online friend. One of the best nights I’ve ever had was last Christmas Eve when Bekah and I got together via Skype and spent hours together wrapping our Christmas presents. It was so much fun and such a loving, sweet time together. She was the first one I said “Merry Christmas” to just past midnight. She texted me yesterday afternoon to check on me because she knew I was having a hard time after finding out that my friend Joseph had died. She said she had appointments but would call later in the afternoon and she did. Katya and I emailed back and forth through the evening and I ended the day yesterday with a wonderful video visit with my dear friend Maggie. It was an amazing day filled with friendship and love and I am deeply grateful.

The challenge for me are the hours between these connections. My days and nights are mostly spent alone. How to weave the hours together with the golden threads of these times with friends, whether an e-mail, a text, a phone call, or a video chat? I know that I am deeply blessed to have these people in my life and I don’t take them for granted. And tonight my darling daughter Rachel will be here. She comes over most Wednesdays and we have dinner and watch our show, “This Is Us,” and have a nice visit. I love having her here so much, I appreciate it deeply.

Yesterday a Facebook friend wrote to me privately and made an observation. She wrote, after a very long, gentle prelude and sharing a personal circumstance, that she saw me often, when going through hard times like the recent hurricane and Joseph’s death, going to a place of fear and loneliness, as if it were an emotional state, something that might be able to be handled, I suppose, in a constructive manner. I said that I was addressing these things in therapy, in fact am going today as I do every Wednesday, but that it is more than an emotional state. I live alone, have for many years now, and will most likely live alone for the rest of my life unless some beautiful miracle occurs to make it otherwise. Those are the facts, and therapy is not going to “cure” the loneliness of a solitary person living alone. The interesting thing, and a good reminder, in talking to one dear friend yesterday who is very happily married, that she gets lonely. Loneliness is the human condition and we can often feel the loneliest in a house full of people that we dearly love. It was true for me when, in a house with my husband and 3 children, all of whom I dearly loved, I wrote, “Loneliness has eaten so many holes in me I feel like a piece of swiss cheese.”

In the 1990’s, in the last years of her life, I had one of the most surprising blessings of my life. A woman who had been a mentor and muse to me through her books for decades and whose books I shared and taught in my writing classes and I became friends. I had written her a “fan letter” knowing that she was getting older and that I wanted her to realize how important her work had been to me, how much I appreciated her books. I did not expect a response, in fact, since she so often said, rather crabbily (I’m smiling writing that because it just was who she was and it was endearing in its way when you came to know her.), that while she appreciated all the fan mail she got it became a burden trying to answer people. I had a rubber stamp I used on the envelope when I mailed the letter that said “Guilt Free Mail, No Reply Expected.” One day, months later, my mother was visiting and watched the children while I went out to do errands. When I got back my mother said that I had a message from “the rudest woman she had ever spoken to.” She said that the woman had left her phone number, and told me precisely when to call her back, and said, in no uncertain terms, that I was NOT to call outside those hours because I would be disturbing her. “WHO was it mom?” I asked. When my mother said, picking up the paper with the message on it puzzling out her own handwriting, “May Sarton,” I nearly dropped over in a dead faint. May Sarton, the woman whom I positively worshipped through her writing, had called, left her number, and wanted me to call her. I did, and it was the beginning of a very dear friendship that lasted until the end of May’s life in the summer of 1995. I spoke with her 3 weeks before she died. She was very ill and her voice was barely above a whisper. She had called me to say goodbye.

May wrote many books about being a woman writer living alone. Her book “Journal Of A Solitude” is a classic in the field and I had read it many times. In the middle of a happy marriage with children I longed for the kind of solitude she wrote about not really being able to take in the truth she told about it, that it could be a biting, cruel beast to live with. She once wrote, “Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is the richness of self.” and yet, despite what she wrote, she would tell you that she got lonely, terribly lonely. And she said something to me a number of times that I didn’t understand until years later, after her death. She said, “You are like my little sister, you are a younger version of me, you are more like me than you realize now, but you will one day.” May Sarton was an out lesbian, I was a married woman with children. I could not have imagined that one day I would be alone, my marriage ended, I would come out a lesbian, and spend most of my life writing about solitude, about living alone and writing, about loneliness. I would feel, as she had, the knife sharp pain of loneliness. It cuts deep for me, as it did for her, and yet on she went and on I go. She had many dear friends that she treasured, as do I, but when the phone call ends, when the door closes behind the dear one leaving, a kind of panic and overwhelming sadness sets in. It happens every single time.

Today, however, I am reminding myself that despite having awakened alone and afraid yesterday, and feeling lonely, throughout the day I was contacted or visited by very dear friends, that they were and are incredible blessings in my life, that they are here and will be here as the years go forward as long as we both are here, and that these blessings are not something to take lightly.

Still, the phone call ends, the door closes, and I am alone. That is the truth. I imagine I will struggle with it all the days of my life, as long as I am alone, and I write this knowing that even if I was one day blessed with a loving relationship it would not be a guarantee against loneliness. This is life, it is the human condition. In this I am no different than any other. I will let it be my teacher. 

Comments

  1. Sue O'Kieffe says

    Beautiful, Maitri.
    I’ve been alone most of my life (only child, no children). I’ve not been in any kind of romantic relationship since 1988. I don’t even really think about being alone until something critical happens where I need help and there’s no one here. And then, well you know. It’s just hard. You speak my truth. I’m glad you shared this. It helps me feel not so alone. I’m going to forward this to a friend of mine who also mourns her aloneness.
    You are a blessing.

    • Thank you so much dear Sue and oh, Lordy, I hear ya girl. I was an only child too. And yes especially when things come along like hurricanes and you are weathering the storm alone and afraid and then there’s all the mess and brokenness of the aftermath and you don’t know what to do it can be so overwhelming that you don’t know how to move forward, even an inch. One of the things that hurricane did do for me was that amidst all of my feelings of being alone and afraid a lot of people helped me and I realized that when push comes to shove and the worst happens there are people who can help. Sometimes they offer, or sometimes someone gives you a number you can call for help and then it is so amazing when help actually comes. It was a revelation to me. Still, there’s a lot to deal with to recover here, and often I feel overwhelmed and afraid. One day at a time, trite but true.

      I’m so glad you came to comment here honey. When we reach out to one another we do feel less alone. Keep coming back, I’m here…

  2. katya taylor says

    you are the mistress of great graphics! the one today reminds me of beautiful rocky maine, with the ocean near — where i so recently visited. And i love the two “older” women keeping each other company! i read journal of a solitude years and years ago, and then more recently, what a powerful book, and yes, a classic. so many women, struggling with the demands of work, children, caregiving aging parents, etc would give anything for solitude, the problem is having TOO MUCH of it. i think books are a saving grace. when reading i feel in company, i feel companioned you might say. journaling is also a reprieve, where i touch base with some wiser self… or going for a walk in nature, where i realize all of life is there to support me: trees, clouds, the breeze, the duckpond, etc. Each of us has to find our own reprieve, our own cure…
    And your blog helps us all reflect on our own human condition, our own longings… thank you dear woman

    • Thank you so much my dear Katya, and yes, I love the graphic at the top and it was actually a photograph, copyright free, and I doctored it in a graphic program. I think it is lovely and had just the feeling I wanted of women friends. And yes, when I was home raising my family I would long for the kind of solitude that May wrote about, it sounded dreamy to me. The reality is that living alone for almost 2 decades now it is not all dreamy. It is a quiet, contemplative life and I am blessed in many ways, but it can be very lonely, and, as an aging woman alone it can be frightening. But I have faith, and tonight I had an incredible conversation with my dear friend Joseph’s pastor. I learned about his death, and his life these last 3 years, much that I didn’t know, beautiful things, he was very close to the church. I am more at peace now. He died of pneumonia of which he had had multiple bouts along with heart problems over the last couple of years. He succumbed to the last bout of pneumonia after 3 weeks in the hospital. Thankfully he was home with his family in his last weeks.

      I’m so glad that you find peace in so many things, in nature, books, writing, and I am so blessed that I am able to share some of them with you. I love you dear Ka. Thank you for your beautiful friendship of decades. You are such a blessing in my life…

      M. xoxox

  3. Dear Maitri,

    I so enjoyed our video chat last evening. It was nice to simply talk and laugh for a while. We all experience those lonely hours and it is so nice to reach out to someone when the loneliness becomes unbearable.

    I do love my alone time, but everything in moderation.

    Your story about May Sarton was so beautiful. What a great memory. How blessed are you that you reached out and she responded in kind. Those are heart connections.

    • Darling Maggie, I loved talking with you last night too! I think video chatting is a revelation and, when most of your life is online as mine is an incredible blessing. For friendships, for teaching, and more work I will do in the future it is a godsend.

      And yes, my time getting to know May was an incredible gift, a blessing, and it was a heart connection indeed…

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