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.