November 2, 2024
Once upon a time, two people met in a social group. Unfortunately, one of them was married.
They had a brief four months of believing the married one was finally going to leave a relationship that had been sour and distant for almost twenty years, and then the adult children and everyone in the family threatened to ostracize the married one forever if he divorced. With regret, this person slunk into marriage counseling.
At last report, the spouse declined to do any real work on the marriage or herself, things went right back to distant and sexless, and the married guy lurked on the single woman’s website for the next seven years. In somewhat dramatic fashion, too: Google Analytics documented this person staying up all night to read blogs the single person — me — wrote.
And suddenly, last summer, this person sent me an email. We spoke for a few days, catching up. And then I committed the cardinal sin of asking the wrong question.
(And I quote:)
What in heaven’s name made you decide to email me now, when I had been asking you to speak to me for something like seven years?
(Because when you see someone lurking and lurking, it makes sense to post and say, Why don’t you just talk?)
In reply:
Wow, have we apparently had our wires crossed. I thought when last we spoke that you didn’t want a friendship. I couldn’t give you anything else, and I thought you wanted me to stay away.
So I stayed away, but kept reading your blogs, and it was pretty clear I’d caused you a lot of pain. I hoped that you would find somebody who could love you, and you’d find happiness, and then I could stop worrying.
When it became clear to you that I was reading your blog, I thought shit! now I’m just causing her more pain. So I tried to curtail reading as much. But then in a recent blog post you said saomething (sic) to the effect that I was no longer stopping by to read your blog, and that you figured I no longer cared. I wanted to let you know I still cared.
All I can offer is friendship. If you want to write me from time to time to just chat about work, or home improvements, or the rather dire state of the world, I’m here. If not, if you’d rather not talk/write to me from time to time, that’s fine too.
Uh … okay. (My reaction to that.)
What I wrote back:
I must say I found your behavior as confusing as could be. You knew how I felt about things, because I made that very plain, but all that hanging about was one VAGUE gesture. It could have been interpreted many different ways.
When only one person is talking, things can become very unclear very quickly. A word of clarity sooner than this would have been most helpful.
(I did ask you to just speak. Many times, in fact.)
It’s been good to catch up with you, to find out how things really stand, and to know how you are. I think that if you were ever sick, injured, or dying, I would want to know. I would hate to lose touch with you altogether. And it’s not bad to keep in touch. I am doing a bit of thinking about how often I would wish to do so.
I’m glad you finally spoke.
I will say that “Finding Someone!” while it is our cultural definition of happiness, isn’t the best way to be happy, especially if you’re a woman, especially the older you get. The fact is that old age, infirmity, and dying are mostly solitary experiences in this country even if you do have family, and if you have to have close loved ones in order to feel okay in your late seventies, eighties, and nineties, a good many of us are going to be shit out of luck. If I can be perfectly okay just sitting here alone, I have made a good job of it … because that’s what every old person I ever knew did at the end of their life. Sit. Alone.
And you know that I’m somewhat eccentric, not very sociable, and don’t mesh well together with most people anyway. So, thanks for the good wishes, but I’ve turned my life in a different direction now.
I’m very sorry that my behavior nine years ago caused so many problems.
And that was the end. I have not heard from this person anymore, nor do I ever expect to again.
At the same time, my best friend many states away is dying.
When she started having abnormal vaginal discharge months ago, their insurance changed. She had to cancel her GYN appointment because her doctor was now out-of-network, and then had to wait months for a new appointment.
By the time her surgery was done, it was too late. The cancer had already spread. Now she has a large tumor sitting in the pelvic inlet, invading the colon and bladder, causing a lot of pain, and slowly choking off the ability to urinate and defecate.
Nobody wants to do surgery. Her only options are chemo and radiation, and she’s afraid to do those, because she is basically all alone in life and has no one to take care of her while she is sick from chemo. Not only that, but chemo can cause major side effects that can maim a person for the rest of their life, and again … she has no one to take care of her. And her quality of life is pretty much shit now, anyway.
(Okay, she does live with someone, but the “relationship” was over a long time ago, because he is basically a shit. I mean, when you are living with someone who’s in pain because they are basically dying from cancer and your response is to be angry with them because they don’t feel like driving you to your colonoscopy?? Um, why is it mostly MEN who have this attitude??)
This will be me one day. When I get whatever is going to do me in, I won’t have anyone to take care of me, either. I have no family and basically no one close, so I can see myself in this exact circumstance in a few years to a few decades.
There’s really no help for anyone in this situation, who’s dying from cancer and has no caregiver, not if they don’t have independent wealth to hire home health nurses. All my friend’s medical care providers could say when she said, “I’m afraid to undergo chemo because I’ll be sick and have no one to take care of me,” was, “Well, you’ll just have to figure that out.”
When you have no one, there’s nothing to “figure out.” You have no one. That’s it.
What’s changed for me this summer is:
I used to live in terror of those days, when they get here.
And, partially for that reason, I used to feel very, very sad that I had no Really Close Relationships (except for this person states away).
And most of my life was taken up with this sadness. From growing up with a mentally ill mother who was both pathetic and a real bitch to me all at the same time, to being the kid wearing the Kick Me sign in school from ages seven to twelve, to losing my dad in a plane crash when I was twelve (which is why the kids finally stopped picking on me), to being a social misfit from then on, to not even dating until I was in my thirties, to finally finding a great relationship and then losing my husband after not even seven years of marriage … I’ve just been a very, very sad person.
Because Relationship has been very limited in my life, and when things were good, they didn’t last too long.
Now it’s been made very clear to me that all the relationship connections to that time in my life when I had a social network I felt like I belonged in have been or are about to be cut, separating me from that younger and happier phase in my life forever …
… and I’m actually happy about it.
I’ve finally gotten big enough that I really feel that, whatever happens to me in my life, I can and will just fucking handle it.
I don’t need to feel lonely anymore. I’m such an eccentric person anyway that all I want to do is explore and think about ideas and type away on a keyboard anymore, anyhow.
“Normal” people think there is something wrong with a person like me. I’m supposed to be out exercising! I’m supposed to volunteer … or something. I’m supposed to want to go out! I’m supposed to want to see and do! I’m supposed to want to travel! Nobody is supposed to want to sit on the couch and be lazy!
People are supposed to want to have somebody to talk to.
But I’m happy here.
I don’t even think about wanting to tell anyone anything anymore. When I got my big raise this summer, it was a while before it dawned on me that other people would be on the phone to someone or out to celebrate.
I remember thinking that it certainly was weird that I didn’t want to call someone and tell someone.
I even forgot my own birthday.
In my world, now there’s only me. And it’s perfectly okay.
I’m looking back now and seeing how very, very heavy that yoke of thinking I needed to have emotional closeness in my life with some special person/s actually was.
It was like a heavy, heavy hand just pressing and pressing on my brain and keeping me under this fog of sadness and fear all the time. I spent literally most of my life feeling like a terrified four-year-old who looks up and finds himself all alone in a department store, suddenly separated from his parents.
And the rest of my life I spent mourning about it. No more Relationships. No one to hear my innermost thoughts. No one to kiss and snuggle with, ever, ever again.
That kind of thinking makes one so, so sad, it’s the hardest thing to even live at all.
And now it’s gone.
My mind feels so light. My brain feels so light.
I finally feel free for the first time in my life.
Like I can control my life, and not my misery and sadness and fear over not having close others In Relationship.
I was surfing around on YouTube, and Janet Jackson’s old Control video came up. I used to love that song when I was young. (Boy, did I ever need to get out from under my mentally ill mother’s thumb!)
I’ve had that thing on repeat for days, and when Janet says, “Free, at last!” and “Now I’m all grown up!” I am really feeling that.
I am free of feeling miserable because I am not In Relationship.
And I think sadness over not Being In Relationship has controlled my whole entire life, as if I were still a tiny, tiny baby, struggling to get Mom to engage and love me.
In fact, those eleven years I had a friend group and knew my late husband and the almost seven we were married? The real reason I was finally happy was that at last! At last! I was finally In Relationship with people.
I remember coming home to my husband at night and being absolutely over the moon, thinking, Finally, finally — I have a family!
And as soon as it was gone, there I was, four years old and lost without my parents in Sears again. (That damn store might as well have been a whole continent.)
And yet, our entire society shouts and screams that We Must Be In Relationship.
That Relationship Is The Only Way To Be Happy.
If I should happen to post anywhere on here that I am in the life stage of old age now and I’m not going to have another relationship, I get scolded. GASP!! Why do you think you’re old? It’s terrible to be hopeless! Aw, you’ll find Another Relationship!
To say that you are old and you will be alone now forevermore is sacrilege! Why, in this Disneyland world, we can’t even conceive of it. Don’t I know we’re supposed to all be young and striving after the goals of our twenties and thirties forever? Relationship! Being thin! Looking and staying young! Goals! Career! Money! Our House! Kids! Sex! And so on and so forth.
How much of this is real, and how much of this is really that we’re all terrified of being alone? How much of this is that we’re all sure we can’t handle being alone?
When my time comes, and I’m being eaten alive by cancer and alone like my friend, I know I don’t need to be terrified of it anymore. This is the end of life, it comes to everyone, and we will suffer whether we have someone to take care of us or not.
I will simply handle it, whatever happens, just like I’ve handled everything else.
I do not need to be afraid of it anymore. I do not need to have panic attacks over it, like I used to.
I do not need to have the sadness of Not Being In Relationship run my mind and my life anymore.
I am in control now, and not the fear and sadness over Not Being In Relationship.
And I have to wonder, if your mind is taken over and run all your life by the fear and sadness of Not Being In Relationship, can you really still call yourself an adult?
Because, finally, I’m in control of my own mind.
If that makes any sense.