This is how it comes about. The young ones fly the nest to make homes of their own sometimes at a considerable distance.
Yes, they return for Christmas, but it’s not the same. They’re birds of passage now, with their own priorities and concerns. Their childhood bedrooms lie unnaturally silent and tidy, doors closed. Life changes. They’ll be back with their own babies and a raft of daft child-rearing notions garnered from ‘experts’ and you, their parents, who brought them up without benefit of such wisdom, will say nothing. It’s lovely when they come, lovely when they go. Now there’s a brief but golden period of unaccustomed liberty and pleasing yourself-ery – places to go, holidays to take, friends to catch up with.
Retirement brings real freedom. For the first time you have that most valuable of all resources – time, and plenty of it. Time for new pursuits, cultivating skills, involvement with community. You’re content. You’re in that newly-minted category, ‘the young old’, still spry, active and fully engaged. It’s like getting your second wind.
Second wind usually brings with it extensive renovation, re-decoration, or possible downsizing as an unspoken acknowledgement of “planning for when we’re older”. Meanwhile you chunter on in a relaxed pattern of regularity, adapting to stiffening joints by the purchase of gadgets for opening jam jars, a doofer for picking things up off the floor and triangular pillows for reading in bed. You establish little night-time routines – each counting out your tablets on matching bedside tables.
No need now to set the alarm. You discover what one wit expressed as “the joy of not going”. However enticing the prospect, winter wet and cold persuade you that “you wouldn’t put milk bottles out on a night like this. We’ll give it a miss,” and spend the evening in front of the telly in companionable silence or affectionate bickering.
Another Rubicon is crossed the year your children say, “Come to us for Christmas”. Part of you resents the fact they believe you’re past it. The other part is glad to be relieved of the responsibility, though, come Christmas Day, you’ll be hankering for home and your own armchair by 4:30. It also absolves you from the fiddly faff of Christmas decoration. “We’ll not bother with a tree this year. Sure it’s only ourselves.” Life changes.
Like an unwelcome lodger, age-related illness moves in. The local surgery’s waiting-room is full of your contemporaries comparing symptoms. Visiting offspring examine you closely when they come. They grill you, “Mum/Dad, are you sure you’re alright? What did the doctor say?” You catch them whispering in the kitchen.
But maybe it’s not alright and the one you chose to spend your life with is taken from you in a long-drawn-out leave-taking or with shocking sudden-ness. People are solicitously helpful, briskly kind and empathetic, but they have their own lives to lead. When the storms of grief subside and the anaesthetic numbness of loss wears off, where does one find the will to pick up and darn together the threads of a heart with a hole in it and go on alone? Life changes-irrevocably.
I’ve only illustrated the one aspect of loneliness I’m familiar with. There’s a host of others – the bullied child, the awkward teen, the single mother; the couple trapped in a dysfunctional or abusive relationship, the socially inadequate, the emigrant, the immigrant; the frail elderly who’ve outlived their contemporaries, the housebound chronically ill or disabled, the mentally impaired – 1.7 million in all, according to Age UK, half a million of whom are over 65.
The bonds that held society together in our grandparents’ day – family, neighbours, church and community, are dissolving. When the parameters of one’s life shrink, an aura of isolation spreads imperceptibly through the psyche and the temptation is to withdraw still further, but there’s a difference between solitude and loneliness. The first can be balm to the soul; the second, an abiding ache in the heart.
Ironic, isn’t it, that in an era extolling the virtues of instant communication and over-shared electronic trivia, loneliness is the new pandemic for which there’s no inoculation that guarantees immunity.
