I spend a lot of time alone now. Oh, I have my two cats and my lovely dog Hazel to keep me company and to cuddle with. I talk on the phone most days with one or both of my daughters, or a friend. And I have all of you on Hive to get the warm and fuzzies from, albeit over an ethernet connection. But in-the-flesh human contact has lessened to only an hour or two a day, on average. There are even days I might not see another human, other than those who walk down my block, for an entire day.
I would never have imagined this back when I was busy managing a household for a family of five and working outside the house. My house was always full of other humans, night and day. I went to work while the kids were at school, so I was NEVER alone. Hustle and bustle was the order of nearly every day, unless we went on vacation, which got harder and harder to squeeze in with the soccer practices, medical appointments, school calendar and other obligations. Our vacations got shorter and shorter and closer to home over the years. It was very difficult and expensive to get my entire brood anywhere exotic, so exotic was out. It was enough for me to drive a few hours and plop us all down at a resort. I could get some rest, and my kids could have a blast.
Boy did I ever wish, way back then, that I could just have a few hours a week to myself!
My then-children are now-adults. They’re as busy as I was back then, and I have to wonder how on earth I did all that! They pull it off too. Did I really have that much energy?
Now that I have all this time to myself, I do not feel lonely at all. I have time to blog, to read, to sit on my porch and greet passersby, to garden, to go for long walks, to do crossword puzzles, to sing, to learn new instruments, among other pasttimes.
But I do worry that, as my social circle shrinks due to deaths, I will someday hit a threshhold of alone time that will render me lonely. I recently spoke to someone about the last few months of my father’s life. He had been a mover and a shaker in town until his eighties. He would head down to the Texas Hot for breakfast and some social time every morning. But as his end neared and his health flagged, he began to not leave the house. My mother was already long gone, so he would spend long periods of time all alone, and not eating. He didn’t last long once his life had become so isolated.
I wish I had better understood what he was going through, but, as usual, it’s hard to imagine what someone else is going through unless you have gone through it too. I would have picked up the phone to call him, and schlepped my kids to visit him, much more often.
Will this happen to me? My father never complained. Will I?
So how about it Silver Bloggers? Do many of us get lonelier as we age?
footer by our dear SilverFish, @mondoshawan