Loneliness
I
Her sentence struck me oddly, and with the unique awkwardness of an interrupted pass or a magnet suddenly shaking and springing to life off of a table. Or maybe it wasn’t exactly her sentence, per se, but the redness of her eyes and the unfurling of her frown as she said it to me. Just as I had picked up my things to go, too: “It’s just that I’m so lonely.” It was as if before I left her—sitting at her round kitchen table in pajamas and flip-flops—she wanted to make sure I had heard her clearly, perhaps fearing that she would never get the chance to speak to me ever again, or for that matter, anyone else.
Ellie was ninety-two years old, and although she was the healthiest “old person” I knew, maybe, I had thought, her fears were somewhat justified. She had, unlike most other women over seventy (all of whom cut their hair short and pull it up tight, which when considering the paleness and straw-like quality of ageing hair, lends to their heads the likeness of dried out bird’s nests), however, a long, full head of snow-white hair that she parted down the center and wore over her shoulders like a young woman would do. And although her skin was wrinkled and sun-tattered, full of yellowing patches and brown splotches, her long hair and bright blue eyes clearly defied her age.
Eleanor was her real name, but no one in my house had ever known her as anything other than Ellie. The only reason I knew her name was, in fact, Eleanor, was that it was written in the sidewalk concrete in front of her house, along with her late husband’s name and the year—“Eleanor & Albert 1962,” perhaps the year they moved into their house, maybe the year they married; my brothers and I used to try and guess what had happened in 1962 for those two, although, in truth, a great number of things must have happened that year, only our childish perception of time was wound up too fast and our judgments miscalibrated. Still, I don’t suppose we paid much attention to it, and like children do, took the signature for granted as a simple constant of nature, given to us like anything else. Yet twenty years or so later, at the time in my life where, as a consequence of every young man’s search for personal meaning in the world, everything, even the smallest gesture or object, could acquire an almost legendary-like significance, and there I was, searching my memory of romantic novels and stories to find some significance in Ellie’s fossilized insignia.
Or at least I had been, half-engaged in our (seemingly endless) conversation about my life in law school, her grand daughter on whom she waged an endless war to get her to go on a date with me (she liked women—tragically so, for Ellie), and the times when my brothers and I used to perform cartwheels and handstands in her front yard, or put on short little plays and skits her living room, and half-engaged in my own personal search for meaning in Eleanor’s name, until I rose to leave, and Ellie’s sudden declaration caught me as off-guard as it did.
It wasn’t that I didn’t know she was lonely. In fact, I assumed that all old people were lonely. Loneliness to me was something that you accrued as you aged, like wrinkles or grandchildren. So maybe I was so taken aback when she declared her loneliness out loud, because I was now suddenly implicated in her loneliness; in leaving my hometown for school, I had willingly caused the melancholy that Ellie was now sharing with me in its fullness. Or perhaps my twelve-year-old ghost, certainly spinning across her front lawn on alternating hands and feet, was guilty, and not me. Still, I didn’t like anyone to implicate my ghosts in anything, although they were certainly guilty of many things in my life. I played briefly with this latter idea in my head—my twelve-year-old memory standing before a judge and court:
The judge speaks first, “do you recall the events that transpired on September 15th, 2011?”
My ghost responds, wearing his favorite pair of neon-green shorts and t-shirt, “yes, your honor.”
“And do you recall performing a handstand with exactly two hands planted firmly on the grass of Mrs. Eleanor Gross’s front lawn at 115 Lighthouse Avenue?
“I believe it was a cartwheel your honor, not a handstand.” People whisper fervently in the stands.
“Order!” The chatter dissipates. “And when was the last time you did such a cartwheel for poor Mrs. Eleanor Gross?” The judge is suddenly speaking to me directly, who is now standing trial alongside his younger self.
“I suppose I don’t remember.” I eke out, and my imaginary palms grow clammy with imaginary beads of sweat. “Maybe I—“
“That’s enough from you,” the judge barks, and I start to wonder what kind of kangaroo court my mind had summoned, “We will now hear from our witnesses, Grass and September Sun…” and the courtroom spurts out in crabgrass, covering the benches, ceiling, even the people; the air grows infinitely bright and hot, being illuminated from somewhere clearly within the room—but before I burn up completely, I’m back at Ellie’s little round table clutching my bags nervously.
“I’m sorry—“ I almost shout, looking over her shoulder out the window and suddenly grateful the sun is hidden behind a layer of storm clouds and not standing witness against me. “I’m sorry to hear that Ellie.” Dark rain is falling in thick sheets outside, and a bird sits in a copper birdbath on the porch a few feet from the window.
Ellie’s features look much more fitting for her age now; even her hair seems a little more brittle. “It’s just that… since Albert went…” I put my bags back down and sat down beside her.
“There are a lot of lonely people nowadays you know,” I said in truth, growing shameful of the world that could produce such loneliness in the woman, and my involvement in it, “a lot of people even my age are very lonely”—I was speaking from experience now—“and they don’t know what to do about it.” Ellie sniffled, wiped a streak of tears onto her sleeve, and turned to the window opposite us. The bird was still flapping her wings in the bath, apparently neither bothered nor aware of the pouring rain.
“Do you think that robin is lonely?”
“Could be.” We both stared for a little at the bird. It had a shimmering orange breast and light brown plumage covering its wings and head. A sharp yellow beak poked out occasional from the bird, who, in going about her ritual cleaning, flitted about spastically and shamelessly, and resembled a ball of feathers trying to turn itself inside out. Bathing in both the rain and the pool of water, the animal gained a very translucent appearance. “Maybe not though.”
I looked back at the bags I had put down on the table. They were full of saltwater taffy, sweet, white corn, and peaches—my parents had just returned from Montauk, and they always tasked me with bringing Ellie gifts and groceries. I think they figured I had the highest tolerance for her stories, but truthfully, I enjoyed her soft voice and her rare, selfless kindness.
Ellie spoke up again. “I know young people are lonely nowadays,” her eyes did not move from the robin in the bath, still flapping about with no coherent rhythm or particular fashion, “but it’s a different kind of loneliness when you’ve had and lost the real thing after so many years. It’s the difference between being born into darkness and having been locked away after living an entire life and having the key tossed away.”
I looked around her house and noticed that it actually was quite dark. So much of it was covered in pictures and reminders of him, it seemed. Still, I wondered somehow if an Albert story could cheer her up. “Could you tell me about him?”
“Oh, honey, you know I can’t possibly retell our lives together” She spoke, although from the look on her face, her bright eyes piercing straight through the window, the bird, the rain, and everything else, I doubted the claim. “He was an absolute saint is what I will say, and soon I’ll join him—I won’t say anything more. If I do, I may start crying, and if I start crying, I fear that I wont be able to stop.” She pulled her gaze away from the bird and turned back to me, wiping her eyes again. This was the well of infinite sadness inside her—full to the brim with memory, of course—and it could be inspected and looked upon, but never touched, lest its container break and her whole world be flooded. Ellie gestured a mild smile, the same one as she had been wearing when I arrived, but it reassured me only of the precariousness of her situation.
Along with the groceries, my mother had also tasked me to bring Ellie to a class at the local senior center. “Ellie can make new friends there—” she had said as she shoved me out the front door with the taffy and the corn, “and she’ll finally get out of that dark old house. It’s depressing in there.” My mother didn’t have the first idea. Still, I thought it would be a good idea, and Ellie agreed to go the following Monday afternoon.
II
It now becomes relevant to our story (to exactly what extent, you, reader, shall be the judge) the melancholia that I was struck with at this point in my life. It was one born out of that same, almost rabid search for meaning, and even more so my failure to find it. I was convinced that something was there, however; it was a mirage—unreachable by definition, obviously—that always shimmered just beyond my reach. It was not a search for truth, or for ultimate purpose—at that particular age I had jettisoned grandiose ideas like those altogether. But rather for romantic gestures, danger, the unknown, none of which I was finding in either my studies or my relationships. Both of these, in fact, were sources of such absolute, crushing stability that they stripped me of the little symbolism or intrigue that did exist in my life, so much so that I couldn’t even indulge in the poetic sweetness that comes attached to a period of depression—I was robbed of even a depraved pleasure such as that. And so now the loneliness I felt was twofold—that of the failure in this search, and the inescapable darkness of old age that Ellie had foreshadowed for me.
These were my concerns as I drove Ellie to the senior center, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that, despite my best efforts to keep our conversation buoyant, I had already been locked away with Ellie in her darkened room.
We arrived at the senior center both a little weary from these efforts, and walked with trepidation towards a small, fluorescently lit gymnasium following paper signs that read phrases like, “Turn left and go straight towards happiness!” or “Keep going! Almost at peace!” I was sure, suddenly granted a moment of inter-species telepathy, that this was how cattle felt walking down those narrow and serpiginous factory-hallways towards the slaughter. I led Ellie by the arm.
We were the last to arrive, and upon seeing the small circle of folding chairs (in each one a woman Ellie’s age or slightly younger-appearing, their bird’s-nests all communicating into one large canopy) and no murderous machines, I breathed a sigh of relief. A couple of the women had walkers placed in front of their chairs, more than a few of them were in pajamas; in short, it was an unintimidating bunch, and Ellie and I settled comfortably into two empty seats side-by-side. The women were chatting with each other in excited, crackling whispers. A large window overlooked a busy highway, although through the glass the cars were only just audible, and so looking out over the traffic, one could replace the engine noises and horns for the chatter of about a dozen old ladies, and imagine that the cars, in oscillating waves of traffic, were in fact, not racing to be anywhere, but instead engaged in a kind of friendly, communal dance. The cars inching towards the front of the wave had little whispers they couldn’t wait to tell their neighbors in front, and the ones slouching at the rear end of the wave were pulling back just ever so slyly, waiting momentarily to think before they would lurch forwards and excitedly blurt out their exclamations. An occasional smoker’s cough coincided with a puff of exhaust, and the cars wavered in the early September heat to the sound of shuffling metal chairs on linoleum.
“Welcome everyone,” a beige sedan announced from amongst the wave, and suddenly the traffic quieted down, its anthropomorphized voices dissolving once again to a muted variety of horns, mechanical swells, and humming engines, and the dance returning once again into a mass of commuters racing somewhere futility important. The beige sedan turned out to be a younger woman sitting at the opposite end of the circle from me with dense, red curls pouring off of her head, a long sunburnt face, and who was swimming in a mass of silver jewelry adorned with a rainbow assortment of precious stones. Her voice was soft but raspy, and immediately brought the attention of the group.
“By show of hands, how many of you fine ladies have meditated before?” A few hands shot up. “Okay put your hands down.” Hands went down. “How many of you have meditated with me before here?” None went up. “Amazing!” I had never seen someone who managed to maintain such a perfect smile while talking before. “Well, for those of you who don’t know me, my name is Julie, and welcome! Today we’re going to be working with a lot of emotions, and we’re going to have a lot of fun, so I hope everyone is ready!” Her smile worked its way around the circle, and almost like the beam of a lighthouse, each person she smiled at reflected with an equally broad grin. When she turned to me, I couldn’t help but join in. Someone in the circle laughed when she turned to them.
“Let’s first go around the circle and say our names and one thing about ourselves, whether we like or don’t like.” There was some shuffling in the circle at this. “I’ll start. My name is Julie, and I have two wonderful dogs, Ruby and David.” The room burst out in laughter at this latter, all-too-human name, and Julie threw out her arms towards the ceiling, then fanning them out backwards down towards her sides, in what seemed to me an effort to capture the laughs in her arms and swallow them whole. “Let’s start to my left because I’m a leftie. Who’s next?”
To her left, a large, floral-printed woman sat up straight. She was one of the ones seated behind a walker, and was pouring out of her seat. “My name is Donna, and something that I like about myself is…” I suddenly became anxious as to what I would say. “Something I like about myself is—um, are my grandchildren.” Julie splayed out her arms again at this.
“Lovely! Let’s keep it going.” And so the exercise continued, each woman speaking in turn, Julie all the while gathering some kind of tangible warmth from their words like a plant photosynthesizing in the sunlight.
When we reached Ellie, she spoke shyly but comfortably, “Hi everyone, my name is Ellie—I have a wonderful neighbor who brought me here today.” She motioned towards me and the group clapped. I quickly introduced myself and mentioned that I enjoyed biking. This was, in fact, something I did like about myself. When we reached the end of the circle and each woman had introduced herself, Julie closed her eyes, breathed deeply, and sat quiet for a long moment before speaking.
“Okay. Perfect. Beautiful. Joyous. We’re going to start with some yoga poses.” For about twenty minutes the group tried a combination of sitting and standing poses, to varying degrees of success, followed by another ten minutes of some basic breathing meditation. Meanwhile, the traffic outside on the highway died down, and the sun settled into the room, this time less accusingly so, and replaced the room’s fluorescent white with a less grating yellow.
A certain feeling washed over me, one which, although having experienced it a number of times, I have not yet found a particular word to describe well. It is, however, some fusion of nervousness, separation from the usual passage of time, and spiritual unity that can be felt under various circumstances: departing a lover under the cover of night, the onset of certain pharmacological concoctions, a group of people embarking together into uncharted, potentially dangerous waters… We were engaged in the lattermost, but despite my original skepticism, I had a newfound willingness to engage in whatever spiritual practice Julie was outlining for us here. So were my classmates, I presumed, from their closed eyes and regular, deep breathing.
“We’re now going to start our main meditation practice. If at any point you start to feel uncomfortable or scared, you can open your eyes and please feel completely free to stop.” I wondered what kind of meditation would scare a ninety year old.
“First take a deep breath, and close your eyes. Feel the weight of your body on the chair, the presence of your feet on the ground.” Here she waited for a while. “Now imagine yourself somewhere you feel completely at peace, like a favorite park bench or beach.” Immediately, without needing to strain or force, tall elm trees appeared around me in dense walls, and a light snow filled the in-between darkness in large, sparkling plumes. Conjuring images in one’s mind’s-eye is like a game of hide-and-seek, albeit often times a one-sided one: a mental portrait, of the type that Julie was having us paint, has all the structure and solidity of a pattern hidden in a magic-eye book—it plays in the periphery of one’s vision until a swiveling of the eyeball (one wonders how or why the superior oblique muscle can translocate an imaginary image such as this in the first place) brings it into the center, and then vanishes instantly upon contact—it shares this quality with many other ocular phenomena, like those ever-evasive dust motes, or the strange geometries that appear with firm presses on closed eyes.
This was the illusoriness of the wintery forest that I found myself in. Still, I continued to lie in a pile of snow located somewhere on my retinas, and gaze up through the canopy of my forest at the back of my eyelids, which formed the basis for a wide-open night sky.
As I waited for Julie’s next instruction, I tried to indulge the fantasy, and reached down into the snow with my hands—feeling the snow proved to be more difficult than seeing it, but with enough concentration I began to sense a wet iciness at the tips of my fingers, and smiled at my small success.
“Now if you encounter any difficult or unpleasant thoughts, I want you to transform them into clouds, and just watch them sail off on the horizon.” This too, proved to be difficult, as I normally had difficulty distinguishing between pleasant and unpleasant thoughts. Most, if not all, of my thoughts, resided in a gray-zone between these two poles, and while never particularly disturbing, neither would I would venture to call them outright pleasant. I was enjoying the forest I had envisioned, however.
But I reiterate: mental images are fickle, always trembling, and their presence fleeting by nature. Still, without the bravery (or stupidity, depending on which end of the telescope you raise to your eye) to describe them, we wouldn’t have gotten very far, now would we? It is night. Whether this was of my own doing, or simply due to the innate blackness we are endowed with as humans to serve as our canvas, I am unsure, although the former seems more fitting. It has reached the point in any snowstorm worth describing where the snow has accumulated in a fresh and thick enough layer to gust off the ground in large peels, and mingle with the snow falling from the sky, so that one is unsure the origin of any snow in the air at any given moment. The forest itself is also quite disorienting, and I find myself unable to trace any one tree from its inception in the snow to its canopy—each time I choose a tree to attend to, my attention is either captured by a different one, taking the former’s place, or lost in the blizzard altogether. There is not much else in the air aside from snow and trees, however, and I don’t mind the confusion.
There I existed for what seemed to be quite a long time, although my perception was most likely skewed given the task at hand, until Julie’s voice once again greeted me in the darkness. “Take a deep breath. In and out.” A gust of snow blew past me. “I want you now to imagine a small locked container, perhaps the size of a jewelry box or smaller, and place it in front of you.” There in front of me appeared a little wooden chest, locked with a small metal hatch, and the top of it began to gather snow immediately. “This box is a magic box. Let it contain whatever you’d like, only don’t try and choose what goes into it—just let it fill all by itself.” There the box sat in my lap, gathering snow but otherwise remaining unchanged. I wondered what the purpose of this part of the exercise was, but my hesitancy relented, and for a long time I felt it silently collect materials from strange and foreign corners of my mind. Like Julie suggested, I didn’t pay any attention to how much was going into the small box, nor did I actually know what it was collecting exactly.
“We’re nearing the end of our meditation, and with it, I want you all to all to either open the box, or leave it closed. Then, when you’re ready, open your eyes.” The full coldness of my blizzard made itself known, and the wetness that had been contained to my fingertips crept over the remainder of my body, chilling me immensely. As the wooden chest sank deeper into the snow, I pondered the choice Julie had presented to me—scuffling chairs and feet became just barely audible, and I could tell that my neighbors were as well. I reached out with my hands, now shaking painfully from frostbite, brushed the snow off of it, unhooked the latch, and opened the top of an empty box.
I took a deep breath and opened my eyes, returning to the circle as quickly as I had left it. The room was almost completely dark now—Julie must have turned the lights off at some point, and the sun had long since set—and there I sat, in a gray and purplish light, slightly confused and embarrassed at the vacantness of my little wooden chest. For a moment I had really hoped, and truthfully even expected, that it would have contained the object of my search, or at least a clue of some kind.
We all sat breathing in the darkness together until a voice—not Julie’s but Ellie’s, surprisingly—spoke. “How can we get out of here?” There were tears stifling her voice.
Julie closed the session with some words I hadn’t paid attention to, and after turning the lights back on, directed us all out of the building, collecting the paper signs off of the walls as we passed back through the hallways in reverse. I drove us back home in relative quietude, exchanging only a few words of comfort to Ellie, whose eyes I couldn’t see but was sure were quite wet, and walked her back into her house. We said goodnight and she left me at the entranceway.
I have since tried Julie’s meditation several times, and have had successively less luck on each attempt, failing to conjure an environment that is a fraction as vivid or tangible as that forest. I’m not sure what I’m hoping to find in that box if I manage to find it again, or what Julie intended for it to hold in the first place. I returned to school the following week, and although I didn’t intend for it to be, that night was the last time I saw Ellie, for a few weeks later my mother called to tell me that she had passed away. She also mailed me a gift Ellie had apparently left on her kitchen table for me. A small brass jewelry box arrived in my mail several days later, closed with a little hatch. It was almost weightless.