The previous entry brought this particular topic back to the forefront of my mind again. When something awful happens to you, or when someone close to you dies, everyone offers their assistance. Whether in person or via a note or card, the words vary little. “If there is anything at all I can do to help, please don’t hesitate to ask.” But you do. Hesitate. And invariably you don’t call. But when you do…well, be prepared to not be helped. And that is a best case scenario. The flipside is you will be made to feel as though you are inconviencing the person who so sincerely implored you to allow them to be useful in some small way in the first place. Or worse still, there is the bait and switch in which you ask for something very specific, the samaritan agrees and then turns around and tries to talk you into accepting some other form of “help” in its place. Usually something you don’t need that will actually make work for you but is easier, quicker, less burdensome for the person while still allowing him or her to feel as though another gold star has been placed behind his or her name in that book God uses to assess our worthiness of his love. A little fyi to all, the next time you are overcome with desire to offer your services in a crisis or to the newly bereaved, stop yourself. The last thing this person needs is another obligation on the to do list. It is a burden to be expected to ask for help when it is obvious to one and all that you actually need it. If you see something that needs to be done, simply ask the person if it is okay for you to go ahead and do it. Case in point, the winter after my husband’s diagnoses was a fairly snowy and blistering cold one. My daughter was too small to be outside with me while I shoveled our driveway and sidewalks, but I was very leery of leaving her indoors with her father. He was suffering from moderate dementia already and none too steady on his feet. So, my husband’s uncle called to offer his services to shovel the walks. He had a snowblower and a truck to haul it in. Great, I thought and told him sure. He replied, just let me know when you need me. If you can’t already see the problem then you don’t read very well. Needless to say, Uncle did not help me get the walks shoveled, I ended up with frostbite on all my toes, and my daughter developed a rather strong aversion to being alone with her dad. People mean well, but the road to hell is paved with their selfish souls. We all want to appear compassionate and seem helpful and that is about it. Actually rearranging our own lives to come to the aid of friends and family does not provide the same ego boost as just offering to. The last two days of my husband’s life, everyone descended on the hospice. This after mostly ignoring him for three months he was there. There is nothing like impending death to light a fire under relatives and friends. And they all uttered variations of the “whatever I can do” mantra. And even after nearly three years of mostly being let down, I still asked for help. I didn’t get it. My close friend, Vicki and her husband, were amazing as they had been all along. A few others came through with odds and ends. My aunt and my mother came running without hesitation. My father, who was quite ill himself, was wonderful. But, as for the rest, it was just words.
grief
There is a social isolation epidemic in America. We have fewer close friends than in years past. We have fewer intimates with whom we can share those thoughts that keep us up into the night. We have replaced physical relationships with Netbuddies and conversations with texting.
For myself I am in a friendship drought again, but this is not unusual for me. I have weathered many periods of social solitude over the years, and I have never had more than two close friends at a time.
I was reading the local paper today and my least favorite columnist was weighing in on this particular topic. It was her contention that people in the Midwest are much friendlier than people in larger cities or Europe. She based this on the observations of another woman who had lived in Europe, Boston and then finally Iowa.
I am not sure I buy into the notion that it is geography or ethnicity that make some places less “friendly” than others. I think, like most things, it comes back to you and where you are in your life internally. I have been more open at different times and definitely closed to relationships at others. There have been times even when I thought I wanted relationships but did nothing to further that end because in reality I didn’t want anything more than to be on my own.
Being the caretaker of a terminally ill husband and now a widow, I have come to know loneliness in ways that defy easy definitions. There were days on end when the only people I had to interact with were a toddler and a husband with a short-term memory that was so short he could literally turn away from you and back again and have forgotten everything you just told him. It wasn’t so much losing him physically but the emotional loss. For both of us. He was so disoriented that he couldn’t access the emotions that had pulled us together in the first place.
Now, of course, I face the new burden of making people too uncomfortable for them to want to be around me. I have to choose my words carefully so as not to reference my old life too often. Too many remarks and I am living in the past and too few means that I am in denial or worse, I must not have loved my husband very much in the first place to be moving on so quickly.
An article in last month’s Oprah talked about how the socially isolated bring much of their loneliness on themselves. It gave the standard advice that the shy and socially inept always receive. Practice smiling. Put yourselves in social situations more often. Relax. Blah. Blah. More simply put, try not to be yourself so much and people will like you more for being more like them.
I don’t smile continually and that’s a genetic thing I realized only after my daughter was born. She had the most serious look on her face at all times. “She’s shy,” people would say but I never allowed her to be labeled. “She needs to assess her surroundings,” I would tell people. “When she’s ready, she’ll come to you.” I am not inept. I socialize quite well once I get my bearings, but I admit I am easily overwhelmed by numbers and noise, just like my daughter. It is easy to like outgoing and the pretty. It’s just as easy to find them annoying and shallow because frankly some people are not worth the effort of getting to know them. What they project is what you are getting.
I used to think that my loneliness was my fault somehow, like Oprah said, but it’s not. There are boundaries on my personality which make me who I am and limitations on my life, now especially, that make social situations hard to be a part of or even participate in at all. Am I lonely? Yes. I lost my husband and he had filled in all the drafty, empty spaces in my world. But am I lonelier than ever? Not really. I have been here before. It’s just a lull and it will pass and I know this because it always has.
Good title. Good question. I ran off the road last week. I knew exactly where I was going right up until the week of July 10, 2006. And then, I was lost because two things happened.
First, I graduated. Two years ago with a terminally ill husband and a two year baby to contend with I decided the best thing for all three of us was for me to get my masters. It seemed like a good idea at the time, and during the first course I took the instructor had us draft a vision of our futures. A five year plan if you will. Mine was only two. Which I thought was good because at the time I thought planning as far out as two days was a severe testing of my imagination, faith and will. It took me as far as last week when I arrived in La Crosse, Wisconsin to finish up what I had so foolishly, or amazingly depending on your point of view, started. Read Full Article
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