Cheryl Pearson

THE HORROR OF BEING LONELY AT SEVENTY. by Michael Whelan The cruelest part of growing old isn't knowing that life is getting shorter. It's wondering how much of it you'll have to spend without being loved the way you once were. At seventy, loneliness is not simply an empty house. It is a body that still remembers what it feels like to be loved. God, how I miss being held. I miss holding Rebecca's hand. The beautiful simplicity of our fingers finding each other without either of us giving it a thought. I miss cuddling in bed after a long day, feeling her warmth against me, knowing that whatever horrors the world had waiting, for that one precious moment, we were safe. I miss someone telling me I look handsome. I miss hearing those three ordinary, extraordinary words: "I love you." And perhaps most heartbreaking of all, I miss saying them to someone who could whisper them back. These are the little things we take for granted until death comes along and steals them. For years, I cared for Rebecca as Parkinson's and dementia slowly took possession of the woman I adored. Cancer had already ravaged my own body. I was exhausted, frightened, and sometimes so overwhelmed that I prayed for one afternoon when nobody needed me. Now I have more afternoons than I know what to do with. What a cruel joke. People think loneliness is about having nobody to talk to. They're wrong. I can talk to friends. I can laugh. I can attend a gathering and appear perfectly happy. Then I return home. Nobody asks how my day went. Nobody reaches across the couch to touch my arm. Nobody notices that I've put on a nice shirt or that I'm unusually quiet. And the bed. Dear God, the bed. There is something almost unbearable about having an entire side of a mattress available when you'd surrender everything you own to feel someone breathing beside you again. At seventy, society seems to assume our need for tenderness has somehow expired. It hasn't. My heart is seventy. My need to be loved is ageless. I still want affection, companionship, laughter, romance, and the glorious comfort of knowing someone is genuinely happy that I walked through the door. I don't want to spend my remaining years merely remembering what love felt like. I want to feel it again. And perhaps that is what makes loneliness at seventy so terrifying. I am not finished loving. I am simply living in a world where the person who knew how to love me best is gone. But love does not vanish just because the person who awakened it is gone. It remains in the hand that still reaches across the sheets, in the words that rise to my lips with nowhere to land, in the part of me that still believes tenderness is worth wanting. So every night, when I turn out the light, my hand finds the place where hers used to be. I always tell her how my day went. And for one aching moment, in the darkness, I am not only remembering what I lost. I am remembering that I am still capable of love. And perhaps that is not the loneliest truth of all. Perhaps it is a promise. The heart that can grieve this deeply has not gone empty. It is still open. It is still reaching. Somewhere beyond the silence of this house, there may be another hand waiting to find mine—not to replace Rebecca, because no one could, but to meet the love that remains. Until then, I will keep getting up. I will put on the nice shirt. I will answer the phone, accept the invitation, sit beside someone who needs company, help other caregivers how to get through another day and let the world surprise me when it can. I have lost the life I knew. But I have not lost my capacity to live. And as long as I can still love, still hope, still reach toward another human being, my story is not over. The bed may be empty tonight. But I am still here. And here, even at seventy, is not the end.