Are you lonesome tonight?

Helen has been away for a week in Scotland on ‘granny duty’. It’s the longest we have been apart for quite a while. It has done us no harm to be separated for a few days – ‘absence makes the heart grow fonder’ and all that.

While she was away I attended a funeral of a woman only 50 years of age. She was a lively, warm person whose life was blighted by both cancer and a stroke. There must have been 300 people at the service which speaks volumes about the esteem in which she was held. What must it be like for her husband and her young adult children not to have that welcoming presence when they come in through the front door?

When Helen was away there were a couple of moments when for me aloneness turned briefly into loneliness. When a fertile solitude turned to barrenness. These moments came late in the day when I was tired. Sleep brought new resilience.

People are often reluctant to admit they are lonely. Maybe they think it suggests some failing in themselves. That others don’t wish to be in their company. That they are not interesting or attractive enough. But it is certainly far more complex than that and may not reflect on the lonely person at all.

People are lonely for all sorts of reasons. It may be a lack of acquaintances but then you can feel lonely in a room full of people. Or they may be people who perhaps do not share your interests or values but with whom you feel you have to pretend, play some sort of social game. You can feel very isolated in a situation like that.

I remember when I was a teenager very interested in pop music thinking how many songs there were about loneliness. Elvis Presley ‘Are you lonesome tonight?’ Roy Orbison ‘Only the lonely’, Paul Anka ‘I’m just a lonely boy’, were just a few of many. If you are of a certain vintage you may just remember them. I wondered why so many. The theme persists in more recent music. Of course they were mostly about lovesick young things who had been jilted and most of us can remember the pain of young unrequited love. That was my first encounter with loneliness. There were a good many others to follow, mostly at university and the feeling that I did not fit somehow or was out of my depth. It is a universal theme - it is there in classical opera too.

And then I remember the journal of the second secretary-general of the United Nations, Dag Hammarskjöld. He tells there of the profound loneliness he felt in that very exposed and important political role. There was no one he could talk to about the strife in the world which it was his job to manage. So much highly confidential, top-secret stuff came across his desk. His journal-verse-autobiography ‘Markings’ is a book which is by turns dark, chilling, enlightening and above all profoundly human. It’s worth a read if you can get hold of a copy.

It takes real discernment to identify the fine line between gnawing loneliness and fertile aloneness, in oneself and in others. I thank my visitors, callers and non-callers this week for locating it. And I hope that the grieving husband will find in the days after the funeral, friends and family who also possess such discernment.

Photo:Shutterstock