On aging and solitude
I found the following clipping very interesting. It’s similar to how I envision my old age: a time to reminisce about the life I’ve led.
A life of solitude does not have to be a life of loneliness
By Donald M. Murray, Boston Globe Correspondent | January 18, 2005
When I was 40 I was warned about the loneliness of old age, but now that I am twice 40 I find I enjoy the community of the self.
I have been surprised and grateful for the support Minnie Mae and I have been given by family, friends, and neighbors, even some whose names I do not know.
The importance of the support from the community has been so dramatic that I have overlooked the importance of the increased time I spend alone, since Minnie Mae unfortunately needs the care of an assisted living community.
Of course I miss her. In the 53 years we have been together our lives have grown as one. Each morning when I wake, I still expect to find her at my side, but the loneliness that I had feared has become a blessing, not a curse.
I enjoy the trivial freedoms of living alone. I can get up early or late, nuke and eat a one-course meal of peas, only peas; turn the volume on the hi-fi up and the TV off; sit at my computer at 3 a.m. if I can't sleep; keep a refrigerator without eggs or milk.
True solitude, however, takes me far deeper into the self than the freedom of the trivial. I realize I was bred for aloneness. Some of my ancestors, I am sure, spent their days alone, in a small rowboat fishing out of sight of Scotland.
Others spent weeks, perhaps months, hunting alone in the great forests of Scotland before the English slaughtered the trees so they could provide fuel for the early factories of the Industrial Age.
I feel those great-great-great grandfathers and beyond in my genes, and alone I can travel back to live with the ancestors who programmed me for solitude.
I was blessed with a sickly childhood and that wonderful condition called convalescence, and spent weeks in bed reading, daydreaming, and being introduced to classical music on the radio by Walter Damrosch.
I like waking in an empty house, walking from room to room, listening to the silence, different in each room. Shadows share my rooms, and they become friends, and we laugh at how they scared me at bedtime when I was young. The painter's light at the edges of the day changes each room from hour to hour.
It takes an hour of sitting alone to empty my brain of yesterday and tomorrow. Then it fills. I am the boy who explored the Ashuelot River by himself; the soldier who was sent, alone, to find the British Army so we would not attack each other; the newspaper reporter who felt comfortable on the sidelines, taking account of life.
Alone, pleasing no one but myself, I keep exploring my many lives, what was, what is, what might have been.
I no longer travel to the Norwegian Coast but I am a tourist in my past, surprised at those who worry about an old man's lonely life.