Some Random Thoughts on Loneliness

Sometimes feelings are difficult for me to characterize. I woke up this morning feeling, for lack of a better word, lonely. "How could I be lonely?" I thought. I have a lovely wife and three sons with me, and many good friends, co-workers, neighbors, ... I've been thinking about it all day and have come to the conclusion that maybe what I'm feeling isn't loneliness, it's emptiness. While emptiness seems to capture what I'm feeling more accurately, I am very unsettled by it, since emptiness implies something is missing. The problem is, I don't know what's missing. How can I fill a void if I don't know what to fill it with? This got me to thinking that perhaps loneliness and emptiness are one in the same or that maybe loneliness is just one form of emptiness.

I can remember sitting next to my father on his death bed nearly twenty years ago. I stared up at a painting on the living room wall for hours while he slept. My father claimed to see a woman smiling back at him in that painting. It was a landscape painting with rolling grassy hills, and some trees and a few cattle grazing near a river bed. No smiling woman could be seen anywhere by me or anyone else except my father. The hospice nurse told me that morphine sometimes has that effect. I kept looking anyway -- up close, far away, at different angles -- nothing. I was perplexed. My father was not one to talk outside of his head, even on morphine.

He awoke once with tears running across his temple into his ear. He told me how lonely he was, how utterly alone he felt. "How could he be lonely?" I thought. I was there sitting right next to him, holding his hand. My mother was always there in the living room with him. The hospice nurse visited every day, as did many of his friends and neighbors. How could he be lonely? I squeezed his hand, and reassured him that he was not alone, but it did not seem to console him.

I suppose it is possible to feel lonely when you're not alone. I've felt lonely at parties where I 've "chit-chatted" with everyone, but did not have a meaningful conversation with anyone. I'm feeling lonely now as I type this blog while one of my sons sits less than 15 feet away playing away on a video game. Lonely, but not alone.

Several months after my father passed away, I flew back down to Florida to pay my mother a visit. Sitting on the couch where my father's bed had been, I looked up at that painting and was startled by what I saw -- a woman smiling at me! It was the same landscape with the cows and the river, but now I could see her eyes, nose and upturned lips as plain as day. I told my mother and even pointed out each of the woman's facial features. My mother was polite and told me that she could see them too, but something in her voice told me otherwise. I felt lonely the remainder of the day, because I was now the only one that could see that smiling woman in the painting . . .