Piercing the Silence

More than a decade ago I was speaking in Washington DC to a gala gathering of parents and families of (mostly) gay youth. “Human beings cannot live without community,” I said that evening. “We are social creatures, we human beings. When we are, or when we feel, cut off from those with whom we first crawled around the nest, we grow sick and die. Study after study shows that longevity and wellbeing are immediately and intimately tied to our sense of being in community: valued, love, and needed.”

I thought back to that evening earlier this week when I read that the COVID pandemic has accelerated a parallel pandemic of lonesomeness. According to one paper, “a 2021 study found that over 60 percent of young American adults report that they are either frequently lonely or lonely nearly all the time.”

Then came a Surgeon General’s report warning that young people in America are facing “devastating” mental health consequences as a result of various factors, including the COVID pandemic. I was shaken by this: Emergency room visits for suicide attempts rose 51 percent for adolescent girls from 2020 to 2021.

In 2017, lonesomeness especially among elders led the UK to name a “Minister of Loneliness.” The results have been mixed, in part because what’s needed is community and there’s no government strategy to mandate community. Still, I applaud them for recognizing loneliness as a genuine, existential, right-now crisis.

My claim in Washington that “human beings cannot live without community” was not hyperbole. It was, and still is, the truth. If our divisions and hostilities erode the core of our communities, we lose what most we need: the human exchange, the common touch, the interest in each other by which we live. Our youth disappear. Our elders fade. Our neighbors grow silent.

It’s holiday time, a glorious opportunity to reach out to someone who’s grown silent in my life or my neighborhood. It’s one of those rare occasions when a single word, a caring gesture, a “you matter to me” could, literally, save a life — a holiday gift beyond any we can buy.

Becoming a Puddle

In a few days, it’ll be a year since the passing of a close friend of a close friend, Hendrick (“Henk”) Hart: philosopher, professor, writer. As a child, he and his family survived near starvation during the Nazi occupation of The Netherlands. Years later, as a father, he lay next to his beloved daughter as cancer took her life and, a few years later, cared equally for his dying wife.

Henk emerged from life agonies without rancor. He lived, and died, believing life had purpose. Here’s one of my favorites of his brief writings penned in his 80s.

“Love and grace can seem like a trickle. They can also flow like small spring rivers. And occasionally they grow into mighty waters. But none of that is possible without drops and puddles.

In my old age, I try being a puddle and I know that sometimes people step in my puddle and go on their way spreading a few drops of it. 

They allow me to dream of tsunamis of grace and monsoons of love. And, in the dream, the light dawns.”

Let us all aspire to becoming puddles.

There's Gotta Be a Word for This

Even at the depths of the COVID pandemic, I didn’t sit around and read dictionaries. Perhaps I should have, because I’ve been thinking about words a lot lately, but I didn’t.

Thinking about words…. I’ve been known to quote writer and historian Garry Wills who told us, “The problem with words is, they have meaning.” He had a point. We can’t use words indiscriminately making them mean what we want them to mean. They already have meaning even before I get to them. If I say “I love you,” I’m not merely filling the air with sound. The word “love”  means something. Said honestly, those three words means a lot.

So I noticed when some Republicans who wanted dilute the violence of the January 6 assault on our nation, they changed the words. Rioters and thugs, killers and brutes, became (who could believe this?) “tourists visiting the Capitol.” The mob violence, by all definitions an insurrection, was transmuted in Republican speak to “a group of law-abiding Americans expressing themselves.”

C’mon on now. Words have meaning, and their meaning ought to be rooted in truth. We can put a little lipstick on the pig but it’s still a pig. How can words possibly accommodate changing “rioters and thugs” or “killers and brutes” into “tourists”? As nearly as I can tell, we can’t get there from here.

Just for our entertainment, here’s a word-based diversion: In The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, John Koening collects real experiences for which no one has a perfectly good word. They add up to (his phrase) “obscure sorrows,” and Koening finds or creates words to convey those sorrows. For example, growing from thick German roots is this beauty: “mauerbauertraurigkeit, the inexplicable urge to push people away, even close friends who you really like” – as if your social taste buds suddenly went sour. I didn’t know we needed a word for that but, just in case, we now have one.

(Incidentally, I really liked this one: “anecdoche, a conversation in which everyone is talking but nobody is listening.” I could have used that word for the past number of years to describe the experience of living in America.)

So why am I flailing around with weird words when I could be in the pool with my granddaughter or considering a visit to some imaginary place that’s COVID-free? This simple truth: No matter how hard I’ve tried, I can’t find a word that describes what I’m feeling. It’s becoming an obsession – oh, and by the way, most of you don’t have a word for it either.

For one thing, none of us have a word for how we feel because we’ve never quite felt like this before. This is uncharted territory. Vaguely frightened. Sort of scared. Mostly exhausted. Unable to make decisions. Drifting through days. Sleepless at night. Wondering about everything.

I won’t get direction or clarity from the “news,” so I’ve mostly stopped watching. MSNBC says Trump should be jailed and Biden should be praised. That makes sense to me, but neither is happening so, why bother?

On the next channel, Fox says vaccinations make you sterile or maybe dead. That’s handy, since it saves us confronting the reality that, while dodging coffins and body bags, it means we don’t owe anyone safety in our presence. We can be infected and boundlessly infect others. Oy. I think I have a word for this: treason.

Some days I feel like a badminton birdie getting slammed from one place to another, and I don’t even have a word for how that makes me feel. “Morally outraged” goes in the right direction. “Furious” occurs to me. But it’s frustrating to have no word that says I’m too tired to care and, at the same time, grief-stricken at the ignorance, dishonesty and collective evil seen daily as this pandemic continues to simmer.

Maybe I need a word that describes the Wonderland in which I’m Alice. I’m wandering through territory where right is left, up is down, truth as I’ve known it isn’t true, and the Cheshire Cat just mentioned that all the characters are mad.

According to opinion writers, the American economy is humming and people are spending, but despite it all the mood is “glum.” Glum. That may be close to what I feel. Morning, noon and night, all grey, all dull, all glum. That might work.

The New York Times says we’re all “trapped in a pandemic funk: Millions of Americans can’t shake a gloomy outlook.” Okay, maybe “glum,” maybe “gloomy,” maybe I’m just in a “funk.”

My life isn’t awful. I haven’t suffered COVID. I embrace one grandchild and have another on the way. I have friends I love and trust, some money in the bank and some food in the fridge. But none of this has changed the reality that I’m troubled, and don’t have a way to describe it.

My mother, known to engage happily in what might be called “therapeutic profanity” believed no woman should use certain crude terms. Maybe she was right. But let me borrow, for a moment, that 4-letter term for excrement. My feet are anchored in acres of the stuff; the stench is horrible; it’s neither solid nor liquid, and I can’t get out. I’m stuck in it.

Okay, your turn: Kindly, if you can, suggest a word for this.