Listening to the loneliness that so many of my elder subjects experienced upon the death of their spouse broke my heart. They each described suffering from a profound sense of abandonment by their friends and family members, particularly after the brief period of “acceptable” mourning time had passed. They weren’t angry. They understood that people who haven’t lost a spouse can’t necessarily understand the grieving process or know how to handle it. But they all wished that their loved ones had made more of an effort to stay in touch—that they had reached out with love rather than avoiding them like the plague, as if they might catch something deadly. They also hated feeling pushed to get on with their lives by those who still had meaningful lives to live. As Marsha put it, she wanted to crawl under a rock and mourn for as long as she liked, while still knowing that someone cared enough about her to check in.
While I can’t fully understand what these seniors are going through, not having lost a spouse myself, their feelings of abandonment still resonated with me. We have all felt “less than” or excluded from groups that other people belong to. You fall out of the group—for whatever reason. Maybe you lose a wife, or your boyfriend dumps you, or you have a huge fight with some queen bee in the friend group, and all of a sudden you’re on the fringe, and the people you used to talk to, hang with, text … vanish. It’s very lonely. Whether you're 16 or 96, it’s much the same feeling. And it sucks.