Eaten by Cats

It's a hard and scary thought for most people: you're going to die alone. Even if someone is there holding your hand you're still generally the only one in the room dying, although probably the hand-holding makes it seem somewhat less lonely.

What's harder and scarier is living alone. Growing old alone. For some people it is a task of such terrifying magnitude that they'll do anything to avoid it. Live with people they nearly hate. Suffer awful treatment because at least it's treatment. Dash from one social engagement to the next like they're rungs on a hamster wheel. Some people have children because they think children will keep them from feeling alone. Maybe all these things help: the partners clutched like life rafts, the friends selected from desperation, the children bred in preventive hope. I don't know.

The thing is: no matter how many people we surround ourselves with, we are, as Rilke says, unutterably alone. I think that it's good to learn that, because then you can choose the company of people whose presence does not function a light against the darkness, because you make the light you need yourself.

Sooner or later, you come to an understanding that dying, probably the most mysterious thing you'll ever do, is something you're going to do alone. I think that this understanding makes the things you do alone in the rest of your life seem less challenging. Go to the movies alone, eat alone, wake up alone: this is nothing once you accept that you're going to die alone. But until you come to that understanding, I think you live with something worse than knowing you will die alone. You will live alone, too. You actually already do, but you are more alone for imagining that you are not.

Comments

[Carrie]

Exactly.

For me the reality that I live alone, that we live alone, was somewhat of a relief. Knowing that meant that i no longer had to desperately clutch for togetherness I would never get.

Love your writing. Thanks for it all.

[Eva]

So very true. Thanks for your blog. I really enjoy reading it.Eva

[unraveled]

rilke said it but so have you - and in so many frank and beautiful ways.
thank you.