PREPARE FOR THE GREAT LONELINESS

        

 

When I look toward the future, I look to the population under the age of fifty-five, I want to caution them to prepare for the great loneliness in the last twenty years of their lives.

 

We have become so individualistic in out culture (the entire North American culture) but our individualism, the weakness of our commitment and connection to the larger community, has unpleasant consequences. We may come to old age with the financial resources to look after ourselves until the day we die but there may be hardly anyone who will care how well we are doing in our declining years. 

 

If we are not involved and committed to the well-being of the community in which we live at the age of forty, we will most probably carry that same lifestyle with us into our eighties. Just a few months ago, one older parent shared that their forty-year old son and his family belong to nothing except to a sports club in Calgary. Then he stepped back from the sentence: “But they pay a subscription fee for that service.”

 

As a human being, if we do not belong to the larger community beyond ourselves, no one will belong to us. If people say in the nursing home, “No one comes to see me or to even care for me,” we will sadly add, “But you were not there for anyone when you were in your forties and fifties.” Loneliness, as the ghost of our past absence to community, will come back to haunt us in the one room in which we live in the nursing home.

 

Families are also so small and divided in so many ways that we can envision the situation of the adult daughter or son asking the question: Who will look after my aged Mother in Prince George and my aged Father in Winnipeg? Is loneliness what life comes to in old age?

 

Our deepest human need is to belong. This need is stronger than our need for nourishment. Our strongest community will almost always be our family. But we must not neglect all the other forms of belonging that we need to survive as a human being. We need to belong to the people who are physically around us. We need to belong to the civic community (however large or small that may be).  We need a community of friends, work associates and other communities.

 

But if we do not belong (a working commitment) to other forms of community, the consequence will follow; no one will belong to us. Hence: loneliness!

 

When we see our adult children dropping out of our faith communities (it is also very prevalent in the Moslem, Hindu and Buddhist faiths), we need to recognize that the first commitment people drop out in this individualist culture is the faith community. Do not stop there. Continue counting all the other forms of community that they are not involved in and committed to.   Do not be surprised that the connection and commitment to family may be very weak.

 

The direction of the cultural flow in North America is to arrive at the last twenty years of life, to be financially secure, but oh, so lonely!