Cause Of Death: Severe Loneliness

I recently came accross a story about a woman, aged 57 years old, who locked herself in a freezer and froze to death as she intended. She left a note. She cited in it her illnesses, but above all, her severe loneliness. That became the official cause of her death: Severe Loneliness.

Loneliness is more than a state of mind but there is a cure if one can get past the paralysing effect of what it is to feel or be lonely. As a person closes their eyes in daylight hours to try to understand blindness, yet coming away knowing it takes a lot longer to know its true effects, this, I would imagine, is the same way that a person that would try to understand loneliness would come away with the same result.

To many, the lonely ones, it can be creeping and hard to admit, even after a loved one has died. Defence facades can pop up like jolly Rogers or busy Joe, or cantakrerious Mary, or eccentric Agatha. Pride is a heavy burden that can break a strong person, and yet there is an array of help out there starting with the person themselves who is most affected. It is always the first port of call, and the second is just being able to reach out. It can, all too often, be a matter of life and death.

As the story about that woman in the freezer from France who died, all other life still living is local and it is there that help can begin. By the very busyness of others live’s lonely people can seem invisible; the Elanor Rigsby’s of this world would not be noticed enough to ask, “where do they all come from”  as so poigently sung by the Beatles. But if we can all slow down a bit you can notice them everywhere.

Often the best help you can offer them is the subterfuge of not helping until they can do for themselves. At the very least they need to know where that get that help in their local area. Teaching them how to fish and all that can be done without them ever having to step in the water, and when it is done it can be little surprise on how well they can swim too while fishing at the same time. And one hour a week is not a lot to give to help them of the 168 that make it up.

In a few words, for those who are not lonley, yet, to help other lonely people can be the skills that can be learned should it ever, the scourge of  loneliness that is, happen to themselves.

Barry Clifford