I’m not the kind, thinks a woman in a William Trevor story called “A Day.” The kind she’s thinking of is the kind who adopts, the kind “to take on other people’s kids.” She has no feeling for it, she reflects. Instead, it was their own particular children that she wanted. But that had not been her and her husband’s fortune.
Reading this story at the end of an evening spent with Rachel, my friend visiting from England, talking about loneliness and how to deal with it, and of bucking up in the face of loss, I thought again of my friend in Kansas, a recent widower who was having difficulty finding motivation for living. It was all just so sad, he had written. It being his life, the rooms of his house, the streets of his town, his future—everything. “I’ll never find another you,” sang the Seekers in 1964 in their first UK single hit. The song is an ode to true love, but a celebration, too, of the miracle of finding someone. Astronomers have described the search for alien life in the universe as looking for a needle in a cosmic haystack, but the successful search against tremendous odds happens all the time: among the many who could never stir their hearts, people find someone—or the one—who can.
For 35 years, my friend in Kansas and his wife lived together. Not just shared their home and their morning oatmeal and their evening walks but lived in each other’s pockets, as the Brits might say. Now my friend’s cozy nest was gone, and just the house remained, a hollow shell. I will never find another companion, he lamented. I wrote to him that first you must try before declaring failure. What effort has he made? Joined a church choir? Volunteered at the soup kitchen? Stood on corners holding signs in support of a cause or in protest of a policy? Signed up as a dog walker at the animal shelter? Of course not. He has no heart for it.
Rachel’s father, meanwhile, is widowed and has had no trouble keeping his life going without a wife. He is 98 and lives alone, shops for groceries online and then takes the car out to pick them up, tends a large garden and trims the low trees and hedges, follows the news, and keeps up with his children and grandchildren without needing them nearby. Astonishing. But to me, his real feat is not doing all this by himself but for himself. He was a minister, and perhaps he has inner strength from years of acting as an example for his congregation. He needs no particular person in his life, it appears, to make it meaningful for him. But should he have that need, I suspect he would go find someone. New Yorker writer Roger Angell, widowed at 91, did. People to meet are all around, if you’ll only open your eyes.
I understand, and so does my friend, that in his home, he won’t meet anyone. What may also be clear is that he doesn’t want another, different companion. He’s not the kind to settle for an ill-fitting stand-in, an inferior surrogate. He doesn’t want someone else’s discard, someone overlooked, someone going through her own travails of losing a partner. But that’s not quite right. He doesn’t have anything against other people, except that they are not his lost spouse. No replacement, however suitable, will come close to the real thing. For my friend, no other woman can ever approximate the only woman.
“Every woman in the world.” Those are lyrics, too, from an Air Supply love song proclaiming the uniqueness but especially the comprehensiveness of the loved one, as good to the singer as every woman combined. My friend, as he knows, is not alone in his loss or his feeling of destitution. For months I have sent hopeful greetings from my world to his, telling him of good things in life, assuring him that I know of people sustaining great losses and bouncing back, finding new causes, new friends, new loves even. Have another go, I have urged him. Not at love, necessarily, but at joy. But I no longer urge him toward specific actions. He has been blinded by love and cannot adjust to a different light. I would like to think that love opens doors, topples walls, shortens distances. But blinding love limits. Blind love for life, for example, could keep you from examining in patient awe the shriveled husk of what was once a blooming flower or the moldering trunk of a fallen tree, and from wondrous contemplation of the empty shells of snails, astonishing artifacts of long-gone creatures.
Finances—I know nothing of them, but I know there is “silver in the stars and gold in the mornin’ sun,” as another popular song, “I’m Just a Country Boy,” by Fred Hellerman and Marshall Barer, says. My friend was born and bred a country boy. Surely the natural world that he loves will work its magic. Give it time, I might counsel, except that time, the cure for all hurt, also gives you a place from which to remember, to fear, to mourn. Go to the garden, then, for as W. S. Merwin said, “There is no time in the garden.” Instead, you may find, as Merwin did, “joy in being alive in being in the world.” You have only to go and open your eyes.
“You have to be the kind to open your eyes,” I can hear my friend reply.
Do you, I silently think, have to be the kind that doesn’t?
As John Prine sings in “Dear Abby,” “You are what you are and you ain’t what you ain’t.” No matter how good the advice or how well-meant, it might all be to no avail. As my friend and I both know, some problems have no solutions.
