My friend from Kansas, trying to get his life back on track after his wife’s death six months before, was considering a move from the last home they had shared in Lawrence to Athens, Georgia, where they had once lived and where he still knew people. He had recently made two brief sojourns to the city in the hope that something would click, giving him a sense that moving there would be the right decision. He even volunteered on both visits at the State Botanical Garden. But each time, despite finding the garden a worthy cause and the volunteering easy—even sometimes enjoyable—he left knowing that, now and always, he was alone.
Still, he stoically made plans for a third, extended stay, hoping to find other activities to fill his days and make life without his wife at least bearable. So far, her loss had been unbearable, and he was sinking ever deeper into despair and loneliness under the weight of her absence, which is a strange way to write about the absence of responsibilities, commitment, a person to respond to your good morning, good night, or simple question at the table: “More?” A heavy absence, a loud silence, a pressing emptiness—loneliness can teach you all of these paradoxes. Without those small but specific customs of interaction, everything else is as dry dust—it all blows away, leaving your eyes stinging and making you cry.
This third visit was to be for a month. He had rented an Airbnb, alerted the director of the garden to his arrival, and even resolved to talk to the director of the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at UGA about volunteering there. Then he got in his car and drove 850 miles, through Missouri and Tennessee. No fresh start—that’s too hopeful. He wasn’t rebuilding, just trying to stay on his feet. Survival, not reinvention.
On arriving, he saw that the home he had paid for in advance was inhospitable—even, to his mind, uninhabitable. So he found a hotel for the night, albeit an expensive one, and began the task of looking for alternative lodgings. He calculated that he couldn’t stay more than two nights in the hotel before calling it quits and retreating to Lawrence.
“How awful!” I emailed. He had arranged to sell his home in Kansas, and so with no house to call his and no temporary housing either, he was essentially homeless. I told him about a Spanish word I knew for having no home: desamparo, which is more evocative than homelessness, containing in its meaning both the literal state plus the emotional consequences. Or maybe it is just because the word is less familiar to me that it swirls into my mind like a cold wind across a dark desert where refugees huddle in their makeshift tents. It suggests being on the move, wandering, being chased from one place to another. Parar means to stop, so, though desamparo comes from a different root, it conjures wandering without stopping. The word also means neglect, abandonment, defenselessness, and hopelessness. “So,” I wrote my friend, “this word is for people in a state of wandering neglect. It is often used to describe refugees. You are like a refugee, a disaster victim, trying to survive but questioning, in your current state, the value of survival when your home and homeland are gone.” Sympathy guided my response. But I also wondered if a little perspective might help him, and I considered sending him the pictures I had taken surreptitiously during my recent trip to Las Vegas—images of the truly unhoused. Why would I do such a thing? Not to dismiss his pain, but to remind him that his situation, painful as it is, still included shelter, safety, and a future. He isn’t as bad off as he feels.
The point about feelings, however, is that they are sometimes more real than reality. What does it matter how I should feel after a day without sustenance if in fact I don’t have the strength to stand? So for my friend, there’s little comfort in others being desamparado if he feels worse than they look. Perhaps they are dirty, have no change of clothes, no car, not even a shopping cart in which to store their belongings. But they don’t look as if the ordinary trials of day-to-day existence are more than they can handle. They look like they might perk up with any one of those common conveniences we take for granted—a bed, a shower, a fridge to raid. They look like they might revive, as a wilting flower does with water.
Yet I went ahead and told him he could be worse off. “Not much comfort in that, though, is there?” I asked, as if to half retract my statement.
And then what to write? “Be strong?” “Take courage?” “Think of something pleasant?” I shifted to my life. “It’s nearly 6 a.m. We are all up. We seem focused and our movements coordinated, but it’s just an illusion. Trouble in the … Isn’t there some saying about trouble looming? It looms here. But I will not enter into competition about troubles.” This brought to mind “Trouble in the Fields,” a Nanci Griffith song from the ’80s. She was a new and rising country star. She didn’t rise very far, and now she is dead. Why does one not notice in youth how everything ends? I wrote, “Every fresh spring to sweltering summer to dead winter, every baby struggling to its feet to heartless youth to aged, desperate dodger, intent on him- or herself. That seems to be the path. It is so lush at times we don’t see where the way leads. Onward we go, distracted. I am all for distraction. And if, distracted, we stumble and fall over the precipice, well, at least it is over quickly.”
“But you are not as near the cliff as it might seem. You have friends who all care about you and want you to get firm footing. They will reach out a steadying hand. Please don’t forget that.”
Now, to close. The words of comfort for a suffering friend are finite. And my friend had been suffering since his wife became ill, two years ago.
“Wishing you luck with this latest difficulty,” I wrote. As I reread the email, I asked myself what good any of my words could do. No good. I might as well have skipped the filler and gone straight from my first expression of sympathy to my last of good wishes. But no—all the in-between is the distraction. I believe in distraction. And my friend, with his pointless, empty hours and days, needs it.
