Getting Out

Where might I go, or even want to go?  I've probably entered into that growing cohort of lonely people, seniors whose personal isolation jeopardizes their longevity.  It's been a slow slide with a few demarcation points.  Retirement, while planned, took its interpersonal toll.  At work I greeted many others every single day.  There was work, which itself was interactive, but there was also banter, along with ample solicited and unsolicited opportunities to make a statement directed to a recipient.  I didn't make the kind of friends I could really count on in a pinch, but many reliable acquaintances to exchange professional ideas and personal amusements.  Not that I avoided solitude.  My office had a door which I sometimes closed.  So did my car, which I always closed during the hour and a half each day it took to drive alone round trip between my home and the medical center.  I never felt abandoned, nor did I ever feel the need to seek out new people who came my way passively in significant numbers.  Yet there is a distinction between work colleagues and friends.  When I retired, as fond as I was of the people I got to know, I did not sense deprivation from their absences nor an insatiable need to replace the lost crowd.

After leaving the daily pageant of work, I did not have any fraternal organizations to continue social engagement, other than my synagogue which by then had designated me a talented outlier, more useful than important.  Participatory invitations reflected that, though it long predated my retirement.  Instead, I booked a cruise, my first trip to Europe.  This is also not where one nurtures friends though for one glorious week and a few adjacent days, I had people all around.  Dinner had a fixed group of diners from places that I would never expect to visit.  Tours had buses and guides and lines.  Pools had people of interest in the water and on the chaises.  Glorious but short-lived.  And preceding and following, I would not have described myself as socially deprived, let alone clinically lonely.  

More enduring was the state University's Senior Division.  I enrolled my second semester of eligibility.  In selecting classes, I intentionally spanned the midday break, responding by taking my lunch and a large insulated mug of coffee to sip periodically.  Classrooms were full.  Some of my selections involved writing and critiquing which assured interaction.  But the real benefit to seniors took place outside the classroom.  People populated the lounges between classes, sitting wherever an open chair became available.  We all wore name tags, which enabled conversation, typically about our classes, but sometimes about our avocations.  People ate in the cafeteria, sitting at round tables, sometimes with friends, but sometimes with unknown people who needed an empty space.  And my classes were never cavernous lectures, though special guest lectures could be, so the instructor could be interrupted for a question or comment with some frequency as the class proceeded.

Covid completely undermined the many opportunities for me to wedge myself amid other people.  Those classes just stopped, cancelled by the university.  In person synagogue activities abruptly disappeared.  Those still employed at my medical center had ample numbers of people, many quite ill, but with physical barriers between people not at all conducive to chat, were that even possible amid the volume of sick patients.  My senior medical group, a rewarding source of monthly camaraderie, cancelled its live sessions in favor of Zoom classes.  Probably for the first time, I felt alone.  My car took a daily directed journey once or twice a day circling a few different routes, typically past shopping centers which were open.  I would stop at a WaWa for coffee or occasional soda, only available To Go,  even when the desire to exit my car exceeded any need for something liquid.  The supermarket got visited more frequently for a quick tour, beyond the periodic shopping that I actually needed.  Trader Joe's, my secondary grocer, established limited access which would invariably generate a significant queue.  Sometimes I would put myself on that line mainly to be amid others for twenty minutes followed by a few purchases inside. While those exits from the house became my most sought after daily activities, screens dominated by far, whether social media or my TV or even learning something new on my own.  A sense of loneliness did not happen right away, though.  There were major organizations now sponsoring national and international interviews with public figures or other experts whose stature would previously have made them unavailable to me.  So I took advantage, taking a measure of delight, even, when my name was mentioned by the moderator as the person who submitted a chosen question to the person being interviewed.  I didn't perceive these as loneliness, perhaps, because as a nobody the CEO of an international organization would never invite me to be personally present for a fee I would be willing to pay.

Zoom for things that I would have preferred personal presence greatly changed my perception of where I really desired to be.  Synagogue activities where spontaneity previously enhanced the event, whether committee meeting or class, became more programmed.  And the university senior division's Zoom compensation largely failed its intended purpose of keeping retirees at the top potential.  We had classes, many executed quite well, but once attendance exceeded 20, protocol took over.  No longer could a listener question a teacher's comment in real time, but had to submit the question in a chat box to be conveyed by a class monitor later.  PowerPoint edged out discussion.  Most importantly, there were no chairs in a lounge or round tables in a cafeteria, walks from the parking lot, or even interactive time of any format between classes.  It became very much like watching TV, largely talking heads without any of the sophisticated video documentary re-enactment of modern streaming TV.  Zoom was efficient but not at all equivalent.

Vaccines came, mortality dropped, face mask barriers became largely optional and discarded.  Classrooms sort of reopened, though my medical group of late career physicians did not return.  Worship resumed.  Yet restoration of what was never came.  My classes sometimes had a lot of people, mostly few in person.  Zoom allowed me to take classes from very good teachers who lived 100 miles away, but not to drink coffee with them.  Gathering places, from coffee shops to regional malls gave way to making coffee in the Keurig machine and purchasing worldly goods on Amazon.  And those grand lectures and interviews with movers and shakers, the centerpiece of early covid, have largely served their purpose while the sponsoring organizations harvested my email address acquired in signing on with repurposing for soliciting funds.

That leaves me, and no doubt many others, with fewer hands to shake, fewer people to react to dumb quips, and if longevity research is accurate, few additional years than we might have otherwise had.