ALONE, BUT LOTS OF TOGETHERNESS

By Edwin Cooney

What’s more dramatic and, at the same time, more empty than to feel alone?

One of my childhood heroes, Charles Augustus Lindbergh, was as famous for the fact that he was the first to fly the Atlantic alone as he was for being the first to fly the Atlantic at all. (“The Lone Eagle” was one of his nicknames!)

I got a call last Tuesday night from a gentleman I hadn’t seen in some time. When I suggested we get together for lunch, he told me he was in the hospital for the amputation of his leg due to diabetes. He is proud and quite stoic, but I could hear his sense of aloneness.

When I think about the things I do, depending largely I suppose on my mood, I’m likely to experience one of two primary emotions: either aloneness or fulfillment.

Aloneness usually occurs when I think about myself, by myself and for myself. Fulfillment usually occurs when I feel empowered to share the best of myself with others. I occasionally discover that I’m the main beneficiary of my own sharing. Wow, what a discovery!

The gentleman who called to tell me of his condition isn’t a particularly close friend of mine. In fact, on two or three occasions over the past 21 years, we’ve had some conflict. He was, for some time, a candidate to be my young sons’ stepfather. Ultimately, because he was of sufficient substance to be a candidate for that role, he knew (at least secondhand) some of my own very personal shortcomings. Still, somehow his vulnerability got to me across the distance the other night. He really didn’t want anything except perhaps acknowledgment and at the very least he was entitled to that.

His plight stirred my awareness, as nothing else has lately, of how our success or failure in life is ultimately up to us. Until he was about twenty-six, this gentleman was a success in almost every conventional way. He was a mechanic in the United States Air Force working out of Okinawa when his sight began to fail. Still, he persevered and became a carpenter making cabinets and working out of his own garage for a chain store. He kept the business up until a disgruntled employee burned him out of his home and his profession. Hence, time hasn’t been much of a friend. Now, at age seventy-one, he’s blind and faces the uncertain prospect of living with a double disability.

Whether he cares to keep on keeping on isn’t clear to me as I write this.

Like most of us, his lifestyle has contributed to his fate and yet he’s also a victim (as are we all) of nature’s time clock.

In many ways, his story is all of our stories. I don’t know a single person, and my guess is that you don’t either, who has lived an entire lifetime without at least one setback or challenge. Some people have so many challenges to live with that you get dizzy contemplating how they deal with one or two of them let alone all of them.

As I listened to him the other night, I became sharply aware of my incapacity to ease his predicament.

Some years have passed since I became aware of the well-known tendency of men to want to fix things. Last Tuesday night, I wanted to get in there with all the tools at my command to repair and straighten everything out for him. Alas, I could not. What still gnaws at me, though, is the reason for the anxiety I’m feeling about this man who hasn’t ever been a particular friend of mine.

The answer is that he is me and I am he. Fate is both natural and inevitable. Like that Ole Mississippi, it just keeps rolling along. We can store some of life’s energy for use during times of uncertainty and offer that energy to others, but it’s up to others to draw on that energy once it has been offered.

Whatever I feel about this gentleman or how long I feel what I feel doesn’t really matter. Hopefully, he’ll realize a sense of peace in the comfort of those he loves best. Hopefully, he’ll grant himself the benefit of all of his emotional, intellectual and spiritual strengths.

Ultimately, however, his path to personal peace is his alone to trod—and trod it alone he must along with all the rest of us.

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,

EDWIN COONEY