Loneliness and aging

At the innermost core of all loneliness is a deep and powerful yearning for union with one’s lost self.”

Brendan Francis

The human condition is defined by the tension between our need to belong and our equally strong need to be alone.

Rollo May


“The soul that sees beauty may sometimes walk alone.”

Johann Wolfgang Goethe


Ten years ago in 2014, I wrote this:

I love solitude, but lately I feel I’ve had too much of it. It’s been this way always for the most part, it seems. Almost all of my travels and visits to state and national parks, small towns, nature sanctuaries, gardens and historic sites over the years in South Carolina and in many other states, have been alone, just me and my ever-present camera.

All of this exploration started in earnest 30 years ago at the beginning of my long decade of wandering from state to state and job to job. In between I had numerous unforgettable and life-altering positive experiences that I look back on now and read about in my journals.

I realize how fortunate I am that I was able to do all that traveling and exploring while I was still relatively young (in my 30s). Now, in my sixties, those long solitary travels where each day was unique in and of itself, seem impossible to imagine now. I’m so consumed with my caregiver duties and a full-time job that the days pass in a blur. I only have time for soul-crushing loneliness when I allow myself to wallow in what might have been had my life been more normal or conventional with family and children or a partner to travel with me on life’s journeys.

That was not to be. Now in the later years of my life, at age 63, this can truly hurt and wound me afresh when I dwell on such things. I know I don’t need to go there but at times I must.


June 9, 2025

Life can become lonely when you reach old age. I guess I knew this was coming. Ever since the Covid pandemic starting in March 2020, just two months after my mother passed, and all the 36-hour days filled with full-time work, caregiving, and adjusting to retirement came to an abrupt end, the full realization of what it means to be “alone” in the truest sense of the word, has dawned on me during the fist half of 2025.

I lived alone during Covid for two years in Mom’s beautiful house in downtown Charleston before my siblings and I sold the house. For the first time in my life I had no obligations to anyone or any working life demands. It was pure freedom, and I had no trouble adjusting to this truly solitary state. I took daily walks in the nearby city park; I had my groceries delivered for a year; I never went anywhere, but I had my online friends, photography, and writing to keep me occupied, plus all the online reading and listening to music and YouTube. And everything courtesy of the iPhone that I had with me every moment of the day.

I still follow some of my fixed routines during Covid, but I can now go anywhere in Charleston. I shop at my favorites stores without worrying about the need to mask up. (Barnes & Noble, for example); and I visit parks, gardens, museums and other places in this city with limitless things to do and see, if you so choose to take advantage of this abundance. I attend meetings of a writer’s group every two weeks and am making new friends there. We’ll see how that goes.

I live in a quiet 55+ community with a nice gravel walk just outside my apartment that winds along a tidal creek, whose waters I can watch flow in and out with the tide, and whose peaceful marsh surroundings are now green with summer saltwater grasses. There’s a nice deck overlooking the creek where I can sit and enjoy the cooling-off time at sunset during these hot summer days we’re experiencing now.

Life would be good, and it mostly is, except for that dawning awareness of change in a part of my deepest being that I attribute to getting old and feeling being constantly reminded of the physical and mental realities of aging. These include a very slight limp when I walk, lower back pain when I get up in the morning and after walking briskly during my daily “exercise” walks; cuts and bruises that take much longer to heal; dry skin that can be madden itchy; and a much diminished sense of taste and smell. Oh, my appetite is not that great and I get anxious about noticeable verbal slips or not being able to think of just the right word when I’m talking.

All these signs and signals of old age are something most people don’t want to talk about and confront unless they have no choice, or else it becomes the sole focus of their life and conversations with others as they drone on and on about their illnesses, medical conditions, surgeries and medications. I simply can’t take hearing but so much of that, and then my empathy wanes. May I be spared from succumbing to the boring, pathological state of old-age misery and hopelessness, even if things sometimes do seem hopeless in body, mind and spirit.

Of course I want to keep on living my life because I have so much I want to learn even now, and I am content with the Natural wonders and the urban beauty of the city where I am fortunate enough to live, a destination on all the best places to visit lists. How fortunate can I get?

Yet, most of my days and nights are spent alone in my cluttered apartment, so full of books and do dads and both framed and unframed large Nature photos I have taken for many years. It looks like the ultimate bookworm and photographer’s living and workspace, but it’s not my own home, and I am starting to acknowledge that my overstuffed little 1-bedroom apartment is moving from being a snug collector’s haven and refuge to a hoarder’s enclosure with stacks of books he’ll never read because this is how his life has ended up. God no! But I finally gave up my 10x10 climate controlled storage unit I for which I was shoveling $269 a month to the greedy corporate masters of those storage prisons for belongings you never see. That was some progress, but it didn’t make a dent in my cluttered apartment. I do have money that once would have been thrown away to give to worthy causes and individuals.

So I lie on my sofa late tonight in the sultry month of June, AC and ceiling fan cooling the place nicely. There is no touching the magazines and books I really want to read which are on the sofa next me, the sofa where earlier this evening I took a 1 1/2 hour nap, a habit I’ve been indulging in more and more lately as weariness, loneliness and creeping depression starts to take a toll, and doesn’t just go away like it always did in previous years. Long-term antidepresssnt use may be contributing to this. I don’t know. I’ve done a good bit of research and it’s scary. Deny. Deny.

I’m worried about dementia also, as who wouldn’t when they spent ten years of being with and taking care of a parent who suffered from it, from hardly noticeable beginnings to the dreadful final chapter of this disease.

I am afraid of dying, even though I think of myself as a Christian searcher and thinker who tried to have stronger faith and belief in the teachings I have been inculcated in all my life, with brief periods of deep spirituality and religiosity.

Where am I now? Still seeking, still searching, still clinging to the bedrock beliefs that somehow sustain me enough to read Christisn devotionals every day. I have no intention of drifting toward Buddhism, Islam,or other mainline religions, although I am curious to know more about all of them, and have been for decades. I have my favorite spiritual writers. I now what I have to do overcome that side of myself which is destructive and nihilistic. I’m fascinated by young people on YouTubeTube who explore their deep dives into life and spirituality at a young age, something I cannot remotely imagine having done.

Life goes on, alone. I talk to my brother and sister by phone every week. But otherwise I see or talk to no one for days on end until Sunday rolls around and I become an animated social being and enjoy Sunday dinner at the beach with my brother and his dear ladyfriend and their two dogs. Life seems “normal” and social for awhile, and then it’s back to my little overly cluttered sanctuary. Home, sweet 55+ apartment home!

Yes, it’s true. The solitude I always savored and took for granted is now evenly split between the spiritually nourishing version and that which can’t be called solitude anymore. It’s loneliness, pure and simple. I don’t have too many years left to struggle with that, and hopefully I will be able to live on my own, or with some help, until the end, which I refuse to think much about because it’s all anxious, unproductive speculation. The most I can do is be as prepared as possible. My many years as a caregiver do equip my with strength for whatever that unknown journey in the final chapter of life brings, and wherever it takes me.

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