Footloose and Fancy… at Sixty

I watched the first two years of the Bachelor and the Bachelorette for the same reasons anyone watches Reality TV – curiosity, hate watching, boredom or just as it something new and/or different. I bailed on it as I have over the years with almost all Reality franchises for now the singular reason – the players change the stories never change. There are always prototypes, archetypes and stereotypes and the one consistent factor as someone mentioned to me, was that the person who is the most cringe-worthy/annoying/painful to watch is the one person being themselves. I call this the Ramona factor based on Ramona Singer from the Real Housewives of New York City. She is perhaps of all the Women in all the varying cities the most authentic and with that she is also the one we love to hate-watch. And is that not really the primary reason we listen to many podcasts or watch a show?

I have returned to Survivor and Big Brother during the pandemic and while I find Big Brother still idiotic they are upping the ages and races on the show and with that we have two Women of Color well over 50 still in the game. One a reality “star” who has been on two Survivors and in fact my favorite show, which she one, Traitors, is not surprising as she got what we can say “game.” He son sadly the apple who fell from the tree and was booted and with that I can say happily, Bye Bye. He was a Mama’s Boy and a bore. Crazy people trapped in a house for months on end forced to do challenges to win prizes is in fact idiotic but that is Survivor and many other Reality shows, the Bachelor is just a well dressed one. I loathe the show as I have said that it is human trafficking combined with legal Prostitution to whore out women and men but really still a woman to varying men hot to put a ring on it.. or not.

So when the Golden Bachelor was announced I tuned in and wow I am turned off. I am not sure what I suspected or believed I would see but I while I have seen some variations of a theme, it is still pretty horrendous. What is shows is how sad and lonely Women are, despite having family and work, they are tied to the dress. That dress being a Wedding one with one woman bursting into tears over wearing one for one of the “competitions.” That the Women are all over 60 does little to change the dynamic other than further demeaning and demoralizing them. Not a discussion is witnessed or explored about issues that are not about grief or some type of disability. We have had two or three self evictions, one early on for a family crisis, barely mentioned in passing; Another for physical injury sustained during Pickleball so she called it quits. Another for a family issue over her daughter who had just given birth, and one who was sick during the “Rose Ceremony” aka dumped by a post-it equivalent, so she was given a pass to return. Otherwise I doubt she would have remained. Her illness was likely sustained during an ice cream version of “Never have I ever.” She was lactose intolerant and with that had also missed her own Daughters wedding to be a contestant on a dating show for seniors, and that too may make anyone feel sick from shame or guilt. That she is also the last Woman of Color is another hurdle that well bad news here… Gerry ain’t taking back a Black woman to his family home in Indiana anytime soon. I also knew that one Woman was definitely going to be given the post it note as during the Ice Cream game she admitted she swallowed. Okay not that graphic, but during the game her sexual history was to say the least more “experienced” than the varying Widows and Divorcees left which definitely puts the Scarlett Letter “W” on her. And that too is another issue about how Women who have had a “past” are viewed. Gerry wants a Woman just like the Woman he had before, a Virgin, touched for the very first time. Gerry married his high school sweetheart and had been with her for over 45 years, so his experience is to say the least not unlike a Mormon Missionary. Emphasis on the latter. So with that let’s share our grief and physical ailments as nothing bonds one more and makes a “connection” better than pain.

I have not shed a single tear here. I have heard a few comments of truth in discussing being thought of as invisible and that is what aging does, and some admissions of failures in past relationships and wanting to find a companion to join you in still living life and yet those Widows seemingly have not faced a serious long term illness, caregiving again if they had to with a new partner. Little about their children or grandchildren who ostensibly means they are NOT alone so that is statement that veers on what I believe untrue if not unkind. And of course NOTHING about issues of import with regards to Politics, Religion, Climate Change, or even Sex. They never discuss that which I find very odd given the show, the issues about sex and aging but then they do not discuss anything critical about anything. They are either the most positive women in the world (well other than the grief and disability part) or utterly oblivious aka ignorant.

I am not going to get into the hostage situation like climate, forced to sleep in bunk beds, the lack of privacy, the forced group dates and feuds over the valuable one on one time, which seems to amount to 15 minutes but that is also enough to make a “connection” with the Subject of all attention and admiration whom they seem to know nothing about other than Age and his Wife’s death. I have heard that story so many times now I pray for mine.

Below is a Critic’s take on the Season. I can assure the only tears I have shed are about me actually watching this and having no one to discuss it with. I cannot believe that this show is being watched by anyone under 60 frankly as no one wants to see Old People on TV. That is the ultimate truth, we fear aging and this is just another way of reminding us how bad it is.

‘Golden Bachelor’ Brings Something New to the Mansion: Grief

When “The Bachelor” squeezes widows and widowers through its melodrama machine, the franchise finally finds true heartbreak.

By Amanda Hess The New York Times

Oct. 19, 2023

The third episode of “The Golden Bachelor” begins with a shot of a 72-year-old man crying outside of a California mansion. “The Golden Bachelor” is a dating competition for people over 60, and the man is Gerry Turner, a kindly retiree with a hearing aid and a full head of hair. Just three weeks ago, Gerry — he pronounces it “Gary” — moved into the mansion with 22 women and started dating every single one of them. Already, he is overcome with emotion.

“The Bachelor,” the ABC franchise from which the show is spun, has been producing its bland heterosexual burlesque for more than 20 years, and it excels in manufacturing such melodramatic scenes. Yet by the end of the episode, I was crying, too.

“The Golden Bachelor” is identical in design to “The Bachelor” — Gerry must methodically eliminate his potential suitors until only one remains — and a promotional trailer for the season shows him and his women stepping into familiar romantic scenarios. Gerry and various dates ride horses, an all-terrain vehicle, a hot-air balloon. They rappel down a waterfall. They make out on a boat. Inside the mansion’s candlelit confessional booth, Gerry admits that he is developing feelings for multiple women. He weeps. His many girlfriends weep.

It’s all classic “Bachelor,” until Gerry says this: “The only time I’ve ever felt worse in my whole life is when my wife passed away.” OK. That is new.

Gerry is not a true bachelor: He is a widower. He has introduced the specter of death to “The Bachelor,” and this has both revitalized the show and scrambled its stakes.

In a typical season of “The Bachelor,” the worst-case scenario is that a couple of 26-year-olds rush into an engagement, and then rush out. The expectation of betrothal lends a ludicrous edge to an otherwise frothy contest.

But for Gerry and his potential partners, many of whom have also lost a spouse, love is not a game. When the producers of “The Golden Bachelor” scheme to turn on the waterworks, they draw from wells of grief. A few minutes after we meet Gerry, we see him cry for the first time, as he tells the story of his wife’s sudden death, in 2017, from a bacterial infection. “And so, and so, I took my wife to the emergency room,” he says, “and she never came home.”

The romantic artifice of “The Golden Bachelor” may be hokey, but for its players, it is risky, too. In the second episode, producers stage a faux romance novel cover shoot, and Nancy, 60, is unexpectedly stricken: her costume is a wedding dress, which reminds her of the day she married her husband. “I know this, my rational mind knows this — he passed away,” Nancy says. But the dress unlocks her emotions from that day, “still the best day of my life.” Later, Gerry takes Theresa, 70, to dinner, where she tells him that she feels hope, for the first time since her own husband died, that she will not always be alone.

The ostensible point of “The Golden Bachelor” is to give Gerry a second chance at love, but it represents an opportunity for the franchise, too. One refrain of “The Bachelor” is that some contestants are “here for the right reasons” (to find love) and others are “here for the wrong reasons” (to chase fame). But over the years, the show’s success has spawned a whole “Bachelor” economy — previous spinoffs include “The Bachelorette,” “Bachelor Pad,” “Bachelor in Paradise” and “The Bachelor: Winter Games” — and its most successful players are rewarded not with spouses but with influencer deals, podcasts or other forms of cultural ambassadorship within Bachelor Nation. (The show’s host, Jesse Palmer, is himself a former Bachelor.) “The Golden Bachelor” makes the initial promise of the show plausible once again.

It is made to feel so plausible that it becomes unsettling. The very idea of a wife contest is somewhat demeaning to all involved, no matter their age. As I watch women be ritualistically dumped by their temporarily polyamorous lover, it is soothing to remember that it is just a television show, and perhaps a launchpad to a remunerative brand partnership. But Gerry’s suitors have brought whole lives to the mansion. I am finding it harder, frankly, to dehumanize them.

Contestants on “The Golden Bachelor” vie to impress Gerry, but they also seem tasked with justifying their very existence. They must prove that women over 60 warrant love and attention, from Gerry and from us. One woman rides a motorcycle to set. Another approaches with a walker, which she tosses away in a kind of age-play striptease.

Even as Gerry’s dates are booted from the show, they are made to feel grateful — that Gerry spoke to them, Gerry smiled at them, Gerry gave them the hope of future companionship with some non-Gerry entity. When Gerry cries outside the mansion in Episode 3, it is because the 60-year-old Joan tells him that she must exit the show early to be with her daughter, who is struggling after a difficult childbirth. “My heart maybe got a little fixed from Gerry,” Joan says as a limo drives her away. “As you get older, you become more invisible. People don’t see you anymore. Like you’re not as significant as when you’re young.” That’s when I cried; I cried for Joan.

As I waited for a new episode of “The Golden Bachelor” to drop, I watched a very different reality dating show: “FBoy Island,” which returned for a third season this week, picked up by the CW after its cancellation by Max. “FBoy Island,” created by a former “Bachelor” producer, plays like a meta sendup of “The Bachelor,” and it makes that show’s obsession with ulterior motives explicit. On “FBoy Island,” three single women are confronted with a crop of men eager to date them, and the women must decide which ones have come “for the right reasons.” Half of their suitors have arrived on the island as designated “nice guys” (who are looking for love) and half as self-proclaimed “FBoys” (who are only pretending to be nice). If an FBoy cons a woman into choosing him at season’s end, he pockets $100,000.

If “The Golden Bachelor” raises the stakes for romantic gameplay, “FBoy Island” lowers them like a limbo stick. One contestant, Vince, jokes with one of the women that they have “shared trauma” because they have both entered into ill-fated engagements on previous reality shows. But “FBoy Island” is wise in its own way, and one of its insights is that being a nice guy is not everything. Many men are eliminated from the show not because the women suspect them of being FBoys but because they simply dislike them.

And then there is Gerry. On “The Golden Bachelor,” he plays the consummate nice guy — a father of daughters, a grandfather to granddaughters. As he bounces from date to date, he performs the work of seeing women. He holds their hands, compliments their outfits and listens to stories about their dead husbands. He kisses them and brings them flowers. But he is not there to make friends. If “The Golden Bachelor” believes that women over 60 are deserving of love, it also believes that some are more deserving than others.

After Joan leaves, drama brews between Theresa and Kathy, 70. Theresa tells a group of women that she and Gerry had a wonderful date and a strong connection, and that he spoke of a potential future with her. This rattles Kathy, who rats Theresa out to Gerry, accusing her of gloating.

In the real world, a woman tells her friends about her exciting date with a new boyfriend. But inside the mansion, her friends are also her rivals, and her boyfriend is their boyfriend, too. When natural social laws are suspended, the producers can meddle however they like. Nice Gerry sounds chilling as he parrots a longtime “Bachelor” catchphrase: Confronted with drama in the house, he tells the camera, “I’m not here for that.”

“The Golden Bachelor” is still “The Bachelor.” Its cast of older women manages to make the most artificial of shows feel deep and real, but this also makes it hard to watch. Gerry comforts Kathy and punishes Theresa. At that evening’s rose ceremony, he makes Theresa wait and wait for a rose, shaking in a little dress, before he finally saves her from the brink of elimination. For the crime of being excited, she is reminded that Gerry has the power to make her disappear.

Friendships Made Friendships Lost

I think I am in the equal classification of that statement. I make friends, I lose them. Some by my hand some by theirs but it is always and and/or and with that I move on to the next passenger who sits besides me on the bus of life. I move in and out these superficial arrangements with the best of intentions and the reality of reasons that they no longer suit. Be it physical distance, be it emotional it usually ends as it does, me pulling out steaks and moving on. Then I moved here to Jersey City and had decided it would be my final “resting place” my “forever home” and then a pandemic began and those terms took on a whole new more sinister meaning.

What has happened over the last year is that the few acquaintances I made prior to the lockdown ended. There was no way to nurture them and find common ground. One was the man who exposed me to Covid and then went full on denial when I tired to confirm it over the months only to run into him a few weeks ago and he did so without prompting which ended the need for any further contact now or ever. Then there were the coffee shop kids, these are the replaceable interchangeable crew that have been over the years the faces that fill me with my Double Latte and I chat with and get to know over time as regulars do. I felt that ended in the debacle that was in Nashville but alas pandemics make strange bedfellows, so between the front desk crew and the kids at the sole coffee shop open in the city, I got to know them over time. And now I one is a vaccine hater and the rest of the kids have largely moved on to new gigs as the city opened up so I go there less and as it is said, less is more as a new one opens and new interesting characters stumble on the stage of life to fill the vacancies. But few if any our truly friendship material.

And this may be due to the pandemic and the isolation that enabled me to inventory my life and the history of all relationships, good, bad, ugly and great. With that I own my evil in the roles of them and since that time came to the conclusion that a life of compromise was in fact capitulation and with that I am done. Anyone must have some of the needs and wants I need and want, intellect, humor, travel, liberalness and of course experience. That means someone closer to my age with some life skills that are not just making me a coffee or ringing up a purchase. I was a retail clerk for years and my ability to adjust and accommodate to the needs and wants of my customers made me very successful, so if I can do it anyone can. But we don’t do that we fill our times with our lists and our ideals and we never really know anyone over time and with that we had a shitload of time to figure ourselves out and few likely did. But at age 60 I don’t have the luxury to waste anymore of it and I need to spend less time meeting in the middle. Sorry folks it’s your turn. And with that I am just putting the universe on warning.

The last person who tried to instigate a friendship was a young man at my wine store. He apparently had been working there a year and I only just spoke to him. That should tell you something that he is not anyone I would have noticed or recalled even if I had. So when we were speaking of vaccines and that I was awaiting my parole date of April 28th, he said, “Let’s hang out.” I agreed just thinking that was an empty request but nice and went home. The numbers exchanged and with that, the texts began with an invite to my home to drink wine and have light food. What? I did not extend that invitation with the generic “hang out” so I declined. Then comes – I will get the wine and we can go to Liberty State Park, at 9 o’clock at night (after his shift) to a park that is closed at 10. What? I declined that and said how about coffee some time. Then the offer to have coffee and go to the same park that night. What? I declined. Over the two weeks offers to go on a picnic at the beach. Sure, what beach? Asbury Park. Okay, a fun day trip. No, that was I go down during the day on the train and he meets me at night. Okay then we could have dinner. Which seemed to confuse him as I am again not doing a picnic at night. I have been there all day or some part of the day alone so why would I want to picnic at night? What? Well, that is a little late and he goes – we can spend the night? What? Well, I could but what does that mean? A pull-out bed or shared room. I had been clear that there was no sexual interest on my part and he seemed to agree but the strange negotiations, the idea that if we are doing things as friends why are we doing them partially alone. I am going to the beach for the day and then you come down at night? Why? This finally ended with the actual phrase: NO MEANS NO. I couched it and was apologetic as well I do go to the wine store and this is not like finding a new coffee shop for heaven’s sake I need to have some consistent patterns. And with that he understood or so he has said, and with that, I have never heard from him again. I went to the wine store yesterday before he got there and made my purchase and left hurriedly. This is the new pandemic years. The isolation, the boredom and the confusion of social mores, and sexual frustration I suspect will be a large factor in the establishment of friendships and the breakup of others.

With that in mind I have been reading a great deal on friendships. And the most common is the spousal one as the best friend. An unhealthy if not ultimate issue when ultimately the relationship breaks up. But hey this is why being trapped in your hamster cage with a partner is a success or utter failure. You get to know someone differently when you are forced to co-habitat with another 24/7.

This is from The Atlantic and they also have another about the issues surrounding one’s spouse as the BFF. But on this I agree as to the nature of friendships, the issues about finding one’s tribe and the pressures to be an identity over self.

Kami West had been dating her current boyfriend for a few weeks when she told him that he was outranked by her best friend. West knew her boyfriend had caught snatches of her daily calls with Kate Tillotson, which she often placed on speaker mode. But she figured that he, like the men she’d dated before, didn’t quite grasp the nature of their friendship. West explained to him, “I need you to know that she’s not going anywhere. She is my No. 1.” Tillotson was there before him, and, West told him, “she will be there after you. And if you think at any point that this isn’t going to be my No. 1, you’re wrong.”

If West’s comments sound blunt, it’s because she was determined not to repeat a distressing experience from her mid-20s. Her boyfriend at that time had sensed that he wasn’t her top priority. In what West saw as an attempt to keep her away from her friend, he disparaged Tillotson, calling her a slut and a bad influence. After the relationship ended, West, 31, vowed to never let another man strain her friendship. She decided that any future romantic partners would have to adapt to her friendship with Tillotson, rather than the other way around.

West and Tillotson know what convention dictates. “Our boyfriends, our significant others, and our husbands are supposed to be No. 1,” West told me. “Our worlds are backward.”

In the past few decades, Americans have broadened their image of what constitutes a legitimate romantic relationship: Courthouses now issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, Americans are getting married later in life than ever before, and more and more young adults are opting to share a home rather than a marriage license with a partner. Despite these transformations, what hasn’t shifted much is the expectation that a monogamous romantic relationship is the planet

By placing a friendship at the center of their lives, people such as West and Tillotson unsettle this norm. Friends of their kind sweep into territory typically reserved for romantic partners: They live in houses they purchased together, raise each other’s children, use joint credit cards, and hold medical and legal powers of attorney for each other. These friendships have many of the trappings of romantic relationships, minus the sex.

Despite these friendships’ intense devotion, there’s no clear category for them. The seemingly obvious one, “best friend,” strikes many of these committed pairs as a diminishment. Adrift in this conceptual gulf, people reach for analogies. Some liken themselves to siblings, others to romantic partners, “in the soul-inspiring way that someone being thoughtful about loving you and showing up for you is romantic,” as the Rutgers University professor Brittney Cooper describes some of her friendships in her book Eloquent Rage.

Some alternate between the two comparisons. From the night Joe Rivera and John Carroll met at a gay bar in Austin, Texas—Rivera was the emcee for a strip competition, and Carroll won the $250 cash prize—they felt like brothers. “Brothers that really want to hang out and be around each other,” Carroll clarified. Yet when Carroll considered their shared domestic life, he told me that “we have a little married-couple thing going on even though we’re not married.” These mixed analogies suggest that neither wedlock nor siblinghood adequately captures what these friendships feel like.

Many of those who place a friendship at the center of their life find that their most significant relationship is incomprehensible to others.

Intimate friendships don’t come with shared social scripts that lay out what they should look like or how they should progress. These partnerships are custom-designed by their members. Mia Pulido, a 20-year-old student at Drew University, says that she and her “soul mate,” Sylvia Sochacki, 20, have cobbled together role models in what has felt like a “Frankenstein” process: Through reading about intimate female friendships from centuries ago, the pair discovered a framework for a relationship that doesn’t neatly fit the contemporary labels of romantic or platonic. They found their complementary personalities reflected in the characters Sherlock and Watson, and they embraced the casual affection (and the terms of endearment “Bubble” and “Spoo”) that they came across in a note between a wife and husband; it was tucked into a used book they found at a garage sale. Pulido has found it freeing to build a relationship around the needs and desires of Sochacki and herself, rather than “having to work through this mire of what society has told you this relationship consists of.”

Many of those who place a friendship at the center of their life find that their most significant relationship is incomprehensible to others. But these friendships can be models for how we as a society might expand our conceptions of intimacy and care.

When Tillotson and West met as 18-year-olds, they didn’t set out to transgress relationship norms. They were on a mission to conform, aye ma’am-ing their way through Marine Corps boot camp in South Carolina, and referring to each other by their last name preceded by the title “Recruit.” Most evenings, Recruit Tillotson and Recruit West spent their hour of free time chatting in front of their shared bunk bed.

During these conversations, they discovered that West’s mom had just moved to a city that was a 20-minute ride away from Tillotson’s hometown of Tulsa, Oklahoma. West and Tillotson spent boot camp’s month-long break together, winding through the Tulsa suburbs in West’s mother’s black sedan, late-aughts rap pulsing through the rolled-down windows. For most of the next four years, they were stationed thousands of miles apart, including when Tillotson eventually deployed to Iraq. From afar, they coached each other through injuries, work woes, and relationship problems. Their friendship really blossomed once they both ended up in the Tulsa area for college, and they started to spend nearly every day together. By then, Tillotson was waiting for her divorce paperwork to be notarized, and West was a single mother caring for her 3-year-old, Kody.

When West got a job at a bar, Tillotson watched Kody during the day so her friend could sleep. Tillotson frequently joined West at preschool pickup. When the two women would walk down the hallway, past the miniature lockers, West said, “it was like the seas parted.” Tillotson could feel the parents’ eyes on her. Periodically, a teacher would sidle up to the two women, direct her gaze toward Tillotson, and ask, “Who is this?” “People would always ask us how we know each other, or, ‘Are you sisters?’ A lot of times people think we’re dating,” Tillotson, 31, said. It would take too long for West and Tillotson to explain the complexity and depth of their friendship to every curious questioner.

With no lexicon to default to, people with friendships like West and Tillotson’s have assembled a collage of relationship language. They use terms such as best soul friend, platonic life partner, my person, ride or die, queerplatonic partner, Big Friendship. For some, these names serve a similar purpose as matching friendship necklaces—they’re tokens mainly meant for the two people within the friendship. Others, such as West and Tillotson, search for language that can make their relationship lucid to outsiders. West and Tillotson realized that people understand boot camp to be an intense setting, the kind of environment that could breed an equally intense friendship. When the friends began to refer to each other as “boot-camp besties,” people’s confusion finally faded.

For more than a decade, Nicole Sonderman didn’t mind if the only people who understood her friendship with Rachel Hebner were the two women who were part of it. Sonderman sums up their relationship as “having a life partner, and you just don’t want to kiss them.”

In the years when they both lived in Fairbanks, Alaska, the friends were fluent in the language of each other’s moods and physical changes. Before Hebner suspected that she might be pregnant, Sonderman made her buy a pregnancy test, steered her into the bathroom, and sat in the adjacent stall as Hebner took it. Four years later, the roles reversed: Hebner had the same accurate premonition about Sonderman. “We paid more attention to each other than we did to ourselves,” Sonderman, 37, told me.

They occasionally navigated around other people’s confusion about or combativeness toward their friendship. Their preferred term of endearment for each other, wife, wasn’t a problem for Sonderman’s then-husband. But once Hebner divorced her husband and started dating, her romantic partners got jealous, especially the women she dated. Sonderman grudgingly placated them by calling Hebner “wiffles” instead of wife.

After those years in Alaska, the pair spent a few years several time zones apart, as Sonderman and her then-husband moved around for his work. Eventually Sonderman moved back to Alaska, but Hebner had relocated to Indiana. Phone calls and occasional visits became their friendship’s support beams. Sonderman said that Hebner reached out less and less as she grappled with a cascade of difficulties: She was in an abusive romantic relationship and she lost her job because she had no one else to take care of her daughter while she worked. She was depressed. In October 2018, Hebner died by suicide.

For Sonderman, Hebner’s death was devastating. The women had envisioned one day living near each other in Alaska, where the two of them had met, and where Hebner longed to return. Now Sonderman had none of that to look forward to. For six months after Hebner’s death, she kept earphones in when she went to the grocery store. She couldn’t bear small talk.

Sonderman found it hard to translate her grief to others. “Most people don’t understand. They’ll just be like, ‘Oh yeah, I had a friend from high school who died’ or something and try to relate. But it doesn’t really resonate with me.” In other cases, people would impose a salacious and inaccurate story line onto their relationship to try to make sense of it. Because Hebner was bisexual, Sonderman said, some people believed that they were secretly lovers, and that Sonderman was closeted.

To Elizabeth Brake, a philosophy professor at Rice University whose research focuses on marriage, love, and sex, Sonderman’s experience is not just tragic but unjust. Because friendship is outside the realm of legal protection, the law perpetuates the norm that friendships are less valuable than romantic relationships. This norm, in turn, undermines any argument that committed friendships deserve legal recognition. But if, for example, the law extended bereavement or family leave to friends, Brake believes we’d have different social expectations around mourning. People might have understood that, for Sonderman, losing Hebner was tantamount to losing a spouse.

With no legal benefits or social norms working in her favor, Sonderman has felt most understood by other people who’ve had an intimate friendship. Sonderman described one such friend who was an especially attentive listener. For two hours, he and Sonderman sat in a car, engine off, in a grocery-store parking lot. She talked with him about Hebner, cried about Hebner. Her friend said, “It sounds like she broke your heart.” Sonderman told me, “That was the first time that anybody really got it.”

Intimate friendships have not always generated confusion and judgment. The period spanning the 18th to early 20th centuries was the heyday of passionate, devoted same-sex friendships, called “romantic friendships.” Without self-consciousness, American and European women addressed effusive letters to “my love” or “my queen.” Women circulated friendship albums and filled their pages with affectionate verse. In Amy Matilda Cassey’s friendship album, the abolitionist Margaretta Forten inscribed an excerpt of a poem that concludes with the lines “Fair friendship binds the whole celestial frame / For love in Heaven and Friendship are the same.” Authors devised literary plot lines around the adventures and trials of romantic friends. In the 1897 novel Diana Victrix, the character Enid rejects a man’s proposal because her female friend already occupies the space in her life that her suitor covets. In words prefiguring Kami West’s, Enid tells the man that if they married, “you would have to come first. And you could not, for she is first.”

Two well-known women who put each other, rather than a husband, first were the social reformer Jane Addams and the philanthropist Mary Rozet Smith. In Addams’s bedroom, now an exhibit at the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, in Chicago, an enormous portrait of Smith hangs above the mantle. After meeting in 1890 at the pioneering settlement house that Addams co-founded, the women spent the next 40 years entwined, trudging through moments they spent apart. During one separation, Addams wrote to Smith, “You must know, dear, how I long for you all the time, and especially during the last three weeks. There is reason in the habit of married folks keeping together.” When Addams traveled without Smith, she would sometimes haul the painting with her. When the two women journeyed together, Addams wired ahead to request a double bed. No scandal erupted in the newspaper. These women weren’t pressed, directly or implicitly, about their sex lives, nor did they feel compelled to invent a label to make sense of their relationship to onlookers, as West and Tillotson would about a century later. Same-sex intimacy like theirs was condoned.

These friendships weren’t the exclusive province of women. Daniel Webster, who would go on to become secretary of state in the mid-1800s, described his closest friend as “the friend of my heart, the partner of my joys, griefs, and affections, the only participator of my most secret thoughts.” When the two men left Dartmouth College to practice law in different towns, Webster had trouble adjusting to the distance. He wrote that he felt like “the dove that has lost its mate.” Frederick Douglass, the eminent abolitionist and intellectual, details his deep love for his friends in his autobiography. Douglass writes that when he contemplated his escape from slavery, “the thought of leaving my friends was decidedly the most painful thought with which I had to contend. The love of them was my tender point, and shook my decision more than all things else.”

One question these friendships raise for people today is: Did they have sex? Writings from this time, even those about romantic relationships, typically lack descriptions of sexual encounters. Perhaps some people used romantic friendship as a cover for an erotic bond. Some scholars in fact suspect that certain pairs had sex, but in most cases, historians—whose research on the topic is largely confined to white, middle-class friends—can’t make definitive claims about what transpired in these friends’ bedrooms. Though we will never know the exact nature of every relationship, it’s clear that this period’s considerably different norms around intimacy allowed for possibilities in friendship that are unusual today.

A blend of social and economic conditions made these committed same-sex friendships acceptable. Men and women of the 19th century operated in distinct social spheres, so it’s hardly shocking that people would form deep attachments to friends of their own gender. In fact, women contemplating marriage often fretted about forging a life with a member of what many deemed the “grosser sex.”

“You would have to come first. And you could not, for she is first.”

Beliefs about sexual behavior also played a role. The historian Richard Godbeer notes that Americans at the time did not assume—as they do now—that “people who are in love with one another must want to have sex.” Many scholars argue that the now-familiar categories of heterosexuality and homosexuality, which consider sexual attraction to be part of a person’s identity, didn’t exist before the turn of the 20th century. While sexual acts between people of the same gender were condemned, passion and affection between people of the same gender were not. The author E. Anthony Rotundo argues that, in some ways, attitudes about love and sex, left men “freer to express their feelings than they would have been in the 20th century.” Men’s liberty to be physically demonstrative surfaces in photos of friends and in their writings. Describing one apparently ordinary night with his dear friend, the young engineer James Blake wrote, “We retired early and in each others arms,” and fell “peacefully to sleep.”

Physical intimacy among women also didn’t tend to be read as erotic. Even men wrote approvingly of women’s affectionate relationships, in part because they believed that these friendships served as training grounds for wifehood. In his 1849 novel, Kavanagh, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow casts a friendship between two female characters as “a rehearsal in girlhood of the great drama of a woman’s life”—the great drama, naturally, being marriage to a man.

Men could feel unthreatened by these friendships because few women were in the financial position to eschew the economic support of a husband in favor of a female companion. By the late 1800s, exceptions to this rule started to sprout. Colleges and professions were opening up to middle-class (and, almost exclusively, white) women, enabling these graduates to support themselves, no husband required. At this point, the historian Lillian Faderman told me, women’s intimate friendships “no longer had to be a rehearsal in girlhood.” Educated women could instead live together in what were called Boston marriages. These committed relationships allowed women to pursue careers and evade heterosexual marriage.

From the late 1800s to the 1920s, each one of these components—gender-segregated society, women’s economic dependency, the distinction between sexual behavior and identity—was pulled like a Jenga brick from the tower of romantic friendship. Men and women’s divergent social spheres began to look more like a Venn diagram, enabling emotional intimacy between the genders. With far more women in the workforce and potentially independent, men weren’t so enchanted by women’s intimate relationships. Sexologists declared same-sex desire—not merely same-sex sexual acts—perverse. Americans came to fear that kissing or sharing a bed with a friend of the same gender was a mark of “sexual inversion.” Romantic friendships had lost their innocence.

A few decades after the erosion of romantic friendship began, Americans’ conception of marriage shifted. The Northwestern University psychologist Eli Finkel identifies three distinct eras in American marriages. The first, running from the colonial period until about 1850, had a pragmatic focus on fulfilling spouses’ economic and survival needs; the second, lasting until about 1965, emphasized love. Finkel makes the case that starting around 1965, the “self-expressive marriage” became the ideal; spouses expected their partnership to be the site of self-discovery and personal growth. (Excluded from these structures for most of the nation’s existence were the tremendous number of Americans who were denied access to legal marriage, namely enslaved Black Americans, interracial couples, and same-sex couples.) Throughout this evolution, Americans started relying more and more on their spouses for social and emotional support, with friendships consigned to a secondary role.

John Carroll, who met his platonic partner, Joe Rivera, at a gay bar, describes this type of romantic relationship as “one-stop shopping.” People expect to pile emotional support, sexual satisfaction, shared hobbies, intellectual stimulation, and harmonious co-parenting all into the same cart. Carroll, 52, thinks this is an impossible ask; experts share his concern. “When we channel all our intimate needs into one person,” the psychotherapist Esther Perel writes, “we actually stand to make the relationship more vulnerable.” Such totalizing expectations for romantic relationships leave us with no shock absorber if a partner falls short in even one area. These expectations also stifle our imagination for how other people might fill essential roles such as cohabitant, caregiver, or confidant.

Carroll and Rivera, 59, escaped this confined thinking. They built their lives around their friendship—at times deliberately, at times improvising in the face of unanticipated events. In 2007, Carroll discovered that the house next door to his was up for sale. He called Rivera with an entreaty: “Bitch, buy that house, and you can just walk home from dinner!” Rivera would no longer have to drive across Austin several times a week to have dinner at Carroll’s house. Carroll, who’s a real-estate agent, had already filled out the contract for the house for his friend. Rivera just needed to sign.

After buying the house, Rivera did in fact log fewer miles in traffic, but that was a trivial benefit compared with the life-altering ones that came later. When Rivera became concerned that Carroll’s drug and alcohol use had gotten out of hand, he took photos of partiers entering and leaving Carroll’s house at 3 or 4 a.m. Rivera staged an intervention with Carroll’s other friends, and Carroll agreed to get help before Rivera could even begin reading aloud the two-page letter he’d written. The next day, Rivera drove Carroll to a recovery center, and cried as he filled out the paperwork. Rivera asked the man who ran the center, “What if [Carroll] goes through recovery and when he comes out, he hates me for doing this to him?”

Their friendship did change after Carroll finished the program, but not as Rivera had feared. While Carroll was in recovery, he and his friends came up with a plan to turn his house into a sober home for gay men—a solution to Carroll’s shaky finances that also served a meaningful purpose. Once Carroll finished his own stint in a sober home, Rivera suggested that Carroll move in with him. By the time Carroll unloaded his bags, Rivera was already months into his own sobriety, a commitment he made even though he never had an alcohol problem. Rivera said, “I didn’t want to be drinking a glass of wine in front of John when he couldn’t have one.” “Who does that?” Carroll asked, his voice blending incredulity and gratitude. They’ve both been sober for a decade.

Companionate romantic relationships and committed friendships appear to be varieties of the same crop, rather than altogether different species.

A friendship like theirs, which has spanned nearly their entire adulthood and functioned as the nucleus of their support system, raises a fundamental question about how we recognize relationships: On what basis do we decide that a partnership is “real”? It’s a question the journalist Rebecca Traister poses in her book All the Single Ladies, when she examines the central role that friends often play in single women’s lives. “Do two people have to have regular sexual contact and be driven by physical desire in order to rate as a couple? Must they bring each other regular mutual sexual satisfaction? Are they faithful to each other?” she writes. “By those measures, many heterosexual marriages wouldn’t qualify.” At the same time, people who have intimate friendships are eager to declare their devotion. The social theorist bell hooks writes that women who have such close friendships “want these bonds to be honored cherished commitments, to bind us as deeply as marriage vows.” Companionate romantic relationships and committed friendships appear to be varieties of the same crop, rather than altogether different species.

Brake, the philosopher, takes issue not just with cultural norms that elevate romantic relationships above platonic ones, but also with the special status that governments confer on romantic relationships. Whereas access to marriage currently hinges on (assumed) sexual activity, Brake argues that caregiving, which she says is “absolutely crucial to our survival,” is a more sensible basis for legal recognition. She proposes that states limit the rights of marriage to only the benefits that support caregiving, such as special immigration eligibility and hospital visitation rights. Because sexual attraction is irrelevant to Brake’s marriage model, friends would be eligible.

In LGBTQ circles, placing a high value on friendship has long been common. Carroll, Rivera, and several other people I interviewed for this story, absorbed the idea of “chosen family”—that those besides blood can decide to become kin—from this community. Though he and Rivera never considered dating, Carroll had already learned to be at ease with nonsexual intimate relationships with men. In other words, he had come to appreciate something that was once widely understood—as Godbeer, the historian, puts it, that “we can love without lusting.”

In many ways, Americans are already redefining what loving and living can look like. Just in the past several months, experts and public intellectuals from disparate ideological persuasions have encouraged heterosexual couples to look to the queer and immigrant communities for healthy models of marriage and family. The coronavirus pandemic, by underscoring human vulnerability and interdependence, has inspired people to imagine networks of care beyond the nuclear family. Polyamory and asexuality, both of which push back against the notion that a monogamous sexual relationship is the key to a fulfilling adult life, are rapidly gaining visibility. Expanding the possible roles that friends can play in one another’s lives could be the next frontier.

Other changes in American households may be opening up space for alternative forms of committed relationships. Fewer and fewer Americans can count on having a spouse as a lifelong co-star. By the time they’ve gotten married—if they’ve done so at all—most Americans have spent a considerable part of their adulthood single. The tally of Americans’ unpartnered years grows once you tabulate the marriages that end because of divorce or a spouse’s death (about one-third of older women are widowed). According to a 2017 Pew Research Center report, 42 percent of American adults don’t live with a spouse or partner.

We’re also in the midst of what former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has called a growing public-health crisis in the United States: loneliness. In a 2018 survey, one-fifth of Americans reported always or often feeling lonely. Being alone does not portend loneliness—nor does being partnered necessarily prevent loneliness—but these data suggest that plenty of people would appreciate a confidant and a regular dose of physical affection, needs only amplified by the pandemic. Americans, who’ve long been encouraged to put all their eggs in the marriage basket, may come to rely upon a wider array of social relationships out of necessity.

A platonic partnership may not feel right for everyone, and as is true with dating, even those who want a mate might not be able to find a suitable one. But these relationships have spillover benefits for those in close proximity to them. Tillotson told me that she thinks all her relationships have been brightened by her closeness with West. Their romantic partners appreciate that the friendship lessens their emotional load; their mutual friends treat Tillotson and West as a reliable unit to turn to when they’re in need; their veteran community has been strengthened by the volunteering they’ve done together. Their platonic partnership fits Godbeer’s description of how Americans viewed friendship centuries ago, that it “not only conferred personal happiness but also nurtured qualities that would radiate outward and transform society as a whole.” Though Tillotson and West’s relationship serves these broader purposes, they choose to be bound to each other primarily for the joy and support they personally receive. Tillotson thinks of her romantic partner as “the cherry on the cake.” She and West, she explained, “we’re the cake.”

The Other ICE

We are associating ICE now with the horrific customs agents seizing and deporting unauthorized Immigrants or now how I ask myself if I am having my nightly presser bourbon with our without but the acronym also stands for In Case of Emergency.

Now of late unless prodded I leave blank but often I write my dead dog’s name with my former last name and phone number from Seattle.  Good luck with that one.  But when I was in Nashville undergoing dental reconstruction the first surgery was with General Anesthesia.  So the requirement is that you are accompanied by someone and they remain on site while you under.  Of course this being Vanderbilt and their history of bullshit what was two hours became four but I had hired a Nurse Practioner who stayed to take me home.  She had another client within the hour of dropping me off versus I was to have her stay while I showered and got settled, I was fine and up enough off the drugs to move about and do so on my own.  I had her call me in four hour increments to check on me and by the second one at 11 pm I was fine and told her to come by in the morning to see if I was alive and so forth.  We went for a walk and talked about her observations and my recollections to comprise what was a hate letter regarding the treatment I had including keeping me under too long and in turn not providing me a Valium or some other narcotic that would have dropped my blood pressure prior to administering an anesthetic and putting me risk.  But hey they are HEROES, right?

But as a woman on her own age 60 and with the state of the universe right now I recall this very well with my last visit to Vanderbilt by the Intern/Doctor who performed my last dental implant surgery, the one done so badly it required emergency surgery to correct it.  I said during my pre-op visit I like two Valium before as it calms me down, I am going local as I prefer to be awake as it enables me to get up and around more.  He was “concerned” that I come always alone to the appointments, despite the fact they are dental exams I am not having a kidney replaced but that how did I get there.  I made the mistake of telling him the truth, by Lyft and going home in the same way.  I did not tell him if there was anyone at home or if I had people checking on me that was not his business and again I knew from before that once you walk out the door they don’t care their liability extends only to that point so you can lie your ass off and pay someone to be your “friend” as that is all they care about.  But it was ugly and again led me to blow up and have to have the Surgeon intervene. Here is what happened, I was right.  I said, “I will worry about me and you worry about the implant surgery and making that a success.”  And I was successful on my end, him not so much.  HEROES, right?

And I found the below article from another like myself and in turn reviewing the comments there were some much like this one:

I read this for the sole reason of posting this comment:  Fill-in that line with somebody, anybody.  I didn’t because I didn’t want to bother people and found my bank account frozen and cards not usable.  A doctor I hadn’t met had certified my inability to care for myself and the court had appointed a lawyer from the hallway to oversee my official life.  I discovered this when I tried to use cards to send pizza to the nursing staff at the hospital after I left.  A lawyer was appointed to help me regain my official life, and the initial lawyer sent me a certified check from my account, but put a name in there, really.  No idea how often this happens; when I regained control I never looked back at the incident, but don’t let the hospital think nobody out there knows or cares about you.  

And irony on top of irony one of my Lyft drivers had a similar experience at Vanderbilt with his baby daughter and she was brought in with a rash and inflammation that the Doctor on call thought was a sign of child abuse and they would not release her to the family.  DHS took the child, several thousand dollars later to an Attorney the little girl was remanded back to her family and the rash was an allergic reaction to a product in the home that they were using to clean.  Abuse not at all. HEROES, right?

There are many many stories of this type when a Doctor or Nurse assumes something from the case and in turn decides you are incapable of caring for yourself and others.  My former Attorney attempted suicide in the middle of the corvid virus outbreak in Seattle, his wife and the EMT took him to all places Evergreen Hospital the treating facility for the victims of the nursing home. He was “released” against medical advice as they could not treat or diagnose him given they were sort of kinda of super busy with a deadly virus.  So when they tried to get him to an appropriate treatment facility he was rejected as too high risk even though he was sent home, did not harm himself further and actually took the initiative to seek help.  HEROES, right?

So I am not “alone” in my experience as there were many comments from those like me who had no real meaningful connections and those they had had their own families to look after so what do you do

I live alone and am a once a week office volunteer for a charitable entity that gives needed rides to seniors over 60 (by volunteer drivers) to non emergency medical appointments and grocery stores in the county I live in. As I am over 60, so I could use this service also. But since its not an emergency service,  my younger brother 700 miles away is my ICE.  I can get to a hospital in an emergency since I have finances and insurance to do so.  But getting home is the problem, as no doctor or hospital will release an emergency patient to a paid service like Uber or a Cab. They are afraid that the paid driver will dump you at the curb and not see that you get into your home safely.  Perhaps I should ask one of paid staff at the charity if they would agree to be a local ICE, as I have been volunteering in the office over 4 years. I am not comfortable doing so, but I can’t think of anything else.

Again they don’t care once out the door, that is artifice as when I got home no one from Vanderbilt called or checked on me and when I called the next day to make a post op for the following week I was told they were booked.  Okay why wasn’t that arranged PRIOR to surgery and really why was I told to come in? HEREOS, right?

Again I learned the hard way do it all in advance – medications, post op appointments and and all you need to get them to do their part. You only matter if the check clears and they don’t kill you but if you have no family no worry about malpractice lawsuits. See a positive. So what have we learned here? Be proactive, lie if you have to about the ICE thing and hire people and cover your ass as they won’t have you seen a hospital gown?

I’m single and live alone. And on many forms, I can’t fill in the line for ‘In case of emergency.’

By Elana Rabinowitz
The Washington Post
April 4, 2020

It’s on almost every form you fill out for work, schools, the doctor’s office, the dentist. ICE. Three little letters that could save your life. And every time I need to fill it out, I cringe, I’m single and live alone and especially right now I think of it a lot — do I really have an “in case of emergency”?

In my thirties, I had my first panic attack. It struck out of nowhere in the middle of teaching. One minute I was doing an animated read aloud — the next I couldn’t breathe. My face turned red; my elementary school students began to cry. I had no idea what was happening to me. I was brought to the school nurse’s office, where I hadn’t been since I got a nosebleed in the fourth grade. After several minutes of respiratory problems, I got my breathing regulated, inhaling and exhaling in a brown paper bag, like I was blowing up a paper balloon. The assistant principal with the short brown hair looked at me and asked, “Who can come pick you up?”

And that’s when I realized it — no one could

I have friends and neighbors and family nearby, but I could not imagine any of them taking off work, driving or taking a cab to come pick up a grown woman holding a paper bag in her hand. But she was sitting there in the nurse’s room with her eyebrow raised, demanding an answer.

“Don’t you have someone? Who is your in case of emergency?” she said, irritated. “Let me call a car service,” I said.

She walked me to the station wagon, and I went home to my two male roommates at the time. I never told them what happened. I never talked about it again, but the ICE began to gnaw at me. Who was the first person in my speed dial? Who could I call for help?

Years passed — I moved apartments, changed schools and once again had to fill out those little blue cards with the emergency number. I did what I always did — I put my parent’s names down and prayed nothing would ever go wrong. I was in my 40s now and single, my parents in their 80s. I should not be calling them for help. They should be calling me.
AD

As the weather warmed and I started pulling my hair back more, I began to feel it, a small protrusion, which I ignored at first. But soon the pain became excruciating, a constant throbbing that made it difficult to sleep, move my head and even brush my hair. It went from a bump the size of a pea to a bulge quickly. I had an infection on my head. A big bulbous cyst that could not be ignored. I looked it up online where you could see the famous pimple popper perform the procedure. It seemed gross but harmless enough.

Then I went to my doctor who assured me it was a simple procedure — and wrote me a referral to a surgeon.

“You have a pilar cyst,” he said and then showed me numerous pictures on his screen.

A big sac on the back of my head, covered by my golden locks, went unnoticed for years. Now the pain was unbearable.
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“It’s an easy procedure, you might not even need stitches, he might just use glue.”

Nothing to worry about, I thought, and went home and made an appointment for the following week.

I met with the doctor, who seemed friendly enough, a warm man with gray hair who got right to business. He had me lie on my stomach as he began to inject my head with needles to numb it. Then he did his business, one I had watched numerous times on YouTube, like an accident I was grotesquely attracted to. I knew he would cut an incision and then remove the entire cyst — the size of a marshmallow but calcified and stuck in my head. We talked about Europe and travel and still, he was in there — poking and prodding trying to get this sucker out.

“This is really infected.” He said. “It may take awhile.”

Soon he began stitching me up like an old dress — so much for super glue. Finally, he was finished. It was five o’clock in rush hour and I planned to take the subway home. I got up and he began to give instructions I was not prepared to hear.
AD

“Go home and take a shower. You will see a lot of blood,” the doctor said.

Wait — what?

This was supposed to be a simple procedure, but because of the size of the infection and the difficulty in removing the cyst, there was more blood than usual. I would need to go home and wash it out for sanitary purposes and keep an eye on the stitches. If they didn’t hold, or some other unforeseen rupture incurred, I would have to go to the emergency room.

“Blood?” I said.

“Yes, if it does not stop you will need to go to the emergency room. Do you have someone to take you?”

And there it was — nearly a decade later, ICE. The three-letter word, that sounded like a four-letter word. Of course, I had people in my life, including a brother who lived nearby, but as for someone who I could call and would answer the phone, well, I wasn’t sure.
AD

“The emergency room?” I asked again.

“Probably not, but just in case. Otherwise, I will see you in 10 days to take the stitches out.” He said and left.

There I was. Alone. Afraid that my little cyst might cause me projectile bleeding. That all of a sudden, I would be vulnerable and scared and without support. I was going to get an Uber but it was rush hour and I knew the subway would be faster. So I took the train home, hiding my head, turning away from the crowd so straphangers couldn’t see. At home, I pulled my hair back — my neck was covered in blood. Skeptically I took a shower, and as promised the clear water turned crimson. It stopped and I got dressed and sat on the couch.

Who would I call? I thought. What would I do if I had to go to the ER? I started panicking but eventually fell asleep. I made it through the night, feeling frightened and alone, and my head began to pang like someone had knocked me out. The next day, I began calling friends and family to tell them what happened. To my surprise, many told tales of needing to go to the ER alone, and that fortified me.
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My father had gone a few days before for heart problems. My closest friend had been once when her kids were small, so her husband had to stay behind and watch them. Others had similar stories.

As this pandemic bears down on us, many people have and will face going to an ER, or even an intensive care unit, alone.

If this is the case, there is a certain comfort in knowing that there are others out there who care and are thinking of you — and in that way you are never truly isolated.

Steps to take when facing a medical emergency

Being single with cancer may mean less aggressive treatment than a married person

I’m 70, single and have a strong support system. But when I got sick, it wasn’t enough.

There Go I

The expression goes: There by the grace of God go I.  Well thankfully I don’t believe in God or I would think somehow the great Daddy in the sky has spared me from death and/or life of living hell.  I like to think it was luck and sheer determination on my part but on the off chance there is a higher power I guess thanks is in order.

When I read this story it affected me in two ways.  One a survivor of sustaining traumatic brain injury.  I was LUCKY.  I was found in my car unconscious/comatose with a 4mm blood clot in the brain after the lunatic I was out with shoved drugs in my drink, shoved incessant drinks down my throat (although blood alcohol can rise due to Benzodiazepines in the blood system) then enabling me to get behind the wheel of a car which for the grace of god crashed into a pole.  I say that as I wonder had I got home in that state and seized or fell I would never be found for days/weeks/months or had he been with me what he would have done to me and again I would never know or be found.  So by the grace of God I crashed my car.  It however had a downside as it the medical providers at Harborview and the City of Seattle saw me not as a patient but as a drunken whore so once those labels are assigned you can never be healed.

And when I read this story in the New York Times I got it, I really did.  A loner, an outsider as in being Gay, financially secure and very bohemian with no family or partner to advocate or look out for or after.  And with a series of catastrophes he was found with a blood clot on the brain and when he came out of it he sustained one of the more significant types of TBI with short term memory damage. That could have been exacerbated by years of alcohol abuse and in turn the isolation post care without a clear treatment plan or course of action he further deteriorated.  You see that is why my Attorney Kevin Trombold believed that I the drunken whore did not need true legal advice and counsel and in turn cannot to this day explain how I highly functioned while his former associate, Ted Vosk, goes out of his way to explain his depression and rages as a symptom of Traumatic Brain Injury   and continues to try to inflict severe damage through alcohol abuse, car accidents, running accidents and attempted suicide by bear by running to Alaska and taking massive pics putting himself in danger.  I find it quite amusing and tragic all at the same time its Grizzlyman meets Into the Wild but this from a Harvard educated Attorney.  I wish him well on his efforts, hopefully soon he will get it right.  And I leave that to you to decide what that is, my choice is less kind.

I, on the other hand, took it as a challenge to recover and using varying strategies and techniques to stimulate the brain’s plasticity I think I came back stronger than ever.  A bigger bitch but that my be do to the supposed care givers who were anything but.  As the saying goes: Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me.  I will never be fooled again, right Roger?

The story below is a man who had promise and again because of a lack of network and of course knowledge they simply cast him off to a facility where moments of lucidity are masked by lack of care.  He will only further deteriorate and decline and this in the shadow of Langone who has extensive programs and a facility dedicated to this type of injury.  C’est La Vie as this is where you are when you are an outsider, you are single, old, female, gay, alone or just disposable.  This is America and funny we have more Septuagenarians running for office than not.  Not all of us need to be in the shadows nor deserve to be regardless.

‘The Phantom of Ninth Street’: A Bon Vivant’s Lonely Decline

He lived every New Yorker’s dream life. And then it all slipped away.

By Michael Wilson
The New York Times
Feb. 20, 2020

When the police arrived at his apartment in Greenwich Village, Paul Pannkuk didn’t know what they were talking about.

Someone had entered the apartment next door, taken a random armload of the tenant’s belongings — photo albums, a doormat, a shoe holder — and dumped it all with the garbage in the basement. The burglar was captured on security camera, and he looked an awful lot like Mr. Pannkuk.

He told the officers he had no memory of the incident. He would never steal, he said.

He stood in his once-grand one-bedroom home, with marble floors and windows onto tree-lined West Ninth Street. The home’s former elegance was now hard to imagine.

The living room was dark, most of its lights missing. There was little furniture, and what remained was old and worn, with stuffing sprouting from holes. Newspaper clippings were stacked in tidy piles on the floor beside black-and-white family photographs.

On a side table was a sheet of paper with what looked like random doodles and reminders. In fact, it was a map of sorts for a man hopelessly lost, guideposts to his old life: “Morgan Stanley,” “Drake University,” the name of the composer of “The Music Man” (Meredith Willson). There was a verse from a child’s prayer: “If I should die before I wake/I pray the Lord my soul to take.”

Mr. Pannkuk had once lived in comfort approaching extravagance, split between the Village and the Hamptons, his future secured by a career in finance many dreamed to have in 1990s New York. He traveled the world, returning to the city to share his stories with his friends.

Most of those friends were gone now. He had driven them away. At the age of 68, he was on a path many single New Yorkers dread. He was alone, with no one to take care of him, the mysterious occupant of Apartment 1A. But he was too far gone to realize what was happening. His brain no longer worked the way it once did.

His story is one steeped in kindness and frustration and hope misplaced, framed by addiction and a shattering accident on the eve of a new start. It is the tale of a recluse in plain sight, a man left to compulsively wander the place he called home. A friend gave him a dubious title: The Phantom of Ninth Street.

Mr. Pannkuk was a product of the midcentury Midwest, born in 1948 in Mason City, Iowa. He attended Drake University, in Des Moines, studying economics and foreign policy before going to work for the World Bank in Washington, D.C., in 1979.

By the mid-80s, he had moved to New York City with a career on the rise, first as an analyst with Standard & Poor’s, and then — as his cheat sheet reminds him — with Morgan Stanley. He became that firm’s manager of risk in its dealings with some 85 countries on three continents, traveling frequently and living for a time in London.

“Very smart, extremely well read,” said Susan Saxe, a former analyst at Morgan Stanley who worked with Mr. Pannkuk in the ’80s and ’90s. “He knew what was going on in the political regime of any country you could think of.”

His sister, Jan, lived in Illinois and spoke to Mr. Pannkuk often by phone. She knew little of New York, and imagined his days and nights busy with high living. She was not far off.

In a corporate world that leaned steadfastly straight, Mr. Pannkuk was a regular at the city’s gay clubs. Tim Riordan, a Manhattan schoolteacher, met him at a gay bar in the ’90s, “in a long, kind of serpentine coat line at a dance party,” he recalled.

“Mr. Pannkuk was very fun-loving and loved to dance,” Mr. Riordan said. “He mixed the corporate world very well with the world of gay men.”

He lived for several years on the Upper West Side, and in 1990, he moved downtown, buying the one-bedroom on West Ninth Street. Years later, real-estate agents would call the block, between Fifth Avenue and Avenue of the Americas, the “Gold Coast” of the Village, but in 1990, it retained some of the scruff and bohemian flair of the ’60s and ’70s. He loved his new home.

He also painted — “impeccable reproductions of Picassos,” Mr. Riordan said — and mounted the large works in his living room. “People would walk by at street level and stop dead in their tracks, thinking the owner had an original in there.”

Barbara Martinez, a musician who was raised by her mother, said Mr. Pannkuk, a family friend, was like a father figure. She remembered his annual Christmas parties: “Lots of silver and white balloons,” she said. He had shelves filled with dozens of Champagne flutes.

At some point in any story about Mr. Pannkuk, the teller invariably arrives at a memory of clubbing or having long conversations over drinks — always over drinks. In his younger days, it seemed harmless enough. “When I met him, he drank a fair amount of wine,” a longtime friend, Pablo Scheffel, said. “But we all drank a fair amount of wine.”

As the years passed, the fair amount increased.

In 2005, after 13 years with Morgan Stanley, he left the firm. He was vague when he explained his situation to friends — there was a new boss he didn’t get along with, he said. But some suspected that he was let go. Ms. Saxe, his colleague at Morgan Stanley, had been unaware that his drinking had become a liability — “until, at some point, I knew it had gotten the better of him.”

He was just 56. He started his own consulting firm, and created a LinkedIn profile with blurbs from former colleagues. (“He was a terrific boss and a patient mentor, with great insight into human nature as well as economic analysis.”) He bought a baby grand piano, playing for friends by ear. He had a dog.

And he drank. “Early retirement didn’t serve him well,” Mr. Riordan said.

Adam Cohen, an artist, met Mr. Pannkuk in 2008 through a dating site. “Everything was revolving around a drink,” he said. “‘Let’s meet here for a drink.’ ‘After the gym, let’s have a drink.’”

He was a regular presence at the Lion, a restaurant down the block from the apartment, and French Roast, around the corner. “He’d spend a thousand bucks a week on drinks and lobster pot pies,” Mr. Cohen said.

“He identified a lot with his job. It gave him his identity. He never replaced that,” Mr. Scheffel said. Except, of course, with alcohol. “He told me he would get up at 3 o’clock in the morning and start drinking.”

He would drift from bar to bar. Ms. Martinez, who grew up thinking of Mr. Pannkuk as a part of the family, had a key to his apartment, and would sometimes find him incoherent or passed out.

“He would go on binges,” she said.

The night that changed everything

Six years after he left Morgan Stanley, with no progress toward finding work or keeping vague promises to cut back on his drinking, his friends intervened. In 2011, a group gathered at his apartment and told him he needed real help. He didn’t disagree. Ms. Saxe had found a rehabilitation facility in Connecticut. The night before he was to go there, she called and told him she would pick him up in the morning. Mr. Pannkuk said he would be ready.

The next day, a Saturday in October, Ms. Saxe arrived at West Ninth Street and rang his buzzer. No answer. She feared he had started drinking again, so she headed to the Lion. He wasn’t there. She passed by French Roast and his other haunts, but she didn’t find him.

She returned to the apartment. Worry grew to fear when she heard Mr. Pannkuk’s dog barking inside. She called 911. Firefighters arrived and banged on Mr. Pannkuk’s door, and when they got no answer, they broke it down.

Ms. Saxe was horrified at what she saw. Mr. Pannkuk was lying unconscious on his marble floor, bleeding from his head.

Paramedics arrived and loaded him into an ambulance. Ms. Saxe fought to stay calm. “They were looking around for his shoes, and they pulled out some fancy pair of shoes, and they made a remark about them,” Ms. Saxe said. “I said: ‘You have to understand. He was always so beautifully dressed.’”

He ended up at Bellevue Hospital Center, where doctors discovered a traumatic brain injury caused by his fall.

Mr. Pannkuk seemed to have damaged his medial temporal lobe, a zone in the brain deep behind the ears, where new experiences are converted to long-term memory. His injury permanently disrupted this function. In practice, Mr. Pannkuk is incapable of creating new memories.

Doctors at Bellevue fitted Mr. Pannkuk in a helmet while he healed. He believed he was in London, oblivious to reality. He spent months in the hospital that way.

Ms. Saxe called Mr. Pannkuk’s sister, Jan, after the fall to share the news. “I was shocked,” Jan said. “He was so close to going to a facility that was going to help him.”

She had her own set of health issues within her family in Illinois, but she traveled to New York and visited him at Bellevue. After stopping by the apartment to fetch clothes, she walked the streets of Greenwich Village. “It’s just one bar after another, basically,” she said.

Her brother returned home in 2012 to Ninth Street a very different man. He was no longer able to hold a conversation, losing the thread almost immediately, starting over several times in a period of a few minutes. He had magazines and the newspaper delivered, but he could not comprehend what he was reading.

Worried about his finances, Jan took control of his checking account and the amount of cash available to her brother at the A.T.M., putting him on an allowance.

She soon discovered that he was drinking again, his debit card charges betraying him and listing two, three, even four bar tabs a day at his favorite Village spots. It is not unlikely that he simply forgot earlier visits that day, and entered the bar each time as if it were the first.

She could also tell when he used an A.T.M. He tried to withdraw cash several times a day, even when the account was empty, having forgotten earlier attempts. The pings from the bank brought her comfort.

“I know he’s OK,” she said. “He’s walking around.”

But his old circle of friends were increasingly frustrated.

“I had a relatively young daughter at the time, and I felt I was maybe investing too much time in him,” Ms. Saxe said. “I stopped going around to see him.”

Mr. Riordan would stop by and ask the doormen how his friend was getting along, but he found himself reluctant to ring his bell. He once happened upon a wild-looking Mr. Pannkuk — who in the past had been known to return to his stylist after a haircut if it wasn’t to his liking — shambling along the sidewalk.

“I watched people’s faces as they approached him,” he said. “He was an eyeful — people were having second takes. Little did they know he was about to take a right into a very chic apartment.”

By 2017, he was destroying that apartment from within. He carried his valuable books and treasures from his world travels to the basement for disposal, Mr. Cohen, the artist, said. He threw away his television, his stereo, even his light bulbs, casting the apartment in dim shadows. He threw away food he didn’t remember buying, filling his refrigerator instead with rows of plastic cups of water.

Mr. Cohen began visiting once a week just to make sure Mr. Pannkuk was eating. Ms. Martinez, the friend who looked to him as a father figure, dropped by the liquor stores and the Lion; she claimed to be his daughter and begged them not to serve him anymore.

It was in this period, in the spring of 2017, that Mr. Pannkuk was arrested after throwing away his neighbor’s belongings. In all likelihood, he probably believed he was in his own apartment, and treated those things like he did his own property that he did not recognize.

I first encountered Mr. Pannkuk after reading a police blotter that detailed the bizarre burglary. Why would a 68-year-old man steal random stuff from his neighbor? And then just put it in the trash?

I knocked on his door and was invited into his dark, curious surroundings, where the disheveled man before me told me the same facts about himself, over and over. Morgan Stanley. Drake University. An old friend he expected to arrive any time now. Morgan Stanley. Drake University. Old friend.

He said he was aware of having been hurt in a fall, but that it was minor.

The victim in the burglary case declined to be interviewed for this article, and it’s unclear why he chose to press charges, but in doing so, he set into motion events that pulled the recluse from the shadows and into the city’s view.

Mr. Pannkuk’s sister and friends contacted for this story agreed to speak about his past and present with the understanding that no article would be written until his situation stabilized. Jan, his sister, said she saw an opportunity to share her brother’s story with others facing addiction or brain trauma issues.

After his arrest, Mr. Pannkuk was appointed a lawyer, and while the criminal charge was later dropped, the matter of what to do about Mr. Pannkuk lingered. In 2017, his case was referred to Surrogate’s Court, where he sat in silent bewilderment as his lawyer and representatives from the city and the Mental Hygiene Legal Service, which represents the disabled in need of care, discussed his future before a judge.

The primary obstacle to bringing Mr. Pannkuk the aid available to many New Yorkers was his wealth, as manifested in the apartment on Ninth Street. He had too much money to qualify for free assistance, and not enough for live-in care.

“There are a lot of difficulties going on in your life right now,” Judge Kelly O’Neill Levy told him in September 2017. “The court finds that the appointment of a guardian is necessary.”

At the same time, the apartment building, a co-op, was threatening eviction proceedings against Mr. Pannkuk. His guardian, Sabrina E. Morrissey, a Manhattan lawyer who worked with clients from vulnerable populations, represented him and his wishes to stay in the apartment, but in reality that appeared less and less of an option. His sister and Ms. Morrissey agreed: It was time for him to go.

Late in 2018, his guardian led Mr. Pannkuk, 70, from his apartment of 23 years to his new home. He had no idea that he would never be back. His apartment was going on the market. It would sell quickly for $1 million.

The income from the sale would go to pay for an assisted-living facility in Queens, a journey of some 17 miles, but a world away.

I have visited a few times over the past months. He has a room on a special unit for residents with memory issues. To get to that wing, you pass through a door designed to keep residents from wandering off. It has an alarm that is disarmed with a code that Mr. Pannkuk, if he learns it, is unlikely to remember. The hope for residents like Mr. Pannkuk is that, over time, they become more at ease with their surroundings and come to think of it as home.

Earlier this month, I arrived, and he smiled brightly when he heard his name called.

“Aren’t we in Queens?” he asked, correctly, before inquiring about the status of the impeachment hearings against President Trump.

He sat in his room’s sole chair and crossed his legs. Behind him, three of his prized paintings from his apartment, the Picasso reproductions, leaned against a blank wall. A health aide knocked and offered him a bowl of rice pudding. Mr. Pannkuk asked if she would please put it in the refrigerator.

“I’ve been to London, France, Russia,” he said, and for a moment, he looked like any other retired executive, thinking back over the good times. “I’ve been to India.”

Then, inevitably, that look of comfort shifted to one of urgency, and the room around him changed from comfortable studio to forbidding cell.

“You know, my apartment is in Manhattan,” he said. “I’d love to go home.”

The Reservoir

I have been of late trying to figure out coping strategies for the final six months in Nashville.  My tentative date of departure is October 15 at the latest.  It all hinges on how quickly we can finish the last part of my dental work and in turn how well I can pack and go.  My plan is to start now and I have no problem myself doing the heavy lifting but it is when I have to rely or depend upon others that my resolve falls away.

I am not sure if my depression is just the frustration over the teeth. It is difficult to function and to feel comfortable, I cannot eat what I want and I feel exhausted just dealing with all the issues that surround the care and maintenance of the tissues and the denture as I wait for the next phase to begin. That is when the implants are uncovered, capped and the impressions made to begin for the final teeth to be crafted and in turn installed.   At times it sounds like a car being prepped for repair!

Then there is the frustration this process has alighted, the issues of my temper and my snark to lead me to say things that I should have not, suggesting that a gun to my head would expedite the process and perhaps at least allow for better communication.  Again I tried to manipulate the situation playing victim in a place that lives for victimhood so it led to the Cops coming to my door at 7 am to do a “wellness check.” That threw back most of this a couple of months for me to calm down and try again to find some level of communication that would work.  And that actually never happened as once again I was hauled into a room and asked why I was always alone at my appointments and how did I get there?  Seriously is this for real?  Do I appear incompetent? Apparently.

The struggles began early when I went to the schools, I have written extensively about how horrific those are but I realized that is where much of my energy and passion comes from, children.  To have that one source of energy that filled my reservoir taken has left me depleted in ways even I did not realize.  The trauma, the poverty, the long standing legacy of racism and generational ignorance has affected the culture here like a cancer that cannot be treated let alone cured.

I tried volunteering and found the same smug territorial-ism that I encountered in the community, the eye rolling, the ignoring and the lecturing about how something was done wrong and rarely a kind word or genuine attempt at bonding.  Offers to go for coffee were met with the passive acceptance but later excused as unavailable.  It became a constant push pull to try to meet people and when any offers were made it was to attend their Church, a house I had no interest in visiting.   But I did go and no offers were made to come to lunch, brunch or again but prayers were proffered and I accepted them with the intent they were given, with grace.  But once over I was alone again.

My days were spent futilely and desperately between Yoga classes, long walks, online shopping, book reading, and sitting at varying coffee shops reading the New York Times and harassing the staff for laughs.  When bored I would go through my endless stash of no longer fitting clothes, things I did not want nor need and pass them off, not to buy friendship but to stave off guilt for my sitting there for hours having nowhere to go and no one to go home to.   I would have gotten a pet but when I knew I was here for the short time there was no way I would make that kind of commitment and I watched how people here seemed to connect and relate to their pets – they had them and they walked them, rarely cleaned up after them, the dogs and even cats seemed desperate for attention and they too glommed onto each passer by as a potential friend.   I saw myself in those animals and felt what they felt.

I have tried drinking too much, crying not enough and mediation to stave off the anger, the rage, the sadness and the like and it never did more than make me feel worse.  As I watch my reservoir deplete I worried that it would one day take a torrential down pour to refill it and then it would overflow and burst as a result changing the landscape forever.  My greatest fear seemed to get closer with every day that passes and as we have come to learn with global warming it can snow in May so I am on full Weather Alert between now and my time to depart but every day seems to bring more rage and anger.

I worry that my personal reservoir can never be full enough to be sustainable and as a result I am permanently damaged in a way that further closes me off.     Every effort to try to build a friendship or some type of healthy relationship has led me to hit the proverbial wall.  One can only hit a wall so much before the cracks lead to total collapse.

Withdrawal and retreat is a tactic of war and of sports only the idea is to rethink one’s strategy and find the opponents weak spot in which to wring out defeat.  You wring out dish clothes and rags and I am one rag of a towel.

A loner by nature is not of nature as we all have to eventually find a tribe, a pack, a school, a colony, a swarm, a collective in which to belong and to feel a part of a whole.  I cannot even find a half anymore.  I laughed when I saw the #SexStrike. Really? Can you strike from a job that you do not do anymore?  And was it a job?  At times it felt that way and the times it did not I could walk away I would cross that picket line.  I miss sex but its men I don’t miss or maybe its just the men I used to know. 

I used to say it is not the size that matters (take that however you want) but it is the quality of that which you take or is given to savor and take pleasure from.  Well I know at age 60 there is no one who wants even a taste.  The water has sat to long in this reservoir to be of use, it is stagnant.  Funny water is deep as am I.

Alone Again, Naturally

Ah the three day weekend full of last minute summer plans, BBQ’s, and other final acts to mark the end of one season and the beginning of another.

I moved across country this year to Nashville from Seattle. A native of Seattle I understood the Seattle Freeze and I accepted it.  I never felt lonely as all I had to do was look to the left and right and see really ugly unhappy people in forced relationships as a means to avoid actually making friends and being social, that I never felt alone or lonely.

It is probably why I love NYC and that there you can be alone and never alone.  You can be lonely and within minutes find an activity that will assauge said loneliness.

I am very much alone in Nashville and with it lonely.  I don’t miss Seattle there is too much water under that bridge to ever look back at rebuilding it.  I hated my job, I hated my house and I hated every waking minute of being there.  I will take loneliness over that intense rage any day of the week.

In Nashville I suspect for me to connect the only way will be through a Church and that I have not felt compelled or willing as despite being a believer and liking faith, I have a feeling that in Nashville once you join it is like a tattoo that you come to regret as it was in a moment of drunkeness or idiocy and I don’t want to join somewhere to just fill the ache of having no friends.

It hit me hard the first day I filled in my application with the Nashville Public Schools and they had the “In case of Emergency” portion to complete.  The head of the department came by and asked why it was blank.  I responded that I had just moved here and don’t know anyone well enough to designate such an important notice.  She then asked about anyone from where I was from.  “No,” was my definitive response.  She shook her head and walked away.

Well first of all those are bullshit.  I know for a fact that no one actually does know who to call and that if I was in a public school and some attack, they call 911 and they in turn have the hospital raid your phone.  They may or may not call the schools to find out contact info but given the time, the office would be closed or they would not have access. Trusting a school district to give a flying fuck about a Substitute Teacher is laughable.  I often when pressed put my dead dog and my old phone number down.

The idea of ICE is quite important to me and why I also lock my phone now.  I have just my ID and that is enough.   I know what first hand these fuckers do when they raid your phone and call people in the middle of an emergency.  I have yet to ever reconcile, forgive or forget what Harborview Medical Center did to me.

So I have massive trust issues. I always have and now it is firmly in my character to utterly warn anyone treating me that I am very alone and this is all on me.   The end.

I do worry about this and my mental health and know that I will have to leave Nashville in the next 3-4 years.  I don’t feel as unsafe here but I don’t think I will ever build community here.  This is a magical place but magic is a trick.

I have joined Meetups and that was abject failure.  Again I take my share of responsibility but I do know manners and good hosting and neither of those things were apparent on my first go around. I wanted to join a writers group but the male host was so creepy and weird that again that is my “trigger warning” and I extricated myself with positive affirmations and thanks and ran for the door.

So I have work to do.  And when I read this today I thought I am not alone.

The Health Effects of Growing Old, and Lonely

By KATIE HAFNER
THE NEW YORK TIMES
SEPT. 5, 2016

BLACKPOOL, England — The woman on the other end of the phone spoke lightheartedly of spring and of her 81st birthday the previous week.

“Who did you celebrate with, Beryl?” asked Alison, whose job was to offer a kind ear.

“No one, I…”

And with that, Beryl’s cheer turned to despair.

Her voice began to quaver as she acknowledged that she had been alone at home not just on her birthday, but for days and days. The telephone conversation was the first time she had spoken in more than a week.

About 10,000 similar calls come in weekly to an unassuming office building in this seaside town at the northwest reaches of England, which houses The Silver Line Helpline, a 24-hour call center for older adults seeking to fill a basic need: contact with other people.

Loneliness, which Emily Dickinson described as “the Horror not to be surveyed,” is a quiet devastation. But in Britain, it is increasingly being viewed as something more: a serious public health issue deserving of public funds and national attention.

Working with local governments and the National Health Service, programs aimed at mitigating loneliness have sprung up in dozens of cities and towns. Even fire brigades have been trained to inspect homes not just for fire safety but for signs of social isolation.

“There’s been an explosion of public awareness here, from local authorities to the Department of Health to the media,” said Paul Cann, chief executive of Age UK Oxfordshire and a founder of The Campaign to End Loneliness, a five-year-old group based in London. “Loneliness has to be everybody’s business.”

Researchers have found mounting evidence linking loneliness to physical illness and to functional and cognitive decline. As a predictor of early death, loneliness eclipses obesity.

“The profound effects of loneliness on health and independence are a critical public health problem,” said Dr. Carla M. Perissinotto, a geriatrician at the University of California, San Francisco. “It is no longer medically or ethically acceptable to ignore older adults who feel lonely and marginalized.”

In Britain and the United States, roughly one in three people older than 65 live alone, and in the United States, half of those older than 85 live alone. Studies in both countries show the prevalence of loneliness among people older than 60 ranging from 10 percent to 46 percent.

While the public, private and volunteer sectors in Britain are mobilizing to address loneliness, researchers are deepening their understanding of its biological underpinnings. In a paper published earlier this year in the journal Cell, neuroscientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology identified a region of the brain they believe generates feelings of loneliness. The region, known as the dorsal raphe nucleus, or D.R.N., is best known for its link to depression.

Kay M. Tye and her colleagues found that when mice were housed together, dopamine neurons in the D.R.N. were relatively inactive. But after the mice were isolated for a short period, the activity in those neurons surged when those mice were reunited with other mice.

“This is the first time we’ve found a cellular substrate for this experience,” said Dr. Tye, an assistant professor at the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at M.I.T. and a senior author of the paper. “And we saw the change after 24 hours of isolation.”

John T. Cacioppo, a professor of psychology at the University of Chicago and director of the university’s Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience, has been studying loneliness since the 1990s. He said loneliness is an aversive signal much like thirst, hunger or pain.

“Denying you feel lonely makes no more sense than denying you feel hunger,” he said. Yet the very word “lonely” carries a negative connotation, Professor Cacioppo said, signaling social weakness, or an inability to stand on one’s own.

The unspoken stigma of loneliness is amply evident during calls to The Silver Line. Most people call asking for advice on, say, roasting a turkey. Many call more than once a day. One woman rings every hour to ask the time. Only rarely will someone speak frankly about loneliness.

Yet the impulse to call in to services like The Silver Line is a healthy one, Professor Cacioppo said.

On a recent afternoon, Tracey, a Silver Line adviser, listened as a caller in his 80s embarked on a nostalgic trip down his list of favorite films. The next caller serenaded Tracey with “Oh What a Beautiful Morning,” on his harmonica.

Once the harmonica player had hung up, a call came in from an 88-year-old man with an avalanche of memories to share: dogs he had owned, boats he had captained, London during the blitz. Tracey, a former nurse, listened patiently for 30 minutes.

“It can be really fascinating when people talk about things like London during the bombing,” she said after the call ended. “It’s important to remember the rich lives people have led.”

Silver Line workers leave it up to the caller to mention whether they are feeling lonely. Still, the advisers are trained to listen for signs of unhappy isolation, and gently lead the conversation accordingly, perhaps offering to link the caller to a Silver Line Friend, a volunteer who makes weekly phone calls or writes letters to those who request it.

Sophie Andrews, chief executive of The Silver Line, said she was surprised by the explosion of calls shortly after the service began operating nearly three years ago. The Blackpool call center now receives some 1,500 calls a day.

Ms. Andrews said she was most concerned not about those who called The Silver Line, but those who were too depressed by their isolation to pick up the phone. “We need to raise awareness with the people who are the hardest to reach,” she said.

Professor Cacioppo lauds efforts like The Silver Line, yet he warns that the problem of loneliness is nuanced and the solutions not as obvious as they might seem. That is, a call-in line can help reduce feelings of loneliness temporarily, but is not likely to reduce levels of chronic loneliness.

In his research, Professor Cacioppo has shown that loneliness affects several key bodily functions, at least in part through overstimulation of the body’s stress response. Chronic loneliness, his work has shown, is associated with increased levels of cortisol, a major stress hormone, as well as higher vascular resistance, which can raise blood pressure and decrease blood flow to vital organs.

Professor Cacioppo’s research has also shown that the danger signals activated in the brain by loneliness affect the production of white blood cells; this can impair the immune system’s ability to fight infections.

It is only in the past several years that loneliness has been examined through a medical, rather than psychological or sociological, lens. Dr. Perissinotto, the University of California, San Francisco geriatrician, decided to study loneliness when she began to sense there were factors affecting her patients’ health that she was failing to capture.

Using data from a large national survey of older adults, in 2012 Dr. Perissinotto analyzed the relationship between self-reported loneliness and health outcomes in people older than 60. Of 1,604 participants in the study, 43 percent reported feelings of loneliness, and these individuals had significantly higher rates of declining mobility, difficulty in performing routine daily activities, and death during six years of follow-up. The association of loneliness with mortality remained significant even after adjusting for age, economic status, depression and other common health problems.

Dr. Perissinotto is also interested in examining the link between loneliness and suicidal thoughts, as there has been little research in that area. She hopes to study The Friendship Line, a 24-hour, toll-free, loneliness call-in line run by the Institute on Aging in San Francisco that is also a suicide prevention hotline.

Although plenty of research into loneliness takes place in the United States, Britain remains well ahead in addressing the problem.

“In the U.S., there isn’t much recognition in terms of public health initiatives or the average person recognizing that loneliness has to do with health,” said Julianne Holt-Lunstad, a professor of psychology at Brigham Young University, whose studies also link loneliness to deteriorating health.

Age UK, an organization similar to AARP in the United States, oversees an array of programs aimed at decreasing loneliness and coordinates efforts with fire brigades to look for signs of loneliness and isolation in the homes they enter.

Another charity, Open Age, runs some 400 activities each week in Central London — sewing circles, current events discussions, book clubs and exercise and computer classes, held at church halls, sport centers, housing projects — and its employees also visit people in their homes to try to get them out and about.

“We try to work out what it is that’s preventing them from leaving the house,” said Helen Leech, the organization’s director.

Men and women differ greatly in how they grapple with loneliness. Seventy percent of the calls to The Silver Line are from women.

“We have this kind of male pride thing,” said Mike Jenn, 70, a retired charity worker who lives in London. “We say, ‘I can look after myself. I don’t need to talk to anyone,’ and it’s a complete fallacy. Not communicating helps to kill us.”

Mr. Jenn runs a “Men’s Shed” in London’s Camden Town district, which aims to bring older men together in a more familiar and comfortable environment — working side by side in a woodworking shop. The concept began in Australia and has since spread to Britain: There are now more than 300 Men’s Sheds throughout England, Scotland and Ireland.

Keith Pearshouse, 70, a retired school principal, discovered the Men’s Shed near his home after moving to London from Norfolk, England, in 2007 and recognizing he was lonely.

“I was a bit anxious walking into a roomful of people,” said Mr. Pearshouse, chatting amid the din created by a table saw, router and lathe at the Camden Town shed, a 700-square-foot workshop in a local community center. “But I immediately thought, ‘Yeah, this is a place that would work for me.’”

Mr. Pearshouse, who had never worked with wood before he discovered the Men’s Shed, showed a visitor a delicate wooden jar he was finishing. The pieces he produces are gratifying, he said, but not nearly as gratifying as the human connections he has made.

While Mr. Pearshouse is still a long way from sharing every little ache and upset with his friends at the shed, he said his life would now feel much emptier without the shoulder-to-shoulder way of confiding he has come to know. As he spoke, he took the lid off his jar, and it gave a slight pop, signifying a perfect fit.

Table for Two?

As I wrote the last blog post about being an elderly woman and living and dying alone, I get it I really do.  I found this article from the Post and thought it was one of the more eloquent articles about what it is like to be “single” and of a “certain age.”

Loneliness is the only downside and doing all the chores.  But I resist having a roommate and after that last blog post I keep thinking of the great movie  Arsenic and Old Lace starring Cary Grant.  And then I found that he also starred in this movie >>>>

I do have loneliness and I have anger and I have all the baggage that adults have.  Funny we have no problem with our own carry on’s but others we always have to make room in the overhead and we don’t do well with that.

I think people alone frighten people as they seem disconnected from the duties and responsibilities that define being “American” and that we are to be prosperous, in defined relationship and with regards to women – breeding and still fuckable – when those two duties are done, well Die Bitch Die! 

I’ve been single all my life. I rarely get lonely. 
By Bella DePaulo  
The Washington Post 
February 19 2016

Because I’m single and live alone, people who don’t know me very well sometimes wonder whether I lead a lonely life. I can tell you exactly how long I can spend completely alone, with no face-to-face contact with any other humans, before I feel lonely: 15 days. I know because I tried it.

It wasn’t meant to be an experiment in loneliness. I thought I was giving myself the gift of a writing retreat: I had read about writers who isolate themselves in a charming beach house in a deserted seaside town, and it was easy for me to create my own version. I was working on my latest book, and I already lived on my own in a little beach town. The isolation took care of itself; conveniently, the friends I see most often were all preoccupied at the time with traveling or caring for an ailing parent or some such.

The first week was pure bliss. During the second, I started to miss meaningful interactions with other people, but I was still mostly fine. But then I was done.

In my day-to-day life, I rarely feel lonely. Instead, I revel in solitude, savoring long hours of immersion in reading, writing, cooking, Netflix or whatever else calls out to me. I enjoy my friends, too. I don’t socialize much with people I don’t care about, so most of my time with others is engaging and warm, or neutral at worst. Afterward, though, I love returning to my empty, quiet home.

Because loneliness is the pain of missing out on the relationship experiences you wish you had, the remedy should be more quality time with other people. When my fanciful writer’s retreat turned into a lonely abyss, it took the return of my friends to pull me out of it.

Yet for less acute experiences, I can recover nicely in other ways. A long walk on the beach or bluffs, or some verdant trail, might begin with sadness or stress, but it will almost always end with peacefulness and calm. Intellectual absorption works for me, too. When I first moved to Charlottesville and knew no one other than the people I had met briefly during my job interview, I spent most of my second evening writing a scholarly article, surrounded by rooms full of unpacked boxes.

I’ve been single all my life. According to prevailing cultural narratives, loneliness should not have to work so hard to catch me. As part of our research on perceptions of single people, my colleagues and I created biographical profiles and asked study participants for their impressions. The people in the profiles were described in identical ways, except that half the time, the profile was said to be of a single person, and the other half, a married one. Sometimes we described the person in the profiles as 25 years old and other times as 40. Participants routinely judged the single people as lonelier than the married people, and they thought the single people were especially lonely if they were 40 instead of 25.

Those impressions are most likely wrong. I’ve scoured academic journals for relevant studies, and I cannot find even one that shows that people who get married become less lonely than they were when they were single. But there is research showing that people who marry become less connected to friends and family than they were before. Although definitive long-term studies have not yet been conducted, the available evidence suggests that single people become more comfortable over time with their single lives, not less so.
Surely there are single people who are chronically lonely, just as there are married people who feel the same way. Yet the stereotypes that insist that single means lonely gloss over the diversity of experiences among the 107 million adults (in the United States alone) who are not married.

Researchers have examined the psychological profiles of people who are afraid to be single, and people who like spending time alone. Both sets of studies show the same thing: People who are not afraid to be single and people who like spending time alone are less likely to experience loneliness. They are psychologically strong in other ways, too. For example, they are less likely to be neurotic and more likely to be open to new experiences.

My own interest is in people who are single at heart — those who live their best, most authentic and most meaningful lives by living single. My preliminary findings suggest that people who are single at heart don’t worry about being lonely; instead, they embrace solitude. What’s painful for all of these different types of people is not time alone but not having enough of it.

Reports about the dire consequences of loneliness seem to be proliferating, which is curious considering that, at least among high school and college students, loneliness has been declining for decades. I think the stories are expressing the kinds of fears that always bubble up in the midst of profound social changes.

 As the sociologist and author Eric Klinenberg has noted, the past half century marked “the first time in human history [when] great numbers of people … have begun settling down as singletons.”

I do think that loneliness should be taken seriously. For people whose loneliness is searing and relentless, concern is appropriate. But be cautious about swooping in to save those you only believe to be lonely because they are single or live alone. Those people may already feel liberated by the life they’ve chosen to live.

The Dating Game

I loved that show as a kid and as the new season of the Bachelor comes along it reminds me of the overwhelming need for all of us to go two-by-two on Noah’s Ark.  As all things in America everything seems connected to the Bible and Christian mythology. Yes it is a myth as we have no true evidence to support any of the tales of the Bible, including a man called Jesus. But I like to think we believe Mulder we do and we can or elect not to, freedom of choice and all that.

But we do have a funny problem when it comes to being single. That scarlet letter “S” has some type of odd mark of odd ball and different, someone who cannot find the epynonomous soul mate for whom we are destined to find, or not.

Never dated in high school, went to a dance or prom nor even participated in graduation events much, including those in College.  I had a ton of men friends in College and one significant boyfriend and really I am not the Cosmo girl of my era where Helen Gurley Brown assured me that Sex and the Single Girl was great, and I never took Ms. as my title then or now. Hmm.  Always the spinster, I guess.  Well I was, emphasis on was, married and with my partner for over 10 years in total.  I think that was my attempt at being “normal” whatever that is.

Current stats on singles are here and it made me laugh that for every 100 women there are 88 men single.  Bridget Jones the odds are not in your favor.  But what I also found interesting is that those 65 and over (an approaching cohort) currently make up 17% of all single people with 34 million of that total number or 28% living alone.  Good to know I am not alone naturally.

But it is a tough slog when you are alone and when I read these laments by the men of NYC I did not laugh as in enough frankly,  as I suspect that there were missing elements in the story as there often are. 

This from the same paper that’s wedding pages have such cache that it was an entire storyline in Sex and the City, another celebration of being single until you can no longer be – age, baby, sickness, and simply desire to be married –  as Charlotte, the traditional one, often lamented.  She should of known one of  those guys. The reality in that is there are always Charlottes’.  And the same one’s who were once on the Engagement/Marriage page are the same ones later in the Unhitched page. Well at least you can be in both that has to amount to something!

And then I read this in the Washington Post about girls liking nerds and I thought will this is the first thing of actual intelligence ever spoken by Zuckerberg (that I know of).  And no I don’t think it  is Hollywood’s fault for encouraging women to date/marry attractive men, it is a societal class thing and the idea that nerds are less likely to succeed concept than one Hollywood has conveyed.  The movies she cites are nowhere near as dated and watch a Tracy/Hepburn film to note opposites attract and Tracy was quite married at the time. Also take a look at many films from the 40s, such as Affair to Remember which had Deborah Kerr forsaking her true love due to her becoming disabled. Same thing, no one wants to marry “damaged” goods. That sickness and in health thing, not really.  Same goes for aging, just ask Princess Leia about that one. The Princess never aged, Carrie Fisher, however did not get the memo.

As a woman of a certain age you get used to being independent and the idea of aging brings some concern as the reality is that most women are cared for by another woman in the home, aka their daughter.  I have no children so what does that mean? Do I become a ward of the state? Do they even have such a thing anymore?  The reality is that aging in place is not a reality as the costs and care of maintaining a home independently becomes a challenge.  I have long been a proponent of multi generation co-operative housing which can circumvent this but it has to be a well established cohort of individuals who accept the responsibilities and energies to take time to actually get to know your neighbor and doing so is not easy and do you only find those “like you” or those who  share the more essential values. 

Once again it is like the Dating Game where the contestant picks the best one who auditioned for the role of “date.”

I cannot answer nor explain why I am not good at dating or romance or that I would have any clue as sadly my lessons largely came from TV and they were not ones you wanted to emulate.  I spend a great deal of time of late realizing I will not have love in my life unless via a dog, that my trust and faith in man and mankind was seriously ruptured and in reality I never really did, giving up and walking out friendships and relationships on the earliest of opportunity.  Funny how you walk away from people when you think they cannot maintain their end when you yourself have no idea how to either.  It is a dance with no finish.

Dating should not be a game with a final square as in diamond the end. It should be natural fluid and simply just a function of learning about other people.   Americans need to date people more and need to realize it has nothing to do with sex, marriage and babies.  What do I know? Nothing I have none of those! 

Dying Alone

I am pretty sure that is me.  I am one of the many childless unencumbered individuals who are without many social contacts, a long term job and a connection to a community. 

I died once but for the grace of god I lived.  I realized then that people are largely self involved, unkind and unwilling to help, if you are poor, if you are old, if you are female and of course if you are not white.  I am three out of four so the odds are not in my favor.

I read the article in the New York Times today about the Lonely Death of George Bell.  It is lengthy, tragic and no one ended up happy.  There are no happy endings in lives lived like Mr. Bell or my own………for now.

And as I sat there at my coffee shop the Police arrived to answer a call that a woman found an elderly gentleman on her street sitting wet and confused in the grass.  He was unable to give her the needed information and she did not feel comfortable searching for ID so she brought him to a public place had him wait in her car until the Police came.  I can assure you that that random act of kindness is rare here and that had it not been a largely gentrifying hood with many around on a Sunday he would still be sitting there.  This city is unkind and as the New York Times also wrote about a week ago – we lost our soul in the process of our growth.

She of course when I complimented her said it is something anyone born and raised here would do. I laughed and said no I don’t think so it is not called “random” acts without reason. And she explained about her Judaism and her faith and I understood.  I had nothing to offer her with regards to that and said I am a Catholic who returned to my faith but I still see people as they are and they are not all good.  She did not agree and we ended our discussion abruptly where she left her backpack.  I did not chase after her or touch it.  I wanted to remind her that no, they are just that random.  I can be a bitch but I can be kind.  It just depends.  I am random that way.

A young sixth grader said to me once, “Miss. X you must be really lonely as you don’t have the same job to go to every day, how do you know people and make friends.”  I did not have the heart to tell him the truth and I hate to lie to children so I often say, “I make things up. It shows imagination and creativity, lying is hurtful and destructive.”  And so I made up that I had a life.  It was just another way of saying that if I don’t get out of this place soon I will die here for certain this time certainly alone.

No one helped me. No one.  Ask my attorneys as they will not answer my calls. They did not believe me when I told my story then, they did not help me prove it or offer ways such as court orders  to cell phone providers to prove my dates existence nor ask if I wanted to hire a detective.  They did nothing but take my checks.  I will spend the rest of my life hating them and never foregiving them.

I wrote about another man’s death, in Death by Acronym, that because of the ETOH response by Police, the EMT and the hospital staff he did not get the attention he needed quickly enough to survive the assault that left him injured without ID and ultimately he died. Not from the injury of course that will be the official records, but due to neglect by those in charge of his care.

I could have ended up dead.  I could have made it home and the young man following me finished his business and left me to die.  I would have died like George Bell.

I carry this anger like a seeping wound.  It is like a tumor that grows and I cannot have it surgically removed.  I often think that much of this is gender based and of course aged based but our system is so broken that unless you have an advocate to fight for you, you will die alone.

Raise the Roof or the Family but not the Rent

I found the below article interesting as a comparison of what urban living in what are now the desirable dense cities touted as sustainable cost for those with families and those without.

A trend right now in the 1% class is having more than one child. Well you have to keep that breed line open and secure and so many families that used to be the one and only now have 2 to 3 children, it proves you can have it all with nannies and other full time help on board to help the of course highly educated stay at home working mom with her fantastic degree and career that she is leaning in on.

And then we have real families and of course the singltaries. These are the most desirable as they have disposable income, will live in cell pods and work 24/7 in dystopian workplaces or as I call them the Amazonians.  But they are well and alive in San Francisco, New York and Boston.  The rents are a rising but so is the pay or not but they have free bagels.

This does a better job than most explaining the cost of living in what are those places deemed “family friendly” and those not and the cost breakdown of each.  Note that the costs for family oriented towns are just that towns, not cities and there is little to no discussion on the work available for same families in which to be employed to live on.  So while it may be cheaper to live in Morristown what do you do there?

The Most Affordable Place in the U.S. to Raise a Family

• Eric Morath

New Market, Tenn., is among the communities in the Morristown metropolitan statistical area, where a family of four can meet basic needs for $49,114 a year, according to the Economic Policy Institute.

PAUL EFIRD/KNOXVILLE NEWS SENTINEL/ASSOCIATED PRESS

A family of four can meet its basic needs for $49,114 a year in Morristown, Tenn.—about half the income needed to raise a family in New York or Washington.

There are 140 communities and regions where a family can meet basic needs such as rent, health care and taxes for less than $60,000 a year, according to the Economic Policy Institute’s Family Budget Calculator released Wednesday.

But in Washington, New York, San Francisco and six other areas, the same essentials cost at least $90,000 a year.

The findings demonstrate the wide gap in cost of living between places like Morristown, a mostly rural region nestled in the mountains of eastern Tennessee, and the New York metro area, home to more than 20 million people.

The data also shows how families in any part of the country can struggle to make ends meet, said Elise Gould, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank. Even in Morristown, two adults working full-time at the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour would fail to provide for their family without assistance.

“Everyone thinks it really cheap to live in Mississippi or Louisiana, but it’s not cheap anywhere if you have a very low-wage job,” she said. In fact, no place in Mississippi costs less than $60,000 annually for a family of four. That reflects elevated taxes and transportation costs compared with neighboring states.

The EPI measure isn’t a poverty gauge, but rather estimates what it costs for households to satisfy basic needs, including shelter, food, child care, transportation, health care and taxes. The measure takes into account items such as a cell phones and home furnishings, but not vacations or saving for retirement or college.

EPI has calculated the basic cost of living in more than 600 communities and regions. A tool on the institute’s website allows users to find the measures in their towns, based on the size of their families.
For families of four, 14 of the 15 least expensive areas were in Tennessee. That reflects the state’s low tax rate and relatively affordable child-care options. Several areas in Oklahoma, South Carolina and Louisiana were among the cheapest places to live.

But also included among communities with less than $60,000 in annual living costs were industrial regions, such as Toledo, Ohio, and Cumberland, Md., and cities in the far west such as Logan, Utah, and Boise, Idaho.

In each of those communities, annual rent was less than the national median of $8,977.
Of the nine most expensive communities, five were in the state of New York, including New York City, where the rent for a family of four is estimated at $17,280 for basic accommodations and child care costs $24,130 annually for two children.

But Washington, D.C., was the most expensive city overall for a family of four, requiring $106,493 in income just to meet basic needs. The District of Columbia has the highest taxes in the country, $18,868 annually, and has by far the top child-care costs, at $31,158. Nationwide, the median cost for child care for two children is $9,993 a year.

Washington’s child-care costs may skew higher because the measure doesn’t include potentially cheaper options located in the Maryland and Virginia suburbs.

Still, living without kids makes Washington a more affordable place. A couple with no children needs $52,347 to meet basic needs, ranking the capital as just the 15th most expensive place to live. The most expensive for a couple is Stamford, Conn., requiring $62,430 a year.