Keeping Isolation at Bay

While I was in Florida this week cleaning out my mother’s house, I heard the rest of a story that I thought I already knew.

A woman was extremely ill and dying. Hospice had been called in and the nurse visited several times a week. During one visit, the woman’s husband excused himself and went into the bathroom. Suddenly there was a gunshot. The Hospice nurse ran to the bathroom, opened the door, and found him dead on the floor. Suicide among seniors in retirement areas is a big problem.

The rest of the story is that his wife was furious with him not because he committed suicide, but because he hadn’t killed her before he killed himself. That was the plan to which they agreed and he welched on the deal, committing suicide rather than committing a murder/suicide. It breaks my heart.

I can’t begin to fathom the pain in the lives of those two people that would have driven them to such a gruesome agreement. Besides age and illness, there must have been enormous spiritual and relational pain in their lives. If you live long enough, my elderly friends tell me, you look around and realize that all your old friends are dead. If you have no younger friends, you have no friends. And family… well, families are complicated. Isolation comes upon us so easily in our culture.

While away from home, I finished reading Rod Dreher’s book The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, the story of his sister’s life and death from cancer at an early age. Ruthie lived in the small town in which she and Rod ( and their parents and grandparents and…)grew up. Rod moved out as soon as he was able, living in multiple cities building a career. Then after Ruthie’s death, all he was missing began to come into focus. He wrote:

Contemporary culture encourages us to make islands of ourselves for the sake of self-fulfillment, of career advancement, of entertainment, of diversion, and all the demands of the sovereign self. When suffering and death come to you—and it will—you want to be in a place where you know, and are known.  You want—no, you need—to be able to say as Mike [Ruthie’s husband] did, “We’re leaning, but we’re leaning on each other.”

I pray for the man who committed suicide and the angry wife he left behind—and the nurse who is, I’m sure, still traumatized months later. And I pray for others who are so desperately isolated.

And I pray for myself and my friends and family. Isolation will sneak up on us if we’re not careful. The goal, as Rod Dreher suggests, is to keep it at bay.