This year, at the age of 72, I began living alone for the first time in my life.
Before that, for 42 years I lived with my wife, Diane, who passed away in December. In college and when I was young, I always had roommates.
When my wife was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer about a year ago, she tried to prepare me for living alone. She taught me how to wash clothes. She showed me where the contact information was for the various tradesmen who repair our 100 year old house.
This was all necessary and practical information, but I told him I didn't understand how I could live without it.
“We have a wonderful family and very good friends,” he said. “It's up to them.”
This has been good advice, but my family and friends don't live under the same roof as me. They're not there when I want to complain about a McMansion being built down the block or when I wake up from a bad dream in the middle of the night.
It is also difficult to live alone in a house that can accommodate four people. It was perfect for me, my wife and our two children. Now, it feels enormous (although it isn't), and I wander its empty spaces at night like a character in a gothic horror novel, startled by every creak of the floor.
It would be easier to live alone if you were more extroverted. Diane was much more social than I was, she attracted a constant stream of people to our door and she struck up conversations with everyone, not just friends and neighbors, but also the mailman and Amazon delivery employees.
Diane was what my mother called a balabusta — Yiddish for a good housewife. She was always vacuuming, dusting, smoothing. I got used to seeing her literally sweeping a room.
I miss their familiar movements.
To compensate for his absence, I fill the house with noise and light. I blow up the stereo. I turn on the lamps in each room when it gets dark. I watch TV while having dinner with my new best friend, CNN's Erin Burnett.
You didn't need the US Surgeon General's recent report on loneliness to know that it's dangerous to be alone for extended periods of time. But even on my best days, when it comes to groups, I'm not a big fan of joining. I tried an online site for people who have lost their spouses, but it felt like I was locked in a virtual room saturated with grief. It made me want to be alone.
Isolation is a slippery slope that can send you into the depths of depression. To avoid this, I do what my wife advised and see or at least talk to family and friends as much as possible.
However, none of this teaches me how to live alone.
I suspect I just have to avoid feeling lonely – a good trick if you can pull it off. I've made an effort to stay busy, exercise, continue working full time, and meet friends for lunch. People tell me that eventually I will be ready to be in a relationship with another person – the ultimate cure for living alone. I can't imagine it. Just as I wouldn't want to be the quarterback replacing Tom Brady, I wouldn't want to be the woman replacing Diane. She was the one. At least for now, I'd rather not date the equivalent of Mac Jones.
I decide to go it alone and make the best of it, chatting with the delivery drivers and listening to sad songs (“Long Long Time” by Linda Ronstadt is possibly the saddest song ever sung).
As I wander from room to room during my sleepless midnights, the house sometimes comes alive with memories. Diane's piano still squats in the music room where she taught her students, and I can hear her patient voice correcting her mistakes. Upstairs are our children's bedrooms, where I read to them “Green Eggs and Ham” and “Where the Wild Things Are.” The living room fireplace used to be our family gathering place during the holidays; oak and birch burning and crackling marked our conversations.
William Faulkner wrote: “The past is never dead. “It hasn’t even happened.” I never understood this famous phrase until I started living alone. Diane may be gone and my children may live more than 1,000 miles away, but the memories keep them close and me, not so alone.
Bruce Wexler is a ghostwriter and book editor in the Chicago area.
