Lonely Places, by Gillian

The recent hundred-year anniversary of the beginning of WW1 started me thinking about how war, above any other single cause, creates lonely places of the soul. After all, the very essence of the armed services is to nullify that; to create a sense of belonging and total commitment to your military comrades. To a considerable extent, I'm sure it succeeds. But at the same time it still leaves ample room for lonely places. Did that man hanging on the barbed wire of no man's land in agony, screaming for one of his buddies to shoot him, feel less alone and lonely in his terrible circumstances simply because he had buddies? I cannot imagine so. Did that  tail gunner of the Second World War, huddling cold and frightened in his rear turret, not feel impossible alone?

But, sadly, it is not just the combatants who inhabit such lonely places. It is also, very often, the survivors, and certainly the people who love the ones who died or returned as shattered pieces of their former selves, to occupy their own lonely places. We only have to hear that someone is a Vietnam Vet to immediately conjure up a vision, alas all too frequently correct, of someone with  .... well, let's just say, a vulnerable psyche. The estimate of total American Vietnam Vet suicides is currently about 100,000; approaching double the number of Americans killed during the twenty-some years of that seemingly endless, fruitless, war. Right there are 100,000 vacated lonely places. And of course it's not just the veterans of that war who inhabit places so lonely that eventually they have to take the only way out they can find. The U.S. right now suffers an average of 22 Veteran suicides each day, most of the younger ones having returned from Iraq or Afghanistan with battered bodies accompanied by memories dark enough to extinguish the light in their eyes, and their souls. 22 more lonely places available every day, and no shortage of new tenants.

World War 1, was a terrible war that was supposed to end all wars and instead gave birth to the next, already half grown. Whole villages became lonely places. They had lost an entire generation of men in two minutes "going over the top,", leaving only women, old men, and children, to struggle on. Children dying before their parents is not the natural order of things, and creates empty spaces so tight that they can squeeze the real life from those held in their grip, leaving only empty shells to carry on. Consider that awful story of the Sullivans from Waterloo, Iowa; all five sons died in action when their light cruiser, USS Juneau, was sunk, (incidentally, one week after I was born,) on November 13th, 1942. How on earth did their parents and only sister cope with that one?

Several years ago I spent some weeks in Hungary. A Jewish friend in Denver had given me the address of her cousin in Budapest, and I arranged a visit. This poor woman had lost her husband and their only daughter, thirteen at the time, in Auschwitz, but somehow survived, herself. She showed me the numbers on her arm, and talked of nothing but her child, proudly, sadly, showing me photos of this shyly smiling young girl. I had never met a Concentration Camp survivor before, nor anyone who had lost their family in one. I felt physically sick but bravely sat with her for two hours, hearing every nightmare of this family's holocaust as if it had just happened the week before. That was how she talked of it, and I'm sure that's how it felt to her. She had not lived since then, but simply drifted on through that huge empty place of the lonely soul, going through the motions.

One of my own, personal, lonely places, and I suspect most of us have many of them we can topple into at any unexpected moment, is the one I can get sucked into when I find myself forced to confront Man's constant inhumanity to Man. It's not only war as such, but any of the endless violence thrust upon us by nations, religions, and ideologies. On 9/11/2001 I sat, along with most Americans and half the world, with my eyes gazing at the TV, somehow mentally and physically unable to detach myself. The one horror which burned itself into my brain, out of that entire day of horror, was two people who jumped, holding hands, from the hundred-and-somethingth floor, to certain death below. I wish the TV channel had not shown it, but it did. I wish I hadn't seen it, but I did. It recurs in my protesting memory, and tosses me into my own lonely space, even as I involuntarily contemplate theirs. Can you be anywhere but in a lonely space when you decide to opt for the quick clean death ahead rather than the slow, painful, dirty one fast encroaching from behind? How much comfort did you get from the warmth, the perhaps firm grip, of that other hand? Did these two people, a man and a woman, know each other? Were they friends? Workmates? Or passing strangers? I have no doubt I could find the answers on the Web, but I don't want to know. Those two share my lonely place way too much as it is. They estimate about 200 people jumped that day, but the only other image that stayed with me, though not to revisit as often as the hand-holding couple, was a woman alone, holding down her skirt as she fell. I felt an alarming bubble of hysterical laughter and tears rising in me, but in the end did neither. To paraphrase Abraham lincoln, perhaps I hurt too much to laugh but was too old to cry. No, I doubt I will ever be too old to cry; in fact I seem to do it more easily and with greater frequency. And perhaps that's good. At least it's better than being, as I was that day, lost in my lonely place, too numb to do either.

In May of 2014, the 9/11 Museum opened. It occupies a subterranean space below and within the very foundations of the World Trade Towers. That sounds a bit creepy to me. Then I read that hanging on one wall is a huge photograph of people jumping from the burning building, propelled by billowing black smoke. Why? Talk about creepy. Why is it there? These people have loved ones, we presume. Do we have no reverence, no respect, for the dead or for those who remain? I feel my lonely place approaching. It rattles along in the form of an old railroad car; doubtless it contains doomed Jews et al. My lonely place has much of Auschwitz within it. I know for sure that I will never visit that 9/11 museum. I did visit Auschwitz, and it was awful, but still there's the buffer of time. I hadn't, unlike 9/11, watched it live on TV. I breath deeply and feel my biggest, deepest, lonely place, pass on by. No, I won't be visiting that museum. There are times when those lonely places can only be fought off with a big double dose of denial.

© August 2014

About the Author 

 I was born and raised in England. After graduation from college there, I moved to the U.S. and, having discovered Colorado, never left. I have lived in the Denver-Boulder area since 1965, working for 30 years at IBM. I married, raised four stepchildren, then got divorced after finally, in my forties, accepting myself as a lesbian. I have now been with my wonderful partner Betsy for 25 years.