tuckova

It’s a hard and scary thought for most people: you’re going to die
alone. Even if someone is there holding your hand you’re still
generally the only one in the room dying, although probably the
hand-holding makes it seem somewhat less lonely.

What’s harder
and scarier is living alone. Growing old alone. For some people it is a
task of such terrifying magnitude that they’ll do anything to avoid it.
Live with people they nearly hate. Suffer awful treatment because at
least it’s treatment. Dash from one social engagement to the next like
they’re rungs on a hamster wheel. Some people have children because
they think children will keep them from feeling alone. Maybe all these
things help: the partners clutched like life rafts, the friends
selected from desperation, the children bred in preventive hope. I
don’t know.

The thing is: no matter how many people we surround ourselves
with, we are, as Rilke says, unutterably alone. I think that it’s good
to learn that, because then you can choose the company of people whose
presence does not function a light against the darkness, because you
make the light you need yourself.

Sooner or later, you come to an understanding that dying,
probably the most mysterious thing you’ll ever do, is something you’re
going to do alone. I think that this understanding makes the things you
do alone in the rest of your life seem less challenging. Go to the
movies alone, eat alone, wake up alone: this is nothing once you accept
that you’re going to die alone. But until you come to that
understanding, I think you live with something worse than knowing you
will die alone. You will live alone, too. You actually already do, but
you are more alone for imagining that you are not.