Unaloneness
Longtime friend sent a text just long enough to tell me that his wife had died and could we set up a time to talk. I was shocked—knew she was fighting cancer, but no idea so advanced. On the phone, he didn’t want to talk about her death as much as what it had stirred up. Any death raises awareness of our own, but the death of a spouse takes it through the roof. He asked if he could tell me about things in his life that he wasn’t proud of, that he’d never told anyone. He said, you may not like me after you hear what I have to say.
What is our greatest human fear? Being alone.
Whether in personal relationships or existential vastness, alone is terrifying. All our compulsive, dysfunctional behavior is aimed at soothing that fear, so it’s perfect irony that such behavior only creates more aloneness by killing our presence—our ability to connect. My friend was alone in his home now and afraid that his deeds over decades would end our connection once spoken and maybe his connection with God if not. But life had brought him to the point he was willing to risk confession, essentially doing a 5th Step with me. He’d been carrying his 4th Step moral inventory around like a boulder in a backpack for decades and had long ago admitted to himself and God the exact nature of his wrongs.
But that wasn’t enough to ease his fears.
Fear of what makes us alone only has the power of a blackmailer…once the secret is out, the power is gone. Only in the eyes of another person who knows our deepest secrets, can we know our connection remains. I liked my friend just as much after he told me what he needed to say. He had lived most of his life imagining his secrets to be unforgiveable, that if people really knew him, they would leave him. But in the breathless vulnerability and humility of letting another really see us, we reenter the herd of humanity and find the truth…
…that the default reality of life is unaloneness, that everything and everyone are connected and nothing can separate us from the love of God that holds us all in place…that the fears that make us feel alone and unconnectable exist only in our minds.
