The Forgotten

I've raved again and again over This American Life, and this week's episode is quite interesting and heartfelt. It's all about living alone, so I can definitely relate.

I've been living alone in my own apartment for about five and a half months now. It takes getting used to, especially after sharing not only an apartment but a room with somebody else for the past four years. It takes getting used to, knowing no one within about a thousand miles. I have work friends, definitely, but considering nobody else has set foot in my apartment for around eight weeks, the place begins to be associated with being alone. I've got a duality about me, though; I'm perfectly content to be by myself, and I'm content with being with others. In the former situation, I generally seek to speak to people via online messaging or the phone, and with the latter, the person or people I'm with often get my full attention. Either way, though, I'm happy with the situation I'm in now.

My apartment, sadly, doesn't get utilized as much as one would think; my living room, for the months of July, August, and early September, was where I would hang out with visitors. Now I only venture there to talk on the phone or lie down on the couch. It's curious how my guest bedroom door has been closed for weeks, a kind of no man's land that I don't care about or touch. I have been doing a pretty good job keeping up with cleaning, though; the shower is spotless, and I run the vacuum every week or so to keep everything tidy. I'm not a clean freak by any stretch, but I suppose it could be any day now that a friend shows up looking for a place to stay. If somebody asked me if they could stay with me in my spare bedroom, I would be absolutely delighted. In fact, my Floridian friend Whitney S. asked me if the opportunity would be there for her to move up if she had to. I agreed; a break with rent would allow me to save more money, in addition to having somebody to hang around with when I get bored.

So am I lonely? I wouldn't consider myself so. I definitely seek out interactions with other people, doing my best to make friends in the area, which has introduced several intriguing adventures over the past few months. But lonely? I don't have the time to be lonely. Between work, sleep, said adventures, and phone calls, I don't have enough time in the day. I'm ambivalent, one could say. I like doing my own thing at my own time, but there's no enjoyment that compares with sharing comedy, tragedy, knowledge, and mystery with others.

Regardless, the episode of This American Life this week included the story of a department of the Los Angeles Police that dealt specifically with those who had passed away without any obvious family (or even friends) that should be contacted. They told the story of Mary Ann, a woman who had lived alone for dozens of years, barely speaking to others who lived around her. She was unmarried, had no children, and carried nothing with her to the hospital she checked into to indicate who she knew or who she was related to.

Although a distant relative of Mary Ann had been found, they also told of the people who had no one. Their parents had already passed, they never married or were widows or widowers. They had no children to speak of, and shut themselves in, filling their lives with things instead of people. This amounts to about a thousand people a year in Los Angeles, who are cremated and stored for four years before they are buried in mass graves. Almost no one attends these ceremonies, save a chaplain and a few county employees, less than a dozen usually. It's almost poetic; people who spend their lives alone, whether by choice or not, enter eternity with such company.

The most heart-wrenching story the particular LAPD investigator cited was the death of a woman in her eighties. Her husband died sixty years earlier in World War II after being shot down in Europe. The woman had still had the letters sent to her by the government - the first telling her about the loss of his plane, the second telling of the recovery of the wreckage with no body, and the third telling her about her husband's death and the discovery of the body. She had never moved on, for that six decade period, preferring to remain in mourning for the rest of her days.

Such concepts and stories make the gears begin to turn, thinking about memory, perception, and the intangibility of both. Philosophical discussion aside, though, it's a great listen.

"Because we / Are messengers of memory / Just whispers in time."