We Are In This Life Together

Since I was one of the marginalized in middle school and high school. I have always felt empathy with the marginalized. One of my few friends in middle school was a Native American girl. She was on the margin like I was because she was a Native American. During my university years I ran into her again. By that time, she had become a barfly girl, spending her nights in a local bar, drinking, dancing, and hooking up with guys for casual sex. She was on the road to becoming an alcoholic if she had not become one already.

Among my clients when I was a substance abuse counselor was an elderly woman who had been in a same sex relationship with a younger woman. The younger woman had rejected her for a woman closer to her own age. The only way she knew how to meet other women was at bars. Due to her age, she was no longer attractive to the younger women, and they snubbed her. If she went to a bar, she drank. Her drinking problem was serious enough where it was affecting her health. Rejected by the younger women, she would become depressed and then would drink at home alone, worsening her health problems. Her drinking and depression interfered with her work.

The kind of problems she experienced were not uncommon to older members of the LBGTQ community, male and female, at that time. There were no support groups for them. There were no ways to meet people who shared their sexual orientation and lifestyle except one of the area’s bars that catered to the LBGTQ community.

Faced with the loneliness of old age some older members of that community drank themselves to death; others committed suicide. They, like my client, were caught in a Catch 22, “a problem in which the only solution is denied by a circumstance in the problem….”

I do not know what happened to my client. The contract of the agency for which I worked was not renewed and I had to look for another job. I suspect that her drinking killed her, or she took an overdose of medication and killed herself.

The problems that older people face today are not much different. Young people turn their backs on them. Their circles of friends shrink. They become a victim of the epidemic of loneliness that besets not only this country but other Western countries, exacerbated by the growing divisions between the generations and, yes, the internet.

Older people are not its only victims. So are young people. It is one of the factors that account for the increase in suicides among young people.

Churches can be a part of the solution to this epidemic. However, both older people and younger people need to overcome their reluctance to be around each other, their tendency to segregate themselves from each other by age. We need to break down the age barrier that divides the generations. The several generations have more in common with each other than they realize. They need to be more open-minded toward each other, more tolerant of each other, and, yes, more accepting of each other.

One place to start is to talk to each other. I mean really talk to each other, to get to know each other as fellow human beings.

A slogan I keep hearing since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic is, “We are in this together.” We are indeed “in this together,” not just the pandemic, but life! Let us start acting that way.