Joan is my mother-in-law. At 105, she remains one of the most connected people I know. She remembers all her children’s and grandchildren’s birthdays and still sends them hand written cards. A little earlier these days as snail mail lives up to its name.
She is considering making the pandemic-enforced halt to her Bridge games permanent. Just as the world seems to be busy re-connecting, she is about to disconnect from the world, beyond her family, that has sustained her for the past 30 years of her centenarian life.
Joan has always been content in her own company and always chosen her own path. While the rest of us relish meeting up with people off the screens and in parks, cafes, pubs and homes, she is doing the opposite.
When I met her she was 91 and the centre of any family gathering. I’ve heard it was the same at Bridge.
A brilliant conversationalist, Joan’s preference for her own company has crept up on her over the past few years. Her family was disappointed that a snap lockdown cancelled her birthday celebration on Valentine’s Day, but she was secretly relieved.
She told me over over dinner that she is pleased when she wakes up and realises that she doesn’t have to go anywhere that day.
She still lives on her own and relishes it. ‘I’m happy being single,’ she said recently when her daughter asked if she was lonely. Joan has long ‘made aloneness a friend’, as the poet David Whyte puts it in Consolations.
This is not the ‘new kind of loneliness’ that American artist, Candy Chang, speaks about and explores with her participatory installations of anonymous, handwritten reflections. She told us at a recent conference that she is caretaker of over one million handwritten anxieties, hopes, pains, and moments of grace in the 21st century, such as: ‘I’m afraid to connect with other people’. This would completely befuddle Joan.
She always found it easy to connect with her neighbours. She’s lived in the same house in the same street since 1964, and has been on friendly terms with each generation of neighbours — with the exception of the bloke who had a ‘grow house’ down the road. But she followed his arrest and conviction with interest.
Today, she has a coterie of caring neighbours who take her bins in and out, bring her wood and drive her to Mass. Some are a little annoying and just want to drop in for a chat and a glass of her whiskey. She hasn’t missed those ones much during the many lockdowns of the past two years. Social connections she’d rather discourage.
