The Vigil of the Lonely

It is a hut. A small one. Probably less than forty square meters, which is the entire room that serves as bedroom, dining, kitchen all in one. The bathroom is the size not much larger than the old fashion telephone booth, for those who remember or know what they are. The only luxury is running water.  One faucet in the kitchen, one in the bathroom. Electricity, unpaid for months, had been cut off. The room is also the receiving area and family room.  Neither feature means anything anymore to the eighty nine year old lady sitting on a rickety rocking chair by one of only two windows.  She does not have  a family to speak of  nor is there anyone to visit her except for a middle age postal worker who comes once every two weeks who brings from time to time whatever food, mostly canned goods and week-old bread she can carry in her mail bag, mostly from the local charity chapter of a non-profit organization. The unpaid "social worker"  does it out of her own time and on her dime.  She had seen enough of these elderly people - alone and often unseen - during the last twenty three years while working for the local post office. A young family man who lives half a kilometer down the road heard the story from the postal lady so he comes at regular intervals to cut firewood for the old lady. He also brings kerosene for the one portable lamp. Both good Samaritans wonder how often the old lady gets to eat a warm meal, lately. The wood-fired stove does not look like it has been used much, recently.

                       

It is not an imagined scene nor is it an isolated case. The elderly living alone is a growing phenomenon. The saddest part is that single-person homes were just 10 per cent of total households for most of the 19th century around the world but now, the so-called modern era, it had almost exponentially rose to an alarming rate. In 2012, in Stockholm, Sweden, the number of household consisting of a single person was 60%, almost half of them occupied by old folks.

Would it have been different for that eighty nine year old lady if the little hut were a mansion?  Her life would be a little easier and comfortable, yes; but her loneliness would not be any less.  The mental anguish no less severe, the emotional need no less wanting.

You don't have to understand the entire chart below but be aware that each single dot represents the percentage of single households relative to all households.

I say, the biggest fear among the elderly is not about dying but living. Alone. 

Is it a third world only phenomenon? One might ask.  Far from it, actually. Third world population has a lower single household by far compared to first world countries and most ironically, wealthy nations have more of it.

Direct quote from World Data: "In the US, the share of adults who live alone nearly doubled over the last 50 years. This is not only happening in the US: single-person households have become increasingly common in many countries across the world, from Angola to Japan".

The biggest distress among the elderly from living alone is when no one comes to visit.  The longing for company, even at the briefest amount of time, is on top of their greatest of needs.  More than food itself, if we can believe that. 

Below is one alarming statistics.  Among those below 35 years old, suicide is the No. 2 cause of death. It is fourth in the 35-54 age group. By age 65 and over it is no longer in the top 10.

What does the data tell us? By age 65 and over the will to live and to go on living is well established in that age group. Those who had gotten past that age had gone through the entire natural cycle of life, having survived their youth, midlife, stayed relatively  healthy for the most part to have made it through, so far, and now mostly retired.  Even if not too financially wealthy, we cannot and should not ignore that they have the wealth of information and experience. Yet, by their age, they are ignored. 

The age group 25-35 registered the highest incidence of suicide.  Suicide, as explained by those in the mental health care, is not about killing oneself. It is about killing the pain that brings someone the heavy emotional load no longer bearable.

The elderly had survived all of the travails life had thrown at them.  They made it thus far.  They coped, they prevailed.

The antidote to dying young is to grow old. 

There is only one ticket on the train of life  doled out to each of us.  It is sad that some of the youth would give it up on their own and decide to cut the trip short.  The elderly are those who early on and much later in life decided to make full use of their ticket, not relinquishing their right to reach the utmost of what physically they can muster to reach their final destination.

This musing will not be of much value if it does not lead to the conversation about what  we of a certain age - we know who we are - can do to make the train ride at the later segment of our journey a little more comfortable, less alone, or simply feeling less alone, or find joy even during moments of being alone.  More importantly, what is it we can do for those among us already burdened by the heavy load of loneliness.

There are a lot of "worthy causes" in the world that come barging into our mailboxes, or brought to us on television, full of visual images and melancholic background music, each in need of our support.  Do you recall any TV ad of one non-profit, solely for the elderly, not predicated on the extent of how much their retirement money can afford?  How much do talk shows discuss the plight of the elderly? The elderly, the unseen, the ignored.  We can do more, give more to support their plight.  That is where charity money we can spare should go.  But what of us and what can we do for ourselves? The lady postal worker and middle age man in the first paragraph had done more per capita than what charity work can accomplish.

You are reading this because you live in the modern era that less than a century ago was only the figment of a science fiction writer's most outlandish imagination. We cook without fire in minutes, we reached out and can be reached from halfway around the world at the click of a mouse.  And since when did a mouse adorn our desks.

Via Skype and Zoom, to name just two, we have access to family members and friends willing to share the same electronic conduit to carry audio and video images in real time from anywhere to anywhere. Add to that emails via the internet and we have what little consolation modern society has to offer.  Even when physical hobbies are now beyond us we still have that one last thing where everything actually begins, where our entire being had all started.  That soft tissue not much heavier than three and a half pounds located between our ears is our last refuge. It is our fortress of solitude when solitude is forced upon us.  But that is getting ahead of ourselves.

Nursing homes are  places full of people but where one may feel alone.

It was the late Robin Williams who said,

“I used to think the worst thing in life was to end up all alone. It’s not. The worst thing in life is to end up with people that make you feel alone”.      

-- Robin Williams

The elderly may be ignored but they do not have to ignore what the modern world has to offer. Ride shares like Uber and Lyft are a Godsend to the old and single who no longer want to drive.  Grocery stores now offer free delivery and free curb side service, and more and more restaurants will now deliver, gourmet food or none-to-fancy.  I do not want to over assume here but I am hopeful that soon  much of the world will have realized to focus services to those unfortunate to be living alone.  Governments must respond because the elderly is not only already a voting force and growing  but the latest survey shows that they, on average, have more financial wherewithal than Gen X's and Z's and Y's or whatever alphabetical distinctions young people go by these days.

There is much hope for single home dwellers.  More and more of those living alone are coping much better than their counterparts in nursing homes.  Tragically, many nursing home residents fared worst during the Covid 19 pandemic.  Isolation served the elderly living alone the most protection, extreme social distancing aside.

What follows here is all analogy, a metaphor perhaps.

A TV Western series, "Have Gun Will Travel", that ran from 1957 to 1963, was initially a radio serial turned  TV series that starred Richard Boone as Paladin, the perfect gentleman gunslinger who helped the wronged and the bullied who sought his help and "he was able to circumvent obstacles and achieve victory where it was seemingly beyond the reach of a mere mortal".

I said enough about the show.  The reader may want to read up on it some more and that is where  the reader, I surmise, must begin his or her quest, to embark on a journey, "Have Mind Will Travel".

This much we know.  The brain makes new connections every chance it gets, or rather, every opportunity if it is stimulated enough for its neurons and synapses to remain actively "fired up". 

Direct quotes:

"The dogma for the longest time was that adult brains couldn't generate any new brain cells. You just use what you were born with, says, "Dr. Amar Sahay, a neuroscientist with Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital. "But the reality is that everyone has the capacity to develop new cells that can help enhance cognitive functions."

"Everyone" in that quote includes everyone - the elderly included.  But there is a catch, apparently.  There are no free lunches.

Just watching TV and just reading passively are not the ticket.  What is it then? We ask. What if we are past the active physical hobbies, even wheelchair bound or just home bound, to take the extreme?

The mind.  Use it or lose it.  Not only that it is easy to use, it is the one that can pry open windows to the world from where we sit, our viewing and search options unlimited. But there's a catch. Use it actively, not passively, we're told, because it has capacity more powerful than the most massive hard drive in any computer.  That is why for the brain to be only 2-3 per cent of our body weight, it demands access to 25 % of  the entire energy we consume and subsequently utilize.

For this to work, we are told to keep our brain curious and stimulated as a child would. We're supposed to get our minds set to curiosity, whatever personally you want to engage in.  In today's day and age, would you like to wonder what it is like to be on the Trans-Siberia railroad, wander through the seaside of Nice, in France, what does the atom really look like, how does the loom work, how does Google work, what number is represented by 1 googol, how do bees and ants communicate, etc.  Just throwing everything out there and all of these are literarily out there - the www.dot world and on YouTube and TED Talk only mouse clicks away. The brain wants new stuff so don't get in the habit of sticking to the routine but to what is new to it, we are admonished.

Hand-eye coordination is something we learned hard to do early on in our infancy.  But did you know that was the age brain stimulation was its most active, ever?. Do handwriting again, if you are not already painting stuff, needle work, crochet or the crossword, etc. Even keystrokes as you compose whatever it is you want to write about are beneficial, and, surprisingly, more so to those who can't do touch-typing. Calligraphy is the ultimate hand eye activity where writing is concerned.

There is much to cover.  But what are you waiting for? Write today's diary, write to somebody, get your mind on an adventure to someplace you haven't been to before, from  your chair, wheeled or not, the kitchen table, because even to the immobile, electrons will still move at the speed of light to get you to places you have not been to or things you know little about but dying to know what or how.  "Dying to know" is the magnitude of intensity your brain wants.  So, do it.

Always remember though, there is more to the insatiable mind.  It is the process of keeping our mind constantly fed and excited, so we must use it or lose it.

There's more.  Its hard drive has more capacity than The Library of Congress.  Like the library we can share some of its contents and in return we must allow it to receive even more from others.  Then it will not be alone. 

 

The Future? It is All There Is

The future is all we can look forward to, that is all there is. What we know or see as reality which is the "now", the present moment, is fleeting and unrelentingly ephemeral.  We may relish and live for the moment but, alas, it moves at one second per second. Too deep?  Too cerebral?  Hardly, because when we think seriously about it,  what are we really talking about? The past, even a second ago, yesterday, our teenage years, are now all beyond reach.  The present moment we just talked about.  Remember? A few sentences ago?  All we have left, ever always, is the future.

Sixty seven million years ago and for all of 160 million years before it, the dinosaurs ruled the entire planet and had much to look forward to.  Then, in a flash, literally, an asteroid struck what is now the Yucatan peninsula.  Just a day before that the dinosaurs had at least another 67 million years - from then to the present era - to look forward to.  That one event forever changed everything.  Today, dinosaurs can sometimes only be associated with the cliché to describe a long gone usefulness of anything past its prime.

Familiar?  Oh, yes.  An up and coming politician, or a newly minted multimillionaire, a rising executive on the way up the corporate totem pole, or one charismatic religious leader, or many a personality at the pinnacle of achievement, or anything so popular and sought after, then an asteroid struck, figuratively speaking. A sex scandal, a corrupt business strategy unraveled, a new invention that rendered one gizmo past its utility, etc. and everything ended. An asteroid struck!

The future, untouched and yet to become the present, is pristine territory, untarnished, unblemished,  is ineluctably all that we and ever will have. Everybody willing to ponder it, has it. The future is the home of hope, the unopened box of dreams, the repository of our wishes, the clean parchment upon which we could write what will have come out of all our aspirations, our five year plan, or ten or twenty, or what little time we think we have left, it is also the landscape upon which our retirement shall be painted of many vivid colors, where we are free to move around or do whatever we want to do. That is until it becomes now, today, and soon only to be patches of our memory.

That might seem a fatalistic view if one focuses only on the inevitable and not what paves the path upon which we all must travel. We should not set our eyes only on what awaits us in the final destination because that is a mere point, an instance no more important nor dreadful than all the points along the way and byways we call life.

There is much to rejoice over what is yet to come.  Every slice of what seems like a hastened moment of the present is to be enjoyed, the pages of moments past merely a reference for lessons learned and recollections of joyful experiences, an unwritten journal of how we lived and how well we've affected others with whom we shared our lives.

Much too often we are told that our lives are like a roll of film, each frame a moment.  If it were so, it means that we can roll everything backwards!  But no, because it is impossible to go back in time, books and B-movies not withstanding.  There is no do over and there is no going backwards, mulligans are prohibited.

My view of the passage of time is this.  I imagine each slice of reality a very thin membrane, each  one from an infinite number of playing cards standing upright like dominoes. A moment passes and one card membrane falls forward to topple the next one, like in dominoes.  Each fallen membrane, the past second or moment, is irretrievably gone, a memory and never to stand upright again.  There is an infinite number of fallen cards behind - one event at a time, collated to make up a history. In front, an array of infinite number of strings of upright membrane-cards, spread out like a spider web of infinite strands, each a probability of what is yet to come.  The future landscape is exactly that - arrays of separate rows of upright membranes that make up the future - filled with all sorts of possibilities, sets of probabilities.  As one card topples over, only one of the probabilities, and only one, may occur, to collapse into a single real event. Not one moment too soon, the "present event" becomes a moment ago - never to be retrieved, only remembered.

It is from that definition that I say, "The future is all that we have".  But that doesn't mean it is a free lunch.  That future will be shaped by events caused to occur for each of us, either by our own doing or by others or by what happens to be outside of our control.  

Again, fatalistic?  No, because it is often said, and I believe it, that it is not so much what just happened but how well we react to any event that comes our way.  It could be a sweet flowing stream of joyous occasions or a thundering herd of problems or bad news barreling down our path. Which ever it is, we are tested at how well we take happy moments or how well we deal with adversity.  

Where ever we are at this point in our lives until we get to our final destination, there are still an infinite number of cards yet to be dealt and dealt with.  

Forget re-living the past, revising it or in any way alter parts of it to comfort or assuage ourselves because those fallen pieces are best left alone.  Remember them, to learn from their passage or relish the memory of joyous times but never re-living them.  The pieces had fallen.  Focus on the infinite number of upright cards in front of us.  It will serve as well to train our thoughts and actions at which card we prefer to fall next.  In a way, that is how we control what fallen cards we leave behind.

But what if we are left without a choice but forced to take the one and only option in front of us, you ask. Yes, that could happen. Of course, there is the question of how did one get to be caught in such a predicament, in the first place?  Often, by stern self-examination done in earnest, one finds that he or she had total control of what future cards he or she allowed to fall.  The good news is that, more readily than one may expect, the upright cards in front of us, are still more than enough to get us back on the right array of potential alternatives.  That is because only the future  still has the upright cards of hope or kindling to start the fiery wishes or aspirations long forgotten or set aside.

When each of our stories is told, it will always be about what future cards we picked and allowed to fall forward in time.  And ..

"There is no real ending. It's just the place where you stop the story."

-Frank Herbert

"Our story may have any number of endings but its start is a singular choice we make today."

-Faisal Khosa

Future cards are all we have; choose wisely.

When Numbers Lie and When They Don't

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Lucia de Berk, a Dutch licensed pediatric nurse was convicted of seven  murders and three attempted homicide, and subsequently sentenced to life imprisonment in 2006. What was extraordinarily intriguing about the case, if not alarmingly so, was that only in two of the cases were supported by circumstantial evidence in the eyes of the court while the rest was based on what is called chaining-evidence argument by the prosecution.

"This means that if the several attempted or actual murders have already been established beyond reasonable doubt, then much weaker evidence than normal is sufficient to establish that a subsequent eight "suspicious incidents" are murders or attempted murders carried out by the same defendant".

The prosecution used mathematics - more specifically the scope and power of statistics - that argued that the "chance of a nurse working at the three hospitals being present at the scene of so many unexplained deaths and resuscitations is one in 342 million".

As it turned out, in this case, the numbers were misused by the prosecutors while the science of statistics was blatantly misapplied. It was a miscarriage of justice; rectified only after a long process of reviews and re-analysis of the data that were compiled and the methodology used to convict her. The case was re-opened.  In 2007 she was fully exonerated and compensated for by the government.

Why did this miscarriage of justice happen? Did the numbers lie at first and told the truth later? Actually, numbers do not lie. Never. People do. However, numbers can be and had been manipulated, misapplied or selectively abused to favor one conclusion or sway opinions or, as in the case of Ms. de Berk, win a conviction. It is people who lie. 

There is so much about numbers but let's first focus on the Good, The Bad and The Ugly about it

The Good

Numbers, when applied properly, can project unerringly the results of a fair election long before the final tally. While predicting the weather is often made fun of, there is a method to the madness of forecasting rain or no rain.  When we hear the forecast of 70% chance of rain and it doesn't, it has nothing to do with inaccuracy.  You see, what it meant is that given 100 days on past meteorological records with the same set of conditions being observed and measured for the following day or week, in 70 of such days rain occurred while in 30 of those same 100 days rain did not happen. So, when it didn't rain the forecast was still correct. Our brain only considered rain or no rain without taking into account that the forecast actually and clearly said 70% but only so because in thirty of those days with similar conditions there was not a drop of rain.

The birthday paradox works a little bit differently but it is often met with the same incredulity.  It says that in a room of 23 random guests the odds that two people will have the same birthday is 50-50. Quite high, you say. Increase the number of guests to 75 and the odds go up to 99.9%, a near certainty.  It had been proven many times to be true.  You see, we erroneously think of two specific or particular birthdays of two particular individuals.  When we think simply of two unspecified people and two unspecified birthdays, the odds are higher than we intuitively think.

SO, numbers do not lie. That's good.

The Bad

A particular grocery item languished and unbought for sometime at a posted price of $1.50 each.  The store manager one day put all the unsold merchandise in an open bin in the middle of the isle or intersections of the isles, arranged in a disorderly tumbled mound and labeled Two for $3.00 SALE!  Would you believe they sold faster than had they remained on the shelves?  You'd wonder what happened to the discriminating customers who had avoided those same items all along.  Those are not what the store manager counted on.  He targeted those "not-so-discriminating" buyers who were swayed by the 2-for SALE. 

Lottery is the modern day siren song of the unattainable dream. But what about those who actually won?  But then what about those millions and millions who didn't? And what of those who spend an inordinate amount of their meager income on the odds of 1 in 292.2 million?

• One in 2,320,000 chance of being killed by lightning
• One in 3,441,325 chance of dying after coming into contact with a venomous animal or plant
• One in 10 million chance of being struck by falling airplane parts

Feeling unlucky? If one does not believe that any of the three above potential events will happen to them in their lifetime, why does one think 1 in 292.2 million is a good bet?

The Ugly

According to FBI data there were about 10 million police arrests last year.

"Out of those 10 MILLION arrests, there were 1,004 officer-involved fatalities

Out of those 1,004 officer-involved fatalities, 41 were unarmed.

Out of those 41-officer involved unarmed fatalities (now you might find it hard to believe), out of 41 deaths, now hear this.."

 19 were white - 9 were black

Now 1 is 1 too many, but  41 out of 10 million is a pretty small percentage! (.00041%).

Numbers don't lie but politicians may and do it often with nary a moment of encumbrance nor accountability. You see, if we listen to some of them there is an "epidemic of police killing of unarmed black suspects", or according to one congresswoman, "blacks are being hunted down like dogs by police".  One school teacher in a traffic stop for using her cell phone in a no-cell-phone zone near a school berated the policeman and told him that he and others like him (police) "are a bunch of murderers".

In that same period, last year, 89 police officers were killed in line of duty. 

We hardly hear about them nor their sacrifices.

Numbers don't lie.  People do.

Everyone who heard of Lucia de Berk's story and her conviction only had revulsion and anger at what "she had done" at the time. But, how many of us later knew about what really happened?  I didn't know about it until recently listening to a lecture on TV by a renowned physicist as he explained the power of mathematics and the misuse of it.

Numbers are fundamental to the nature of the universe itself.  Humanity cannot claim to have invented numbers, nor can it take credit for inventing mathematics either.  We (humans) merely discovered them. You see, whether we are here or not, one is always less than two, or that our solar system has one sun orbited by eight or nine planets (depending on your definition of a planet), and that a typical galaxy has anywhere from 100 to 200 billion stars and there could be as many as a trillion of those galaxies in the entire universe.

A circle will always have its area defined by its  radius squared multiplied by an inviolable  constant that we also discovered to be pi. We did not invent that either.

Light will always travel at about 186,000 miles per second.  Unfortunately, bad information, gossip, innuendos, politicians' lies and the woke population's ridiculous "ban this, ban that, cancel this or that", also seem to travel at the same speed.  And the worst part is that some of the worst lies travel to much distances that originate from the very few.

Next time you hear it said and you have doubts that it isn't so, remember Numbers don't lie, people do.