From: The New York Times
How Social Isolation Is Killing Us
December 28, 2016
The New York Times:
My patient and I both knew he was dying.
Not the long kind of dying that stretches on for months or years. He would die today. Maybe tomorrow. And if not tomorrow, the next day. Was there someone I should call? Someone he wanted to see?
Not a one, he told me. No immediate family. No close friends. He had a niece down South, maybe, but they hadn’t spoken in years.
For me, the sadness of his death was surpassed only by the sadness of his solitude. I wondered whether his isolation was a driving force of his premature death, not just an unhappy circumstance.
Read the whole story: The New York Times
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Comments
Perhaps I see myself in this person not in the actual sense but human. There are some things we must face alone and it scares the shit out of me especially when I take the time to think about it. How can i change that I don’t know?
I am the same. No one to notify when I die. I have made up people to notify. I feel so abnormal and am so abnormal, I make up things so people don’t know I have no family or friends. People want to blame you when your alone. Must be your fault something you have done. I go over and over it in my mind and I keep reaching out but I remain alone unable to make connections and I suffer for it- got pushed out of a job which was my only lifeline because I’m weird.
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