Alone Beside You

by Jon Hogland

My neighbor and I used to see each other almost every day. We’d trade greetings that felt mandated. “How’s it going?” And neither of us would answer with any honesty. Not for a while, anyway.

He was the manager of the base’s hotels. He was also a former military training instructor (TI)—the angry guys in big hats that yell at trainees. But that was forever ago. By the time I became his neighbor, he wasn’t angry; he was just tired. He had two children, one that still lived with him, one that didn’t. His wife was a grade-school teacher, and a former TI as well. And they had a very sweet, very old dachshund.

A real milestone was reached when we became comfortable enough to not share ham-fisted hellos every time we passed. We’d share a few words at lunch: “How you doing?” “How’s the wife?” “That’s a cute dog.” “Your cats yell at me through your window.” “Saw your son and his newest girlfriend. What’s he majoring in?” Around that point, my brain started filing him into the “good neighbor” category. Functionally, though, we hadn’t come close.

What do I mean?

Fast forward a bit. Through my kitchen window, I saw my neighbor out front with his dog, who was panting in a way I had seen only once, over a decade prior, with my own dachshund. I knew she was in the middle of kidney failure.

My wife and I were coming fresh from a loss of our own—we’d been trying for a baby and had just experienced our first miscarriage. When we learned their dog had passed, my wife, despite her own grief, had the thought to get them a care package. A sympathy card, some snacks. An invitation to let us know if they needed anything. With her initiative, my wife moved us into “good neighbor” territory.

Catching him outside, we’d talk more. Talk longer. I learned about his mom’s failing health. He learned that we’d just lost our cat. I learned his workspace was collapsing under the weight of the DoD in a way that wasn’t too different from what was happening in my own office. And I learned that his stressors weren’t any different than my own.

Sonder is the realization that each passerby has a life as vivid and complex as your own. I’d realized this plenty of times. But what I always missed—either overlooked or ignored—was that these vivid lives include all of the complex flavors of suffering that I have experienced or will experience myself.

Two vivid and complex events within days of each other. I was in the shower, holding my wife as another miscarriage passed. His son was taking his last breath. The pain is not comparable, I’m sure, but the point is how visceral the hurt was.

We’d talk about it one day when we caught each other outside, heading back to work from lunch. Sorries that were entirely genuine, no ham-fisted forced small talk. But it ended there. The vivid suffering would not.

His mom died shortly after. We had our third miscarriage. For a while, “How you doing?” was answered by sighs and “Yeah, me too.”

And I was thankful to have company for it. But it wasn’t close to what either of us needed.

These massive losses, these lifelong wounds that are so noisy as to never be drowned out with distraction—we, people, used to have a village to help with it all. Not anymore, not for most of us. There’s a kind of sincerity that’s been lost between people, a kind of sincerity that would prevent us from solo-shuffling back into our respective concrete boxes to process our losses in the privacy of our own mourning.

We don’t want to burden others with our loss. We don’t want to burden ourselves with others’. “I hardly know him,” I’d think, whenever the impulse would hit to invite him to talk longer, come over for dinner. Something. Too afraid of the awkwardness of it all, and for what? I avoided awkward emotional intimacy with my neighbor for nothing in return.

When I was a funeral director, ten years ago now, I saw the same phenomenon play out wake after wake. I just didn’t realize it in the moment. Folks acting like near strangers with family that were mourning the same loss. Too afraid to hug their sobbing grandmother, as if she had never held them as an infant. For them, and for me, it was just too foreign.

Let’s be honest, I can only speak for myself. I don’t know why second-cousin Jimmy didn’t hug the family matriarch. Maybe she beat him within an inch of his life when he was a toddler. Maybe she didn’t like being hugged, and he knew that while I did not.

Maybe I’m looking at the past with idealized rose-tinted glasses, thinking that people were quicker to comfort, thinking that they didn’t avoid interactions from fear of cringing. Imaginary or not, I feel the loss of something. Like extended family at the funeral of someone we both knew but hardly remembered. Is it community? Care? Intimacy?

And it’s like we share a driveway, or a mailbox. Sharing life in a shared world at the same minuscule point in time—a statistical wonder, when kept abstract. Out of all the people to ever exist, we’re here at the same time. I am not a statistician, but Google tells me there’s roughly a 13% chance that, out of all the humans ever born, two humans share a lifespan, or, in other words, exist at the same time. You’re 87% more likely to have been born at any other time in history than I am, based on the 110–120 billion humans to have ever existed.

Despite this—despite sharing such a unique kind of existence (this time, this place)—we face the bleakness of it all alone, and it’s getting worse over time. How many of us have the social safety net our great-grandparents did? This entire post might as well be me catching you at lunch, sharing some piecemeal burdens, and saying “Have a good one.”

“Yeah, you too.” And then we shuffle back inside, turn the TV on, and pray it drowns out the vivid, vivid loss, which somehow gets louder every year. And the tragedy of it all is that we’re fighting the same thing, mourning the same loss, some of us having a harder time of it than others. Next-door neighbors all the while. Sharing a driveway, sharing a mailbox. Strangers to ourselves, to each other, and alone.

And what we’ve lost, we can’t even name. How can we begin to get it back? I don’t have answers, but I hope we can. I hope we do.

Have a good one.

_____________________________

Jon is a licensed funeral director, aircraft mechanic, and Air Force veteran. A lover of all things strange and horrific, Jon currently lives in Huntsville, Alabama, with his wife and daughter, dreaming of weirdness in this universe and beyond it.

As the Voice of the Veteran Community, The Havok Journal seeks to publish a variety of perspectives on a number of sensitive subjects. Unless specifically noted otherwise, nothing we publish is an official point of view of The Havok Journal or any part of the U.S. government.