David McElroy

I’ve never experienced a Christmas that felt less like Christmas than this one does.

It’s Christmas Eve, but it feels like just another gray and rainy winter day. I had some work to do at the office, but I was the only one in the building. By the time I left around 3:30 p.m., the rain had stopped and the clouds started to clear as the winds turned bitterly cold.

I didn’t want to be alone, but I couldn’t think of anywhere to be with anybody who I wanted to see. I had planned to go to a Christmas Eve service at my church. There were three services through the afternoon and evening, to accommodate the crowds and still maintain safe distances. But I suddenly realized that if I couldn’t be with a family of my own, the last thing I wanted was to see other happy and loving families together.

As I drove home — lost in thoughts of missing connection — I remembered the chapel at a monastery along my route. I wasn’t dressed appropriately, but I stopped and asked the guard at the gate whether the chapel was open. He warmly encouraged me to go right in.

“There’s a service at 8 tonight, but you’d be the only one in there right now,” he said.

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I saw her issues so gradually that I was in love with her before I realized something was seriously wrong.

The first time I saw one of her mild breakdowns just made me feel empathy for her. She was out of town on business when she called me one evening crying. Something had triggered some feelings from when she was in middle school. All of a sudden, she was back in that old state of mind when she doubted herself and felt that nobody loved her or understood her.

We talked for hours and I thought it was a good experience for us. Something had triggered a crisis for her and I’d been there for her. I didn’t realize it was the start of a long spiral downward for her.

She would go weeks as a brilliant, confident and successful woman — then suddenly seem to fall off a cliff into an emotional abyss. Her behavior was erratic enough by the time we went to an out-of-town film festival together that I told her she needed to get therapy or else we had no future together.

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I enjoy being alone. There are plenty of times when silence is my friend and other humans around me feel like an intrusion.

But there are times — such as right now for me — when I feel lonely enough that the silence is deafening and the empty space around me feels like a dark and dangerous pit into which I could fall.

There are people I could be with tonight. I could join groups in public. I could spend time with other people in private. But there’s nothing available to me that can put a dent into this terrible emptiness. And that’s hard to explain to others.

There are at least three kinds of loneliness — and I’m not certain which one applies to me tonight. I don’t know whether I can be honest with myself. Or with you.

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