David McElroy

When my body needs fuel, I experience a sensation I call hunger. When my body is becoming dehydrated, I feel something we call thirst.

And when my soul needs authentic human connection, I experience something — a hunger, a hurt, a passion — which doesn’t really have a name.

Sometimes we call it loneliness, but it’s more than that. It’s an emptiness. It’s emotional. It’s intellectual. It’s spiritual. And it’s physical.

This inner yearning is the force which has allowed the human race to survive for so long. The writer of the Hebrew book of Genesis tells us that God looked at the world he had made and at the man he had made, then said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.”

Even thousands of years ago, the wise men who wrote such books knew that a man and a woman needed one another. And something inside us won’t leave us alone until we go back to our personal origins — and finally get that right.

In a time of crisis — such as today — I feel this hunger as never before.

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When you start a relationship — especially if it leads to marriage — you assume the other person wants the same things you want.

You’ve probably never even consciously considered what you expect. Your partner hasn’t given much deep thought to what either of you expects. Each one of you comes to the relationship with what you consider to be normal — and that’s what you assume this new partner wants.

When a loving relationship is new and exciting, it’s easy to look past the times when those differing expectations create confusion or even hurt. But the longer you’re with someone — and the cumulative effect of those differing expectations makes one or both of you unhappy — the more tensions surface. And the more you start thinking there’s something deeply flawed with your partner.

What most people don’t realize is that each relationship has unspoken agreements and expectations — and those unacknowledged expectations destroy happiness and make most relationships toxic.

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An emergency room doctor faces death every day, but Dr. Mert Erogul experienced a touching encounter with life this week — as he watched life slipping away from a 100-year-old woman.

Erogul is a physician at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, N.Y. It’s been a terrible week for medical staffers at hospitals across New York City, as these overworked doctors and nurses care for those afflicted with COVID-19 in addition to their normal work load.

But the story of one patient stands out to Erogul this week.

Among the massive caseload he was dealing with was a 100-year-old Hasidic Jewish woman who had been stricken by COVID-19 and gotten pneumonia. Erogul wanted to get her stable enough to send home — so she could die at home with family — but she was doing so poorly that he couldn’t release her.

After the woman’s blood pressure dropped and Erogul decided to keep her in the hospital, the woman’s son kept calling for an hour to find out how she was doing.

“I finally told him, ‘Look, she’s a hundred years old with pneumonia in both lungs,'” Erogul wrote on a Facebook post. “‘She’s not good. She’s not going to do well.'”

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