The Grammar of Loneliness

I am seventy years old. Seventy.

The number itself feels solid, a hard-back bounded volume, yellow with age, storied with other out-dated volumes, seldom requested by researchers. And while seventy is not ancient—I have every intention of living into my nineties, maybe even beyond, as almost all my family members have—it is a threshold for which I am not prepared. Like really…when did it happen? How have I arrived here? One moment I was fifty, still sprightly, still raising children, still leaning into desire and possibility. Then I was sixty, and I thought, Yes, this is good, I can hold this age with grace.

But suddenly, seventy has arrived, and it feels like a great divide. I am walking on a tree thrown down as a bridge, a deep abyss below, and at the other end, there is no one, just wilderness. A sentence without a verb or a determiner.

I am healthy. I am vibrant. I look good. I say that without apology. When I pass a mirror, I sometimes laugh aloud, “Girl, you look damn good.” And I do. Twenty pounds overweight, but I still wear my clothes well, I still move with ease. My body carries me. I walk, I dance, I lift weights at least once a week at the gym. I am intelligent, creative, and spontaneous. I can laugh until I cry. And still, despite all this, despite how much life I contain, I am lonely – a silent killer for many, but especially older Black women. Too many independent clauses.

It is a loneliness I did not expect.

It creeps into the weekends, sits with me on the veranda, whispers to me in the evenings when I cook for myself, when I turn down the sheets and climb into a wide bed alone. During the week, I keep myself busy—teaching, writing, attending cultural events, putting my face and my name in the world. People text me: I saw you at such-and-such event. They think I am everywhere. And yes, I am visible. Yes, I am active. But visibility is not intimacy. Activity is not connected. Loneliness is not just a word but a shadow. A quantifier.

The truth is I can go for days without my phone ringing. And when it does ring, it is not someone calling simply to say, “I was thinking of you.” More often it is someone asking for something. A reference, a workshop, a favor. Rarely is it a voice seeking me, my company, my laughter. That silence presses in on me. It does not crush me completely, but it sits heavy. Is that the objective case?

My children—I love them. I raised them well. They are out in the world in other countries, other cities, busy with their lives. My son calls once a week, mostly so I can speak to my granddaughter. My oldest daughter calls every week too, and texts . My youngest—her pattern is unpredictable, and I sometimes wonder if she even knows how deeply I ache for her voice. I thought we had built strong ties, the kind that would pull them back to me daily, if only for a minute to say hello. But it hasn’t turned out that way. And though I do not blame them, I am surprised. I am hurt. Accusative case.

There are moments when I imagine my death.

I see myself collapsing in the kitchen, or falling in the bathroom, or slumping at my desk, and my body lying there unnoticed. Days might pass before anyone would know. Perhaps a neighbor would smell the silence of me. Perhaps someone would finally call and, when I didn’t answer, begin to worry. It is a chilling thought, one I cannot shake. However, I have two other friends in my age range, like me their children are in different places, no mate and they share my anxiety—sentences that end abruptly. Fragment.

And then, there is hunger.

A hunger deeper for which I cannot find a synonym. I have been divorced for almost thirty years. When my marriage ended, my children were young, and I poured my love into raising them, into my work, into my community. Over the years I have had lovers, brief seasons of intimacy. But it has been seven years since I have had a partner, seven years since I have been consistently touched, kissed, desired. I do not even remember the exact feel of a man’s lips on mine, the weight of a hand tracing my arm, the heat of a body pressed against me. There is a direct object.

I long for intimacy, not just sex—though I want that too. I long for the ritual of closeness: the “Good morning, honey,” the “Good night, love.” Walking side by side. The everyday decisions of what to cook, where to go, how to spend the afternoon. I long to be held. To be cherished. To share my bed, my table, my dreams. What’s missing is the object of my preposition.

And yet, men do not look at me anymore. Not really. Not even men my own age. It is as if I have become invisible in this realm of desire. And I ask myself, what is it I exude? What do I carry that makes me unapproachable? I know not every man my age wants a younger woman. I know because I have friends—men and women—still finding partners, still finding passion. So what is it about me?

Well one man saw me the other day and gave me an off-hand compliment. He was standing by the food place where I frequently buy food. I had seen him before, and he had obviously been observing me. When I got my food and was about to walk away he said, “You know you look good, for someone your age.” I was stunned, confused. How old did he think I was? And what did he mean by I looked good? I just walked away, thinking You are too old. He looked to be in his mid-fifties, and did not know how to compliment a woman. An interrogative sentence.

I talked with two of my dearest friends about this—one in her mid-seventies, another nearing eighty. Both of them feel it too, this isolation, this ache. We raised our children well, gave them wings, educated them, launched them into the world. But maybe, in doing so, we forgot to tether them close enough to us.

Maybe, if we could do it over, we would choose differently.

I see other women whose children live nearby, who are called daily, who have grandchildren tumbling through their kitchens. I listen to friends whose daughters check on them every day, whose sons stop by unannounced. I hear the laughter in their voices, the fullness of their lives. And though I do not think of myself as envious, something inside me clenches. Because I do feel alone. Not all the time, maybe not even most of the time, but more and more, like a missing conjunction.

Despite the accolades, the publications, the invitations, despite being known in circles of art and culture, despite the respect of being called Auntie, then Mommy, and one day inevitably Grandma, I am grateful I am not there yet. Less strangers calling me auntie and more, those in their twenties, greeting me respectfully as “Mommy,” I am seen but not seen. I am a marker. And that is the paradox: being seen everywhere, and yet unseen where it matters most. There is a surprise, a perplexed look when I say I still desire sex, even a one night stand, feel a throb in my groin when I see fine athletic men and crave a wild flirtation. It is not an adjunct.

I have tried a few dating apps. The process is like dangling modifiers. I have opened myself to possibility. But I long for something more organic. I want to meet someone here, in my city, on my veranda, at a dance, at a reading, in the market. Someone adventurous, alive, eager still to share life. Someone who will look at me and see me, not my age, not my years, but my fire, my curiosity, my vibrancy, my passion like an exclamatory sentence.

I want to share the next twenty years of my life with someone. I want to travel, yes, but I also want the ordinary—watching the rain, cooking a meal, tending a garden, holding hands as we walk to the corner shop. I want intimacy, companionship, and partnership. I want to be kissed, to be touched, to be opened up again.

There! I’ve said it. It is not a euphemism.

This is the naked truth of being seventy for me. It is not all despair. There is joy in the life I have made, in the art I create, in the communities I serve. But beneath it all runs this deep river of loneliness, this ache for connection. I know I am not the only one. I know my friends in other cities feel it too. I know there are women and men everywhere, sitting in their houses, vibrant and alive, yet longing to be held. An ellipsis suggests more to come.

What I want, what I need, is not extraordinary. It is simple, human. To love and be loved. To share time, space, touch. To not die alone, unnoticed, but to live fully, with someone beside me, until the very last breath, a phrase remembered and quoted.