I CAN'T HELP BUT WONDER

At a certain point in your life, you will find the person with whom you wish to share your life. You get married, you raise a family, you become grandparents and you grow old together. By this point, you have spent virtually every day in eachother's company. There are good days, there are bad days but you wind down the unpredictable road of life together and develop a closeness that can only be experienced by achieving this type of union; a marriage.

Imagine the profound loneliness you would feel when this person with whom you have chosen to spend your life with is faced with illness and death, inevitably leaving the other behind to cope with their loss. Happens everyday, right? There is grief, but eventually they will move on, seemingly making the most of the years they have left on this earth shepharded by those who will embrace them, care for them and help them through. Still, regardless of the love and support you receive, you are left without the person with whom you have spent every day with for the last 40 or 50 years. I can't help but wonder what the effect that this profound loneliness would have on your own well-being. I had to check, here's what I found:

A team led by Steve Cole, a genomics researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), checked a pool of 153 people in their 50s and 60s, while searching for an answer. They found that chronic loneliness triggers a change in gene activity. The initial results published last year showed that people who scored in the top 15 percent of the U.C.L.A. Loneliness Scale, a self-administered psychiatric questionnaire for measuring the emotion, exhibited increased gene activity linked to inflammation and reduced gene activity associated with antibody production and antiviral responses. These patterns of gene expression were specific to loneliness, not to other negative feelings such as depression.

While I didn't find much hard evidence, there was some anecdotal evidence that suggested that loneliness can be very medically significant and even life threatening. There are many accounts of apparently healthy people dying suddenly, days, weeks, or even months after the death of loved ones. For example, a healthy man may die of a heart attack three months after the death of his wife, or a healthy woman may die a day after hearing that her twin sister has died. Reports like this have been collected and documented, but no one has done formal research on them. Consequently, there is some debate over whether loneliness/grief is a contributing factor in these deaths or whether it is just a coincidence. On the other hand, there is research showing that blood pressure shoots up dramatically for a few minutes when someone talks about feeling lonely. There is also evidence that pre-existing medical conditions (such as heart disease, diabetes, arthritis, etc.) get significantly worse when a person feels lonely. In the case of heart disease, the statistical impact of loneliness on the disease appears to be equal to the impact of smoking a pack of cigarettes a day.....really?

I got to thinking about Christopher Reeve, the actor. After spending almost 9 years caring for her husband and coping with his paralysis and later his death in 2004, Dana Reeve was diagnosed with lung cancer and died in March 2006; a short two years after the death of her husband and only a year after being diagnosed in 2005. She was never a smoker. How on earth do you go from being a young, vibrant and obviously very strong woman to being diagnosed with lung cancer?

When we're searching for answers to the inexplicable, it sometimes helps to find comfort in what might seem like the absurd. Today, this is what I need.