Homesick

Excerpt from Daily Cures, Wisdom for Healthy Aging by Connie Mason Michaelis

Today’s researchers say that loneliness may be as detrimental to older people as cigarette smoking and high blood pressure!  The multigenerational study done by the Stanford Center on Longevity’s Sightlines Project revealed that social engagement might be the single greatest guardian of health and endurance.  There are many conjectures about why this is so. Social interaction generates mental stimulation, movement, creative thinking, emotional stimulus.  A television can indeed spur some of the same responses, but why is it that human interaction is so important?  I’ve been thinking about the connection to homesickness.  Could there be a parallel between what, in our youth, we call homesickness and what older people experience as they suffer the loss of a spouse, children moving away, or losing mobility?

I’ll never forget the loneliness I felt as a freshman in college.  I was so homesick!  As one author put it, “I felt a strange and inexplicable pang that I had never felt before. It was homesickness. I’ve long since forgotten the pain in my neck, but never will I forget the pain in my heart.”  Mine was especially intense on Sunday evenings. At times I thought about getting in the car and leaving school. It’s a good thing I didn’t have a car!  In the midst of the most exciting time in life, I was literally sick. Poet, Christian Morgenstern, says, “Home is not where you live but where they understand you.”  We expect children to grow out of these feelings, but is it possible that the same yearning for home, comfort, and understanding follows all of our days?  Do you think that as Elders we might suffer again from that type of pain, and it literally becomes a health hazard?  That is exactly why we need loving human interaction every day.