JUST BEING PRESENT

Social isolation increasingly characterizes American life. It robs our individual lives of its greatest richness, and also creates fertile ground for the emergence of authoritarianism.

“The Room Next Door,” written and directed by Pedro Almodovar and starring Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton, is an unusually good film. The movie centers on two middle-aged women who were friends in the past and have come together for an unusual, but totally compelling purpose. Ingrid, played by Moore, learns that Martha is dying of terminal cancer and doesn't want to die alone. So, she asks Ingrid to join her in a home she rents in the Catskills, where she plans to meet her end. Wanting to avoid the ravaging effects of the disease and a painful death, she plans to take a suicide pill to end her life while still retaining her dignity. She asks Ingrid to be with her in “the room next door.”

Though Ingrid is death-phobic, she agrees to join Martha to support her in her final weeks. The home Martha had chosen is a modern one, fitted with spacious rooms painted in red and green. It is bright and sunny with the dense forest nearby. The women are close to nature and their immediate surroundings are life affirming, as is their conversation. Clearly, we are in the presence of two highly intelligent and educated women. Both are writers. Ingrid has just completed publishing a novel, while Martha, we learn, was a war correspondent. Books are present in their surroundings, and it is evident that they live their lives with a sense of grace, style and refined aesthetic sensibilities.

The strength of the film is in the conversations the women sustain with one another. It is not that they say anything especially profound. There is very little talk about death itself or the fears that Martha's impending demise might arouse. Martha talks about estrangement from her daughter, and Ingrid strives to be as supportive as she can. There is no philosophical discussion on the meaning of life and death, no veering into spiritual discourse. What is distinctive about their conversation is that it is clear and direct. There are no underlying meanings in their repartee, there is no mystification, their exchanges are devoid of subtexts. Their conversations feel authentic and honest. Ingrid treats her friend with love, respect, and caring. Reciprocally, Martha works to protect Ingrid from bearing any culpability for her death, and when she takes her fatal pill, she does so when Ingrid is away from the home.

Martha has asked her friend to be present with her at a time when it is most difficult to be alone. For me, this was the film's most important message,both personally and professionally.

As the professional leader of humanist congregations for more than half a century, I have often been asked to provide comfort to people in need. I have been called upon to render support when jobs have been lost, when people are ill and hospitalized, when they are bereaved, and most challengingly, when members are actively dying. In regard to the latter, I would often enter these situations with trepidation, but just as often leave these encounters feeling inspired. To enter into the life of people in their final weeks or days endows their words with a weightiness, not so much for their intrinsic content, as much as for the appreciation that they are among the person's last utterances, never to be repeated.

As difficult as these experiences have often been, I have never been asked to do anything I couldn't. If ill, they never asked that I make them well again. When facing death, they have never asked me to somehow rescue them from their fate. When suffering misfortunes, they did not request that I undo the unfairness of the circumstances life imposed upon them. What brought them comfort was simply that I was present. It was all they wanted from me, and it was enough.

The importance of being present is something I learned in my childhood. My mother was the youngest of seven children. They were an unusual bunch. They were intelligent, argumentative, hyper-verbal people, for whom demonstrative affection was notably absent. They would come together to their parents' home in the Bronx to celebrate holidays. Some came weekly to pay a visit to their Old-World parents, whom they often treated with derision. Verbal pyrotechnics would fly between my uncles and aunts. Hurling curses and insults at each other was not unheard-of, something, which as an adolescent, I found slyly amusing. Yet despite the absence of tender emotions, the reality that they came together to be in each other's presence was itself a message that left an enduring impression on me. It spoke to the intrinsic importance of the family bond.

More recent experiences reinforced for me the importance of people coming together to provide support. This August will mark the tenth year since my beloved wife of 41 years died. She fell ill while we were vacationing in London. From the time her initial symptoms appeared until she breathed her last was less than six weeks. One day she occupied the center of my life and the next she was gone. Her death came as a shock, and in its aftermath, I found the presence of her absence to be searingly painful.

The house we lived in together grew cold, and I dreaded being alone. Shortly after her death, I opened my home to visitors, and for a week my small living room was filled with hundreds of friends and acquaintances who came to extend their respects to my wife's memory. And they came simply to be with me. I can't recall anything that was said, but I well remember the outpouring of caring and support their presence brought. For months afterward, friends came to visit, usually one or two at a time. It provided me an opportunity to relate many times over what had befallen my wife and the richness, love, and wisdom that made her the unique person she was. I believe that in one form or another, my grief will always be with me. But I remain very moved when I recall that others were present in my time of great need, and it was their caring, expressed through that presence,that has enabled me to move on.

The reinforcement of the human bond and reclaiming our presence with each other seems especially important in our current times. The Covid epidemic kept us apart, and the fallout in terms of human separation is still with us. As is often noted, the organizational ties that have been characteristic of the American experience are shredding. People do not join clubs and associations as they used to. They are no longer as active in neighborhood and community groups. Religious congregations are losing members. Churches are folding in large numbers and some denominations are hemorrhaging. People are more home-bound, watching TV or glued to their electronic devices, and according to journalist Dereck Thompson in a major article in The Atlantic, “The Anti-Social Century,” fewer people dine together with others in restaurants. He has much more to say:

“Americans are spending less time with other people than in any other period for which we have trustworthy data, going back to 1965. Between that year and the end of the 20th century, in-person socializing slowly declined. From 2003 to 2023, it plunged by more than 20 percent, according to the American Time Use Survey an annual study conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Among unmarried men and people younger than 25, the decline was more than 35 percent. Alone time predictably spiked during the pandemic. But the trend had started long before most people had ever heard of a novel coronavirus and continued after the pandemic was declared over.”

“Men who watch television now spend seven hours in front of the TV for every hour they spend hanging out with somebody outside their home. The typical female pet owner spends more time actively engaged with her pet than she spends in face-to-face contact with friends of her own species. Since the early 2000s, the amount of time that Americans say they spend helping or caring for people outside their nuclear family has declined by more than a third.”

The major causes of solitude in the 20th century, Thompson tells us, were the automobile and the television. Iphones, he avers, are the bane of the 21st.

“If two of the 20th century’s iconic technologies, the automobile and the television initiated the rise of American aloneness, the 21st century’s most notorious piece of hardware has continued to fuel, and has indeed accelerated, our national anti-social streak. Countless books, articles, and cable news segments have warned Americans that smartphones can negatively affect mental health and may be especially harmful to adolescents. But the fretful coverage is, if anything, restrained given how greatly these devices have changed our conscious experience. The typical person is awake for about 900 minutes a day. American kids and teenagers spend, on average, about 270 minutes on weekdays and 380 minutes on weekends gazing into their screens, according to the Digital Parenthood Initiative. By this account, screens occupy more than 30 percent of their waking life.”

“Socially underdeveloped childhood leads, almost inexorably, to socially stunted adulthood. Some of this screen time is social, after a fashion. But sharing videos or texting friends is a pale imitation of face-to-face interaction. More worrisome than what young people do on their phone is what they aren’t doing. Young people are less likely than in previous decades to get their driver’s license, to go on a date, or to have more than one close friend, or even to hang out with their friends at all. The share of boys and girls who say they meet up with friends almost daily outside school hours has declined by nearly 50 percent since the early 1990s, with the sharpest downturn occurring in the 2010s.”

As a humanist, I believe that the highest, most enriching, form of human encounter is created when we are physically present with each other. Speaking for myself, these experiences of direct engagement with others, friends especially, are what I most value. Phone calls, texting, and zooming are no substitute. Just being together for easy conversation seems to be a lost art, especially among younger generations.

The woeful reality of pandemic aloneness will change when people awaken to the realization that something vital is missing from their lives. It will only change as a result of the decisions that people make to spend less time on their phones and in front of screens and reach out to others to strengthen human relations in real-time.

While the current condition I describe relates to the sphere of interpersonal relations, all things are political, if not intrinsically, then in their effects. We are entering a very dark phase, wherein our democracy and liberties are in peril as they have never been before. A population comprised of disconnected individuals leaves itself more vulnerable to the forces of authoritarianism. Effective resistance can only be forged through solidarity.

For many reasons, personal as well as political, just showing up, being present for moments mundane or momentous, could not be more important.