Mary DiPetro—Room number 107

I spent most of my life on the telephone, talking to friends or neighbors or relatives, just to avoid feeling alone. And when I couldn’t reach someone I knew, I’d call someone I didn’t. I spent a collection of long hours over my lifetime talking to assorted catalog representatives, pretending to be interested in placing an order and asking question after question about their products. It started with Sears and Roebuck in 1949, the year I turned thirty and Donald was forced to take his sales team on the road for days at a time. I was alone a lot, for many years. Yes, I had the children, but it wasn’t the same as having another adult to talk to. Plus, they were always at school or out playing in the woods. The three of them could disappear for hours at a time, only to return at the clang of the dinner bell. Donald used our only car for work, and so I was stuck. It was just me. And the telephone.

The Lana Lobell dress catalog was my favorite, and then came J.C. Penney and Radio Shack. I would spend hours looking at the pages, deriving a list of questions about a particular product and then telephoning to ask them all my questions. I’d end the call, sometimes an hour later, with a promise to place my order in the mail the following day. I never placed the orders, though; I just called a different catalog and asked another long string of pointless questions.

Then Dottie moved into the cottage down the lane, and she was as lonely as I was. Her husband, Jim, was a long-haul trucker, and he was gone almost as much as Donald. We’d talk on the phone every day, sometimes three or four times. And we’d get together for coffee and cards a few afternoons a week. But in between our conversations and visits, I was even more desperate for company than before. It was like I would have a long drink of water, only to be followed by hours upon hours of drought.

In many ways, Dottie’s friendship made the lonely times all the more lonely. When she moved away in 1973, my children were long gone, out of the house and off living lives of their own. I had no one left to talk to except for a few church friends, my sister in New York, and the catalog call center operators. Donald spent weeks at a time away from home, driving cross-country to sell industrial steel. It was just me again. And the telephone.

I watched the years roll by courtesy of the catalogs whose pages I turned over and over again. Lillian Vernon, Plow & Hearth, Macy’s, Lands’ End, Toys “R” Us. I studied them all, watching house and toy and fashion trends come and go. I watched them until I stopped being lonely.

I’ll never forget the day it happened. March 15, 2004. I was an eighty-six-year-old widow with no one to talk to. My kids and grandkids were too busy for much more than a weekly phone call, and all my church friends—and my sister—had long since passed. Tommy, my eldest and most practical son, decided it was time for me to move out of my house. He said I couldn’t take care of myself anymore. He said he was scared I would hurt myself worse than I did the day I fell off the ladder changing the battery in the kitchen clock. I didn’t fight him because, truth be told, I was tired of taking care of that house. And I was tired of being alone.

But once I moved into Pine Manor, things were different. There was always someone to talk to. I could have my pick. Sometimes the conversation might not go as planned because someone’s mind would slip, but by and large, I could talk all day if I wanted. I was never lonely there. I never ate another meal by myself, and I never again had to call a catalog representative just to hear a voice. They were the sweetest ten years of my life. I made many good friends at Pine Manor, both men and women. It turns out I wasn’t the only one that spent far too many years with no one to talk to but telemarketers and the Meals on Wheels driver.

A place like Pine Manor is proof that loneliness is a soul-smashing thing. After so many years, it wears you down, and some people never get over it. They showed up there and didn’t know how not to be lonely anymore, so they stayed in their rooms and refused to make friends and denied themselves the chance to feel again. Those were the people I was drawn to the most. Those were the people I wrapped in my folds. I talked with them until they talked back. I listened to the story of their life and told them all about mine. We talked about what we’d seen of the world. Wars, births, sorrow, fortune, deaths, happiness, loss. At one time or another, each of us had felt both the heart-lifting joy of the world’s goodness and the stinging touch of its bitter evils. But there, in Pine Manor, we were all the same. Just a bunch of old, lonely widows and widowers who, at long last, didn’t have to be lonely anymore. And it felt good. It felt really good.

When it was time for me to go, I only had one wish. In the last moments of my life, I wanted a phone against my ear. I wanted to listen to a voice, any voice, and I wanted to remember what it was like to be lonely. Somehow, knowing loneliness was only a memory and not a reality, made the pleasure of the last ten years feel all the more sweet. So, in the middle of the night, when my sons and daughter were asleep in a nearby hotel room, it happened. My children knew it wouldn’t be long until I left. That’s why they came to be with me. But that girl, the dark-skinned one that put the phone to my ear, she knew exactly when it was time. So she dialed a number, settled the phone against my cheek, and held my hand until it was over.