A Former U.S. Surgeon General Says Loneliness Is an "Epidemic." Neighborliness May Be the Cure.

Lucky to be Alive

Back in June 2017, three of my friends were hit by intoxicated drivers within the space of four days.

Coté and her husband Tim were celebrating their tenth wedding anniversary in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. On the evening of Saturday, June 24, their car was hit by a drunk man driving in their lane without his lights on. After Coté was able to get free from the wreckage (Tim was still pinned inside), she heard the other driver ask someone to take him to a nearby military hospital. They don’t know what happened to him.

Coté and Tim were taken to a local hospital where doctors saved Tim’s life. (They advised him to say goodbye to Coté before heading into surgery, just in case.) Then, on Tuesday, June 27, they were medevacked to a hospital near their home in Seattle. Only when I visited them at Harborview Medical Center a couple weeks later did I get a fuller picture of how serious and numerous their injuries had been. Between the two of them they had broken feet and a broken knee, multiple reconstructive surgeries on vital organs, multiple spinal fractures, and more. They were fortunate to be alive, and it was months before they were able to walk without help.

On June 28, Heather, a friend here in Silverton, collided with a man who was driving under the influence, probably of drugs. He was swerving around the road, hit something, and rolled his vehicle into the passenger side of Heather’s car. Somehow the intoxicated driver walked away. (He literally walked away. The police officer let him go free, later acknowledging the driver had likely been high on something.)

Heather was largely unhurt, too, but her car was totaled. She’d purchased it 17 years earlier, a month after her oldest son was born. Recently it had been lovingly and spontaneously overhauled by friends and family: a rebuilt engine, new tires, new headlight covers, new windshield wipers, and a thorough detailing. She was understandably sad and angry to see it lost.

Lives Devoted to Others

Resistencia Coffee. Image via Mel L. on Foursquare.

All three of my friends have dedicated their lives to serving others. Tim cofounded the Parish Collective, a network of hundreds of faith communities around the world who are collaborating with neighbors to weave a fabric of care in their neighborhoods. (Disclaimer: My wife is chairperson Parish Collective’s board chair.) Coté, a native of Chile, founded Puentes, a nonprofit that supports undocumented families in the Pacific Northwest. More recently, the two of them started Resistencia, a coffee shop and gathering place in South Park, their diverse Seattle neighborhood.

Within just a few hours of hearing about their accident in Mexico, friends launched a crowdfunding page to help pay for medical expenses and lost income. Because so little was known at that time about Coté and Tim’s conditions, a fundraising goal was pulled out of the air: $7,000. They raised that much in less than an hour. By the end of the day, tens of thousands of dollars had been given. Eventually more than $57,000 was donated, with an average donation of around $100. Friends, family, and neighbors who had been touched directly by Coté and Tim’s kindness seemed eager to give back, as did a few strangers who had been moved by stories they’d seen on social media or local news.

Crowdfunding efforts were just the tip of an iceberg of generosity. People volunteered to help with the kids and the dog and the house, help run errands, and just be a comforting physical presence in the hospital. Coté and Tim were released from the hospital and have now fully recovered.

Like Coté and Tim, Heather has devoted her life to others, not least of which through her work as a beloved kindergarten teacher and as our daughters’ summer babysitter for six years. The day after her collision, my wife and I saw Heather at a concert in Portland. She sat down next to us before the show and described the spiritual journey she’d been on over the previous 24 hours. Reflecting on the accident and its aftermath, she had started to see it with new eyes. It was a perspective I’m not sure I would have been capable of in her situation—almost certainly not a day after the accident.

Of course, Heather had been frustrated to lose her car. The car itself was going to be a hassle to replace, and potentially expensive too. (She was later gifted a car.) But what Heather grieved most was the loss of a physical reminder of 17 years of family memories and, more recently, the generosity of her community. Yet the family itself wasn’t lost. Nor was her community. In fact, the first paramedic to respond to the accident was an acquaintance from town. And within minutes of the crash she’d been able to call a friend to get a ride home. In contrast, the man who had hit her walked into town alone. By all appearances, he didn’t have anyone to call. Heather  felt compassion for him.

Loneliness: The Greatest Disease

That same week I watched a show on PBS about the “giant thaw” that takes place every year in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. The abrupt transition between Yellowstone’s long and brutal winter, and its hot and dry summer, is considered to be one of the most dramatic seasonal changes on the planet. In one scene, river otters were shown diving below the surface of the ice to catch fish. Because of how scarce food is at that time of year, hungry bald eagles swooped down to try to steal the fish. The family of otters (also called a bevy of otters, a raft of otters, or, my favorite, a romp of otters) were able to keep their food because they worked together. Some of the otters went into the river, while others stayed alert for thieving birds.

But there was also an otter who was alone. For whatever reason, he wasn’t part of the group. Malnourished and weak, he had trouble getting out of the river and onto the ice. Because he didn’t have a family member watching his back, every fish he caught was stolen by the eagles. In order to eat at all, he had to come back late at night. The filmmakers saw him through their night-vision lens, slipping from the bank onto the half-frozen river, his eyes glowing green, fishing by himself under the cover of darkness.

Former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

My three friends were so much on my mind that I couldn’t help but find an analogy with the otters. I obviously don’t know the backstories of the intoxicated drivers who could have killed Coté, Tim, and Heather. And I do know that addiction and bad decisions are more complex than the generalizations I’m about to make. But the situations with my friends were a reminder that people who don’t have a community, close family, or a “romp” of friends, are more likely to do the “night things”—the things best done under the cover of darkness, when the neighbors can’t see you—things like taking hard drugs or abusing a position of power to avoid the mess you made.

Mother Teresa, now known as Saint Teresa of Calcutta, spent nearly seventy years caring for the poor, sick, and dying in India. She saw tremendous material suffering. But as awful as that suffering was, she believed that the worst pain a person could experience was feeling unloved and unwanted. This was, she said, the “greatest disease” in the West. “We can cure physical diseases with medicine, but the only cure for loneliness, despair, and hopelessness is love. There are many in the world who are dying for a piece of bread but there are many more dying for a little love.”

The loneliness Mother Teresa described as a disease qualifies as an actual health epidemic. That’s according to a former U.S. Surgeon General. “During my years caring for patients, the most common pathology I saw was not heart disease or diabetes; it was loneliness,” Dr. Vivek Murthy wrote in the Harvard Business Review. As a practicing physician, Murthy often found loneliness in the “background” of illness, “contributing to disease and making it harder for patients to cope and heal.” Loneliness and weak social connections increase the risk of heart disease, stroke, dementia, depression, anxiety, and obesity. It also impairs our brain from making good decisions. Overall, Murthy said, loneliness reduces lifespan at a rate equivalent to smoking fifteen cigarettes a day.

“Relationships are everything”

For those of us who are privileged to be a part of neighborly communities, our responsibility is to fold in those folks who aren’t.

I was in the hospital when a Seattle newscaster asked Coté and Tim if the accident had made them more grateful. They responded that they had always tried to live with gratitude. And this is true. In one of the tensest moments at the hospital in Cabo, with his life in jeopardy and the cell phone battery running out, Tim had texted a friend: “All is gift.”

But Coté and Tim did tell the journalist that the beauty emerging from the accident had convinced them to double down on their call to extend networks of care to everyone. “We’ve given our lives to this idea that relationships are everything,” Tim said. “And in this moment of deep need, to see this tsunami of care has been unbelievable.”

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