Sleep and Loneliness

My experience living by myself in my first apartment after university was formative in how I approach loneliness. The one-room apartment was located in this building on Mississippi Avenue in Davenport. I would lie in bed and feel my heart beating before falling asleep. While I was alone, I didn’t feel lonely. Because of an active youth, it took no effort to fall asleep and stay asleep until morning. I wrote about this apartment multiple times:

This new apartment already begins the rebirth which is so much needed by my soul at this time. The neighborhood is quite quiet and the apartment that I rent is at the end of a small hallway off the main one. Across the street is another large house which has been subdivided into apartments and it is quite a ways away. Further up the block there is a Jewish synagogue Temple Emmanuel. The river is about three or four blocks away. It seems there are some well-to-do neighbors to the south of this building who at this time are having a dinner party of some sort. But at the same time I believe that the area is on the fringes of the poverty area which is mostly to the West and the wealthy area of town, the Heights, which is to the East. The landlord’s brother lives upstairs in the attic and he mysteriously comes and goes. The landlord said. Sometimes he’s there, sometimes he’s not. Ask him if you need anything, said the landlord. Time will tell as I ask God to manifest his will. My major tasks at this time are to set up my own household for what is to be the first time. (Personal Journal, Sept. 11, 1975)

On Dec. 29, 2010, I wrote a post titled A Normal Winter. It expanded on this time of my life:

It has been so long since we had a “normal” winter in Iowa that we forget what that means. Snow and cold, dry weather are de rigueur and what we have had thus far has been relatively normal. No repeated blizzards, no continuous sub-zero temperatures. A “white Christmas” that was almost storybook in the appearance of the landscape. We could do with snow cover to reflect the heat of the sun back into space.

This week I have been thinking about the first time I lived without a room mate in late 1975. I was working at the Carroll’s Dairy Store at Five Points in Northwest Davenport. While working part time, I earned $0.85 per hour and somehow could pay the rent, and other bills while I figured out what was next in my life. It turned out that what was next was joining the Army, enlisting to attend Officer Candidate School at Fort Benning, Georgia and serving for almost three years in Mainz, Germany after a year of military schooling.

I lived in an large house that had been divided into apartments on Mississippi Avenue. My vehicle was a 1961 Chevrolet Impala, bought from a woman from whom it had been stolen and then returned. Occasionally, I walked the three miles from my apartment to work to get exercise, but to avoid burning fuel as well as even in 1975, it was a struggle to make ends meet on minimum wage. Seven Eleven started opening up convenience stores in Davenport and I used that as leverage to get a raise at Carroll’s.

The single room apartment had a stove, refrigerator and sink, with a shared bathroom was down the hall. Somehow I crammed my book collection, vinyl records and all my possessions into that small space. My mother came for dinner for one of the few times I have cooked her a meal, making tuna casserole of dubious quality. We took a walk to nearby Prospect Park that evening. Cooking and entertaining were skills to be developed later in life.

Laying on the single bed I could feel my heart beating. That feeling is drowned out when there is a room mate. For the first time, I realized what it meant to be alone in the world, although I was not particularly lonely. Being alone drove me to seek out others and work on a life of my own. I started writing a journal, heard Chaim Potok speak about his then new book In the Beginning at the synagogue across the street and pursued what I believed to be the life of someone who had graduated from college. I was living a life, but driven to make something more of it. In many ways, I am pursuing that same life thirty five years later.

What I didn’t know in 1975, was how unique that time of my first apartment would be. That I would set patterns of behavior that would follow me until the present. Knowing now, what I didn’t know then, I look fondly to those few months on Mississippi Avenue, close to the river and on the edge of economic viability. While that life was unsustainable, it became a platform from which I took a bigger leap into life. I never looked back to say I would have chosen things to have been different. (Blog post on Dec. 29, 2010).

As I age, my loneliness has not changed. It may be there, yet it does not dominate my awareness. In recent years I have been sleeping through the night less often. My current project is to increase awareness of my biology and circadian rhythms. By doing so, I have been sleeping better.

Loneliness is something to deal with. I recently found this in the Washington Post.

An increasing number of middle-aged and older adults — especially those in their 40s and 50s — are lonely, according to a report released by AARP, a nonprofit advocacy group for older Americans. Among the loneliest are adults 45 to 49 years old (49 percent identified as lonely), as well as respondents who never married (62 percent); are not working (57 percent); or whose household income fell below $25,000 a year (63 percent). (Washington Post, Dec. 3, 2025).

Click here for the AARP survey.