The Cure to the Fear of Dying Alone? To Truly Live

(Fei Meng)

“That was the moment,” Bridget Jones says in a voiceover in “Bridget Jones’s Diary.” It’s New Year’s Day, and Bridget is throwing a pity party for one. “I suddenly realized that unless something changed soon, I was going to live a life where my major relationship was with a bottle of wine, and I’d finally die fat and alone, and be found three weeks later, half-eaten by a pack of wild dogs.”

We’ll come back to dying alone, without the wild dogs, in a moment.

Recently, I spent some time via internet polls and studies investigating the concerns of millennials. Over the years, I’ve listened to a few young people born between 1982 and 2000 give voice to their anxieties, often about employment or wages, raising children or whether they should have any at all, and wondering, in general, whether their lives were headed in the right direction. Today, inflation and recession have added to those apprehensions, which justifiably top the list in recent polls.

Caring for aging parents is also a millennial concern, which I found endearing, and a worry which is real for some, as many millennials are already attending to parents with health problems. Like the uncertainties listed above, however, this situation is by no means exclusive to the M generation. Plenty of older men and women also watch over Mom and Dad.

But as I traveled here and there among these surveys, polls, and studies, an item on one list struck me as unique: the fear of dying alone.

In her article “Therapists Say Millennials Worry Most About 5 Specific Issues,” Erin Bunch, herself a member of the M generation, writes that she spoke with two psychologists whose clients had experienced high stress from the fear that they’d never meet a “life partner.” Of the five things listed by Bunch, this concern appears as No. 2 under the eye-catching heading “Dying Alone.” Bridget Jones’s wild dogs may be missing from that scenario, but the dread of ending one’s life in solitude appears real.

But here’s the thing for those fretting over this end game: I doubt you fear dying alone so much as you fear living alone. And by alone, I don’t mean that you lack relatives who love you or friends you treasure. No—if you’re worried about dying alone, I think it’s more likely you’re afraid you’ll go your entire life without bumping hips with someone in the kitchen every evening, or whispering at 2 a.m.: “No, honey. It’s your turn to get the baby,” or melting when some dimpled toddler calls you Mommy for the first time.

Lots of online articles and discussions center on the trials suffered by millennials as they search for the right partner, and I don’t doubt that truth. Romance in our culture has gone into exile, though it’s there and real if you look for it. And yes, committing to another is a huge decision, and yes, again, that means compromise and hard work.

But whatever happens, whether we find a mate or remain single, it’s not dying alone that should frighten us. It’s whether or not we’ve truly lived.

Cheryl Strayed writes advice columns under the name of Sugar. A man calling himself Johnny wrote to her about his fear of love, asking: “When is it right to take the big step and say I love you? And what is this ‘love’ thing all about?”

After offering encouragement, Sugar advises Johnny to be brave and authentic, and to “practice saying the word ‘love’ to people [he loves] so when it matters the most to say it, [he] will.”

“We’re all going to die, Johnny,“ she concludes. ”Hit the iron bell like it’s dinnertime.”