As loneliness epidemic rages, you’re only as sick as your secrets

Rushing to get to work, I almost didn’t stop. But my friend and neighbor, Carol Bell, was right by the driver’s side window so I lowered it to say hello.

“Did you hear the man up the street died two weeks ago?” she asked.

I hadn’t. And it was the 65-year-old husband of a woman I was close to when our kids, now 18, were toddler friends. We still loved to chat when we bumped into each other.

We live just three houses apart. Her husband died suddenly in his sleep. My husband and several neighbors heard the sirens at their house — and forgot about it.

More connected, yet further apart We’re more connected — online — than ever. But, often, we forget the true meaning and importance of connection. It’s no accident that we’re also more stressed, sick, depressed and addicted — often since data have been collected.

Opioids are getting the attention, but far more Americans are dying of alcohol-related illness. Some of my contemporaries, that is, but fortunately I’m celebrating my 26th year of sobriety.

What sorrows are we trying to drown with our various addictions?

Too many to mention here, but USA TODAY’s Facebook group, I Survived It, launched Wednesday to give readers and others a new outlet for their anguish and a source for solutions. Co-moderator Mabinty Quarshie and I have brought together leading experts — professional, personal or both — on mental health, addiction, social isolation, domestic violence, suicide, child loss and other life challenges.

Loneliness cuts life expectancy by about the same amount as smoking 15 cigarettes a day and more than obesity. It is also associated with a greater risk of heart disease, depression, anxiety and dementia.

Experiencing trauma, especially in childhood, exacerbates poor mental and physical health. Sometimes, though, it’s not that trauma is necessarily increasing — but that there is more awareness of its effect, so there’s better tracking.

For example, we know so much more about domestic violence now than when I had my own violent partner in the late 1980s. Still, I learned the power of sharing on my own. It wasn’t until I told a high school friend about the black eye, the attempted strangulation, the dragging by my hair, that I summoned the strength to leave.

You’re as sick as your secrets, as an Alcoholics Anonymous saying goes.

Building community, online and off

I’m doing my part to build community offline. My only child just started college, as did the children of many of my closest friends. I’m at the age when many marriages end in divorce and when it’s not exactly shocking when friends and acquaintances die suddenly, especially after heart attacks.

I recently organized a reunion of the new mom’s group I was in 18 years ago. We needed each other — and our far more knowledgeable facilitator— then to help us through the stress of colicky infants and often clueless new fathers.

We needed each other more recently, too, but had drifted apart.

One had endured an unusually ugly divorce that she and her cancer-stricken mother are still dealing with financially. The husband of another had a relapse of a debilitating illness. And some of us suffered through challenges raising teenagers that make new-mom stress pale by comparison.

I’m no longer talking with my mom friends on the Little League softball bleachers or co-chairing the social committees at my daughter’s various

schools. If some of my neighbors and I didn’t have dogs, we would have never met. What a loss that would be.

So I’m walking the walk — with Mickey, my beagle-Jack Russell rescue.

None of us really knows what anyone else is going through unless we take the time to ask — and actually wait for an answer. We can all perpetuate stigma by failing to speak up about the unattractive stories behind our pretty Facebook pictures.

My newly widowed neighbor is not on Facebook and didn’t write an obituary right away. That slowed the spread of her heartbreaking news. Fortunately, she has a strong local support system from the decades she spent at the federal agency where she met her husband. So she wasn’t exactly lonely.

But she was alone more than her only child knew was healthy. He regularly urged Mom to go out.

I spent more than an hour a few months ago laughing amid tears with his mother. He doesn’t have to push her so much nearly a year later.

She and I helped organize a neighborhood moms’ movie group that includes a recently divorced neighbor and a few of us with kids at different stages of college and graduate school.

Our growing movie club is what my neighbor says is like a lovely silver thread resulting from her husband’s death.

Jayne O’Donnell is a health care policy

reporter for USA TODAY. Follow her on Twitter: @JayneODonnell

What are you doing to foster connection and squash stigma in your community? Share photos and a brief explanation of the effort and people at Isurvived it@usatoday.com.