On Solitude

Marianne Moore, a poet, wrote that "the best cure for loneliness is solitude." This sentence explains my mother's demeanor. She spends a good deal of her day alone in her room, and yet everytime I visit her, or she comes downstairs, she is cheerful. I have asked her often, "Are you lonely? Are you bored?" Her response is always, "No, I'm content." On occasions, she has admitted to missing my father, but her missing him, I know, goes well beyond lonliness. His death has left a vacancy in her life that will never be filled, and yet her loving memories of him have colored in the darkness of her two years without him. She waits to join him, and she waits patiently. My mother has found solitude--that feathered cushion upon which she places her trust. A cushion that absorbs the outer noise so her inner voice is heard. She listens and finds safety in the space it provides.