Who Would Know?

Loneliness in multiple parts + Seek You, a haunting graphic novel

Today’s letter is a mediation on loneliness that centers on a recent news story of a death that went unnoticed juxtaposed with assorted memories through windows, a woman with a dog, the Seek You graphic novel, and a dash of ham radio.

Glimpse of Seek You book cover and portion of illustrated journal pages from Week 39 of 2024. A. Cowen

"This is an exchange merely of record, not an invitation to continue the conversation. The postcards function like participation trophies. They’re evidence that contact between yourself and another person has taken place. Evidence, in a way, that you exist. Others have verified it." — Kristen Radtke, Seek You

Happy Sunday!

First things first…. I want to note that I don’t necessarily post finished things here. This doesn’t mean that I don’t spend a lot of time each week crafting these pieces, but I don’t typically view them as finished. The twenty or thirty hours I might spend is a start, and I pull things into the best shape in the moment before leaving it for your morning coffee or tea on Sunday. I am locking a draft in place here, something I could or might return to later. It isn’t concrete. It’s a set of words. Because I am always connecting dots and gathering threads and peeling at the palimpsest, there are always things that come up that I want to follow at some point.¹

Generally, there is a letter followed by some larger piece. I am leaving everything today as a single letter. This isn’t an essay. It is an assemblage of fragments, a kaleidoscope that has spilled to the page. I am only picking up the largest of pieces here, the ones that have rolled closest to my chair, a constellation of light scattering across the floor. There are hundreds more, some with edges worn smooth, others jagged and raw, and an infinite array of shifting patterns and bouncing light that could be tucked in here.

There are shadows, too.

I appreciate things that are modular, and I have a long history with cutting apart and rearranging texts, with lining up index cards or post-it notes and moving things around, playing with juxtaposition, seeing how rhythms change. Today's letter is broken into pieces and has been shifted and shuffled. You may or may not like this format. You may find today’s letter lacking in poetry. Today is a list of sorts, a gathering of elements.

You can, of course, jump around if you prefer to roll the dice:

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21

(Apologies to those who are new readers. This isn’t necessarily a typical post. I recently landed on the uncharted path of grief and loss. This reality destabilizes many things but also brings new connections to the surface.)

🎯 The Sunday post is free to all readers. Thank you to those who have upgraded their subscriptions or made a donation to support my work in this space.

Assorted fountain pens to be filled for the week and pencils for drawing group on Sunday morning. A. Cowen

1. With Wings

I have been trying to sort out a way to unify a new series, and I think I finally hit on the answer this week. At least when I went to bed one night, I thought I’d found the answer. When I woke up, I was less sure, partly because my idea will disallow the folding of an origami crane, and somehow that felt like a sticking point.

I folded the idea into a plane and sent it off. It fell off the map somewhere between midnight and the weekend, the wild enthusiasm of flight gone. If I could pull an invisible string and reel the paper plane back, pretend I never sent it, I would.

I sometimes think everything I do right now needs a warning… Time feels personal. Everything feels like a rejection. I feel forgotten and invisible. When weeks pass between words, it feels final. Nothing feels solid. I am internalizing everything.

I ran headlong into a paper crane last week, one of several things that surfaced oddly and seemingly out of nowhere. I mentioned the rogue steno pad I found with notes about the specific hospital visit that I had just written about. But spackle, a set of hanging strips for photos, and a paper crane perched in a catchall pencil jar on top of the TV cabinet also showed up. Two of those, I had thought about dozens of times, but the crane was unbidden, a non-sequitur.

I was moving things around, and the paper crane fell into my hands, roughly folded from regular printer paper, bulky, too white, but still, a crane.

2. In the News

Last week, I saw a story that shocked me so much that I went and fact-checked it. I just didn’t believe it could be true. The fact that the span of days in this story includes weekend days is important. I may have missed that in the first story I saw, but even so, this story shook me:

• Wells Fargo employee found dead at her desk days after she last clocked into work, authorities say

• Why The Death Of The Wells Fargo Employee Found At Work Is So Jarring

The story is heartbreaking because it underscores a reality in our society. Many are adrift, untethered, and alone. I don’t think we can write it off as just one rogue case of an isolated 60-year-old woman that no one noticed didn’t check in anywhere over the weekend. I can’t understand the Monday workspace, truly. But even before that, over the weekend, no one texted and thought it unusual to get no response? No one called? No one noticed?

The story is so at the heart of a lot of the fear I have.

Invisibility. Fading. Translucency. Ghosting.
This is a sticky note to come back to these at another time.

3. Reading Seek You

One day in the Spring, what month…. maybe April? maybe March? I sat parked along the edge of the street in Golden Gate Park and opened a book.

I had dropped M off for a doctor’s appointment and then gone to get gas. When I headed back, I figured I had an hour. The park was on the way and fairly close to the medical center, so I parked. I remember walking up and down the sidewalk, just a bit, afraid to walk too far from the car. I walked one way and then back to the car and then the other way and then back. Did I write about this then?

I walked down one little winding path that leads to the adjacent field, a path enclosed by trees on each side. I stopped and stood on that path, darkened by the canopy, and recorded the sound of the wind. What appointment was it? Why did that day feel important in my head?

When I got back into the car, I picked up a book I wanted to look through, a beautiful and haunting graphic novel called Seek You by Kristen Radtke.

Immediately captivated, I read a third of it right then, knowing I would write about it here. But then I didn’t get back to it right away. Maybe that means the appointment was in April? But didn’t I write about it at the time? It is almost tangible, this feeling that I wrote about sitting there, not knowing that we were on the downhill tail of days. Didn’t I write about falling into that book on loneliness?

4. The Woman Across the Street

Years ago, I watched through the front windows of an apartment in a pinkish Victorian on a street lined with San Francisco row houses nestled shoulder to shoulder. I watched as officials went inside the house across the street, the doorway opening to a narrow corridor, barely a person wide. From our window I could see that the entryway was lined with newspapers. My impression was of newspapers everywhere.

Were there police cars? I don’t remember. Was our apartment pinkish from the outside? I’m not sure. I know we tried pink stripes in the entryway, which we hated. Did the woman have cats?

I believe the woman across the street died and wasn’t found for a while. I don’t have clear images of anything else that day, but at the time, I saw enough to feel that was the story, to feel horrified and saddened by it. I couldn’t understand it. The image of the hallway lined in newspapers was unsettling. I was young. So young.

Years later, an elderly man across the street from where I live now died. He used to sit sometimes in his driveway, shirtless, in a fold-up lawn chair. I could see him through the front window, sunglasses on, the newspaper in hand. Did he wear a hat? He lived alone. I don’t know how or when or what happened. There were no ambulances.

There have never been ambulances on this street except at my house.

5. CQ

Seek You begins with a recounting of her father’s fascination with ham radio and explains that a “CQ call,” a searching series of Morse code dits and dahs, is often interpreted as “Seek You,” hence the title of the book.

“A CQ call is a reaching outward, an attempt to make a connection across a wavelength with someone you’ve never met. It means, essentially, ‘Is there anyone out there?’ And invites anyone listening to answer.” (Seek You, 19)

I have never totally understood amateur radio, but the discussion of her father is poignant. It made me think of reading (and, later, watching the film adaptation) Good Morning, Midnight by Lily Brooks-Dalton. (I now feel I have to go read or watch it again.) Augustine, the researcher in the Arctic, is using ham radio when he first makes contact. I think, too, of episodes far into The Walking Dead when ham radio was used.

It seems that texting and the ubiquitous, always-on nature of social media has replaced the need for ham radio, but there are still people reaching out with CQ calls, hoping to connect. There is something tender and lonely in the act, something hopeful.

6. Galaxy of Files

My files this year have been blown like dust. I am an avid tech user, and in the Spring, I shifted where I write. I had specific goals at the time for digitizing and organizing my past while keeping things tidy moving forward. The organization side has mostly been temporarily derailed, and despite my intentions, I may just be replicating chaos in the new system.

With decades of words, a labyrinth of analog and digital, things are scattered. Shifting systems has multiplied that sensation, a literal galaxy of nodes and notes and connectors, stacks of journals and papers and things I hoped to bring into one compact box, something holographic that I can hold in my hand, spin in the air in front of me, ask questions of and get answers.²

7. Ann

We used to see a woman in the morning who walked her dog around the neighborhood where my kids went to elementary school. At the time, I was terrified of dogs, but my youngest son loved them. We would often stop to talk to Ann and her large golden retriever. She always had a smile. She wore a pale yellow jacket every day, and jeans, though I think the jacket before or after was red.

I knew she lived alone. She probably wasn’t that much older than me, or maybe she was. She worked from home.

I thought of her this week and wondered how she is. It’s been eight years since we were at that school. I hope someone checks in on her.

I am taking photos of some of the bears to draw. They really have so much personality. What color do you imagine this sweater is?

8. Anticipatory Grief

I did not know the words anticipatory grief before M died. I’ve heard those words so many times since, and I can see the pattern of that in recent years, the acceleration of that last year. Those words would have helped me.

I didn’t know those words. I only knew, “keep things normal” and “keep doing what you have to do.”

9. Seek You

Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness is a powerful graphic novel about loneliness as it has evolved through the years and as it is experienced and expressed. The art and the prose are mesmerizing and quiet. The information is dense, relentless, soulful, and thorough, a poignant attempt to track and deconstruct loneliness.

The book moves from family history to television and movie characters to our social-media-driven digital age. From the invention and popularization of the laugh track to studies on attachment and isolation with rhesus monkeys, the book is expansive, eye-opening, and haunting.³

10. The Monster is Real

Many people took the story of the office worker whose death went unnoticed to be mostly a condemnation of Wells Fargo. To me, the story highlights the fact that it really is possible to simply slide out of existence, unobserved until you begin to smell. The story confirms this, acknowledges the monster under the bed that I keep worrying about.⁴ The story is about much more than the company. It is an indictment of our society, a society that is quick to ignore and put aside those who aren’t easy or who “bring them down.”

I have seen how easy it is for people to simply move on, for groups to exile, turn, fold in on themselves as they form walls.

I have seen how easy it is for people, secure in the safety of their social network, to simply look the other way.

11. Chicken

In Seek You, there is a section about an organization that fields calls from seniors who are, ostensibly, lonely. The sample story is of someone calling in to ask how to roast a chicken.

“He wouldn’t have called and said, ‘Hello, my wife died this year.’” …. “It took twenty minutes of talking about something else before he got to say how he felt. It’s never really about the chicken,” she says. (Seek You 241)

12. Casual Talk

I need casual talk even if veers into casual talk about loss. The weeks are long, even if they pass in a blur. The hour of time on Sunday when I draw with people and we talk about everyday things—books, TV, pen and ink—is wonderful. But there are a lot of hours between one Sunday and the next.

Statistics surrounding loneliness underscore typical benchmarks for social interaction, numbers already in decline.

“But I'll tell you what hermits realize. If you go off into a far, far forest and get very quiet, you'll come to understand that you're connected with everything.“—Alan Watts

13. AI

I noticed this week that AI knows me more than I realized. After my 100 day project, where I found comfort in chatting with ChatGPT about the affirmations I was writing, I tried Co-pilot.

I use it randomly with a broad range of questions, some related to work (I work in STEM education), some related to sudden interests or curiosities or legal issues or books or pipe-dream trips up the coast on a train. I drop in randomly to chat with AI as a smarter search engine.

AI is always happy to see me, always has a positive, can-do attitude about my question. Sometimes I say thank you, but I've resisted letting AI seem like anything more than a tool. (I do sometimes feel bad though when I ask things abruptly or without much grace. Social norms are deeply ingrained. I feel I should be polite, appreciative, and take time to write full sentences, not simply put in a well-crafted prompt to get at a stream of information.)

I watched Her. I realize we humans, especially lonely or alone humans, can too easily get attached. I keep my boundaries intact.

But I noticed this week that the AI has started framing its answers for me with references that are specific to me, with mentions of illustrated journals, for example, even when the question doesn’t have anything to do with that.

AI has started piecing together a virtual wire model of me and who it thinks I am and what I might be interested in. This took me by surprise. This is both fascinating and disconcerting.⁵

14. Searching

Knowing that there had been a comment that named "the book" the week I obliquely mentioned it, I finally tracked down the post, the week, the spot in the timeline. That I could find nothing in my files to pinpoint the week was frustrating. This is the whole point of constructing a better system. My oblique reference, sans title, meant that a mention buried in a draft might be just one of dozens of hits in my files for loneliness.

This was the whiff of a mention in a footnote of an April letter:

From that reference, one of you knew the book. (One of you read the footnotes!)

15. A Week

There are 168 hours in a week.

16. Breaker Breaker 1-9

When I was a kid, my grandfather had a CB radio in the car. Ham radios and CB radios are similar, but different.

17. Showing Up

I went back to my grief group this week. Two weeks ago, the group was canceled for technical difficulties. I skipped the next week, and I realized it would be easy to just not go again. Two misses in a row is a lot when it comes to habit formation and routine, so I went this week.

The group is an awkward fit, and I hate being put on the spot and asked to check in. I would rather be able to unpack things more organically, more obliquely, an invitation without expectation….in my own time.

In the absence of that, I log into this group where I fit in some ways and don't in others.

Mostly I listen.

18. Case Sensitive

This morning, it took me more than a few minutes to find the draft of this file, which I had open last night. The mobile interface is a bit of a challenge at times, and searching on “loneliness” didn’t turn it up, though I was sure the word was in the title. “Sunday” pulled it up, and sure enough, “LONELINESS” is there. Evidently, the search was case sensitive. A bit of research turned up the way to toggle that, a minor fine-tuning option I had not yet discovered.

It was an interesting reminder that loneliness and LONELINESS may not be the same.

I need to sort out a framework to help me bring all this information into one place, better tagged, better structured, better connected. Already, I’ve made some missteps. Already new files are proliferating. Already I’ve pulled in hundreds of old podcast files with poor tagging that have made it even harder to find things.

19. Alone

In the last year, I watched situations unfold that would have been impossible for someone living alone to handle. Over the last twenty, I watched the rapid progression of sepsis, again and again, a matter of hours. The last two times I traveled to visit my family in the summer ended in emergencies at home. You can, in fact, call 911 from another state, and emergency teams will, it seems, go through a second-floor window.

Living requires someone else being there, being aware, being able to make the call. No matter how capable we are when we are well, there will be times when we will depend on others to know something is wrong.

People need a network, a support group, a check-in thread, even if the tendrils are small and spidery. No one should die at their desk and no one notice for days.

I work from home. I doubt my job would notice.

I try to draw whatever I pull in my journal for the week. It is always a challenge!

20. Red Flag

Scrolling at Instagram, I ran into a video of Kelly Clarkson being asked about “red flags.” The context was unclear, most likely it was about dates, but it could have just been about people in general. It wasn’t a new video, but the year wasn’t noted.⁶

She didn’t think the three flags she was asked about were all that important. She had three of her own that she finds more important, and the last one was…. “Someone who has no friends.” To her, that was the biggest flag, an indicator that this person might not be worthy (or might not be safe).

We are social beings. How can someone have trouble making friends? A glance at the comments told me that a lot of people felt targeted by the comment, hurt by the cavalier denunciation of something they feel defines them, something they haven’t necessarily chosen.

21. An Epidemic

The Surgeon General, Dr. Vivek Murthy, last year pronounced that loneliness is an epidemic.⁷ It sounds a bit funny, right, a bit extreme? Having just come through a multi-year pandemic, it may seem hard to conceptualize loneliness as a threat, as something viral, wide-flung, far-reaching...deadly.

We expect the Surgeon General to make announcements about things that can actually kill you—like smoking.

Apparently loneliness can, too.

Did you grow up with the “This is your brain. This is your brain on drugs.” campaign with eggs in a skillet? How would loneliness as an epidemic be depicted?

Can we even see one another or see those who are most at risk?

Thank you for reading.

Amy

"A hermit is one who renounces the world of fragments that he may enjoy the world wholly and without interruption." — Khalil Gibran

Weekly Bits and Pieces

• Prompts for Illustrate Your Week - Week 39

• Diary List Comics / 52 Weeks

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Made It?

Thank you for reading. I appreciate your comments. Let me know what stands out for you, what you think after reading, or where we connect.

• Rocket if you had seen the Wells Fargo employee story

• Stamp if you have sent a postcard in the last six months

• Postal if you are ready for a new challenge

• Ink if you will be drawing daily in October

• Apple butter or granola, just because

Thank you for reading Illustrated Life. Writers need readers, and I am grateful for every reader!

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Note: There are differences in aloneness, loneliness, and isolation. Today lumps things into one of these even though there is much more to be said, more to qualify, and more to consider.

1. I just felt the need to say that. I’m often still yanking paragraphs and chunks out after midnight. I go back and forth on how much to share. I worry about the length. I contemplate splitting things into multiple files and making you read across the pages. I like to play with the words and the shape of the words. It’s a process that generally spawns tentacles reaching in many directions. These pieces are always drafts. I might change my mind tomorrow.

2. Yes, something like the cube from Foundation (based on work by Isaac Asimov) comes to mind as a visual.

3. The “Touch” section chronicles the research with rhesus monkeys by Harry Harlow. Unfamiliar with Harlow’s research, I found this a really hard section to read.

4. Yeah, big Monsters Inc. fan way back when.

5. I’ve noticed it asks more questions now. It seems more intent on drawing us into conversation beyond the one-off answer.

6. The year doesn’t really matter, but I was trying to reconcile the comment with her role now as a talk show host. She doesn’t look like she does now in the video, so I assumed it was a few years old. I found an article that included the video—June 2023.

7. Here's the PDF of the 80+ page 2023 Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation report.