Remembering Joyce

The thing that struck me first about Joyce was the laugh. We had an open house for our small group at church—I don’t remember the exact details—but Joyce was there, and at one point she let loose with an enormous belly laugh. It was a laugh that someone laughs when they haven’t laughed for years. A hungry laugh, a laugh of desperate starvation. A laugh that told the world, “Maybe I don’t have to be alone anymore.” She started coming to our small group each week.

All the adults in Joyce’s family tended to die of heart attacks when they hit 50, so Joyce worked out at the gym. She was one of the fittest people I knew. Her husband had run off with the secretary and left her to raise their children alone. She did a good job, and by the time I got to know her, they were grown, had moved out of the house, and were living on their own.

Joyce was witty as well as very smart, a good friend, and a marvelous cook. She was also lonely. Small group helped with the loneliness, but she would sometimes tell us, especially in Winter, that what she wanted more than anything else was a “Strong-Arm Heater.” We prayed for the right guy to come along, and she was definitely out there looking, but no prospects. I could not figure out why. Any man would have been lucky to have someone like her in his life, but there just didn’t seem to be anyone for her.

Her fiftieth birthday came and went—She did not have the expected heart attack. All seemed well. Then at 57, she was diagnosed with leukemia. The best medical care in the world was not enough to make a difference, and she died after a year of struggle at 58.

At the end, when she had only about 6 months to live, she started dating someone. I was never sure whether he was truly, tragically interested in her, or if he hoped to get some sort of inheritance from her. She didn’t marry the guy.

The unanswered question in all this was, “How could it happen that such an eligible bachelorette was not able to find anyone to date for 15 years?” She was not alone in this. Every time I turn around, and more and more as I age, I keep running into smart, kind, lovely women who can’t find a man. These are not women who do not want a man in their lives. These are the ones who would love to have one, but can’t find a candidate. What gives?

I think its a combination of things that work against women as they age. First, men die sooner than women. This means that there are fewer men to go around as time goes on. I suspect that a lot of men who would be good candidates for marriage are already married. If nothing goes horribly wrong (and sometimes even if it does) they stay that way. So there is a process that removes more and more stable, eligible men from the dating pool in a permanent way. Any men that are left are more likely to be not interested in having a woman in their lives, or they have something seriously wrong with them that makes it a good idea for women to stay away from them.

Joyce never got the Strong Arm Heater that she wanted so much. I sometimes wonder if she died partly from starvation for touch. Newborn babies need to be held, cuddled and touched or they will die. Maybe that holds for the rest of us too.