Her name was Alice. She belonged to our Latter-day Saint congregation, and my dad and I were assigned to visit her once a month. I dreaded these visits. I was 14 years old, and the last thing I wanted to do on a Sunday afternoon was sit in the stuffy apartment of an elderly widow who seemed defined by one characteristic above all others: She was incredibly lonely.
Sometimes, as my dad listened patiently to stories Alice had shared again and again, I would study her family photos on the wall and imagine what her life must have been like before her husband died and left her alone. But most of the time I would just count down the seconds until we could leave. I was put off by the oppressive mothball smell of her apartment. I resented the way my dad let these visits drag on for well past an hour. And I was irked at how tightly Alice hugged me every time we left, wordlessly begging us to stay. It made me feel guilty.
I couldn’t help remembering Alice as I read Natalia Galicza’s story about a man named Frank De Palma. Frank spent 22 years in isolation inside a maximum security state prison in Ely, Nevada. As Natalia notes, his loneliness and isolation became a darkness that enveloped him, until, as Frank puts it, darkness became his friend. He lost his sense of time, even his very sense of self. Now he is out of prison, but he still flinches at the light and considers himself peripheral to society, more shadow than person.
Reading Natalia’s story, I was surprised to learn that no country in the world uses solitary confinement as much as the United States. Natalia explores why this uniquely American phenomenon has become more widely used since the 1990s and details a recent bipartisan effort to curb the practice. I didn’t expect this story to rip my heart open, to bring tears to my eyes, or to make me think of my friend Alice. But it did.
On a lighter note, I was delighted by Marlowe Starling’s dispatch from Marble Canyon, Arizona, on the unlikely comeback of the California condor. I’ve learned that the condor, one of the West’s most iconic symbols, is a study in contradictions, described by early settlers as both “graceful and majestic” and a “huge monster.” It later became one of the first animals ever listed under the Endangered Species Act. Its resurgence from a near-extinct population of just 22 living birds in 1982 to an heartening 560 wild condors today is one of the great success stories of federal wildlife protection. It’s a nice reminder of our duty to be good stewards of the planet, and the varied and interconnected creatures that make the Earth hum like a finely calibrated machine.
I also hope you’ll check out Jean Twenge’s exploration of a controversial new theory that the growth of therapy, widely seen as our best effort to solve today’s teen mental health crisis, could actually be its underlying cause. Twenge, one of the first academics to sound the alarm about the impacts of social media and teen mental health, examines the theory advanced by New York Times bestselling author Abigail Shrier and finds that she agrees with some conclusions and disagrees with others.
What ties these stories together for me is a sense of shared responsibility to our planet, our kids and our neighbors — like my friend Alice. She died years ago, but I often recall the years my dad and I kept visiting her, long after it was no longer an assignment. As I grew up, I came to enjoy the time we spent there. Instead of feeling guilty when Alice hugged me goodbye, I felt bad that she didn’t have more people to visit her. And I remember the Bible verse my dad would often quote after those visits: “Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world.”
This story appears in the June 2024 issue of Deseret Magazine. Learn more about how to subscribe.