Blog 3823 – 05.11.2026

All The Lonely People

The Founder of Mother’s Day, Anna Jarvis, lobbied every important and prominent person she knew to help her get the second Sunday in May, the one nearest her own mother’s birthday, made into a national holiday. It was in 1908. And Anna spent the rest of her life decrying the way Mother’s Day had been taken over my commercial interests selling products instead of honoring mothers.

Anna had no children of her own but “wanted a special holiday to honor her own mother and to celebrate the sacrifices that mothers make for their children.” Two women in particular always come to mind on Mother’s Day in addition to my own mother and all the wonderful mothers that I have known. They are two women who wanted to be mothers themselves but never were. In later life in addition to missing their own mothers on Mother’s Day they wept for the children they never had.

In honoring our mothers and celebrating the sacrifices that they made for us we should also remember those tortured and lonely Elenor Rigby(s) in the world who were forced by circumstances beyond their control to refocus all those motherly instincts in other directions. More that a few women with little or no mother instincts have had children that were no comfort to them and both they and their children were cheated as were so many childless women who had so much mother’s love to give but never got the opportunity.

Today, the day after Mother’s Day, I celebrate those dear hearts that mourn for the children they never had especially on the second Sunday in May. Often these loving souls have found ways to share the abundance of love in their hearts with nieces and nephews and other’s children along with pets to ease their own personal loneliness.

The Beatles in their now classic hit song, Elenor Rigby, ask the questions: “All the lonely people, where do they all come from? All the lonely people where do they all belong?” The come from us, they are us, and they belong to us. To quote another song from the same time period, “Reach out and touch somebody’s hand, make this world a better place (a far less lonely place) if you can.”

Your friend and fellow traveler,

David James White

The Beatles – Eleanor Rigby (Official Music Video)

The Beatles – Eleanor Rigby (Official Music Video)

Author’s I have often said that the greatest pain in life is to lose a child in death, yet perhaps the poet was right in this regard as well when he wrote: “It is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.”