I never thought I’d miss Mondays. That sounds absurd to say out loud—forty years of alarm clocks and deadlines and Sunday evenings spent anxious about the week ahead, and here I am at seventy grieving it. Not the work exactly. But the thing the work gave me, which was a reason for Sunday to mean something. A place the week was pointed toward. Something that made Saturday different from Tuesday.
That’s what nobody tells you about retirement, or about the years after the children leave, or about the slow clearing away of the structures that used to organize your time without you having to think about it. The week loses its shape.
And Sunday evening, which used to be the most purposeful time of the whole week—the hinge, the pivot point, the breath before—becomes just another night in a long string of nights that don’t particularly need anything from you.
Sunday used to mean something different
There was a long stretch of life when Sunday evening meant preparation. The week ahead had weight and shape, and tomorrow mattered in a specific way. There were children to get ready, lunches to make, forms to sign, and the particular low-grade anxiety of a Monday looming. My husband and I had our ritual—a certain dinner, a certain show, a certain arguing about whose turn it was to do the dishes. It was ordinary in every way. I didn’t know at the time that ordinary could be such a complete thing.
What I miss isn’t the rushing or the obligation or even the particular dinner. What I miss is being included in the rhythm—the rhythm that most of the world organizes itself around, the one that says the week has a shape and you are in it. When you’re raising children, you’re in it by necessity. When you’re working, you’re in it. When the children leave, and the work stops, and the husband is gone, Sunday evening becomes a door you’re standing on the wrong side of, watching through the glass at something still going on inside. The people inside can’t really see you there. They’re busy living a version of the week that used to include you.
I don’t dread Sundays—I grieve them
For a long time, I thought what I was feeling on Sunday evenings was dread. What I understand now is that I wasn’t dreading anything. I was grieving. There’s a difference, and it took me a while to feel it clearly. Dread points forward, toward something you’re afraid is coming. Grief points backward, toward something you already lost. What comes over me on Sunday evening isn’t fear of the week ahead—it’s the accumulated weight of all the Sunday evenings that used to be different. The sound of a house that used to have more people in it. The echo of a calendar that used to have more on it. I’m not bracing for what comes next. I’m sitting with what’s gone.
Naming it grief instead of dread changed something. Grief you can sit with. Grief has a logic—it means you loved something, and the thing is no longer there. That’s not a problem to solve. That’s just what happened.
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I used to manage the feeling—now I just sit in it
The management strategies were extensive. A phone call timed for six o’clock. A project I saved specifically for Sunday evenings—something with enough pull to carry me through. A standing invitation somewhere that I accepted more to have somewhere to go than because I particularly wanted to go there. I got good at not feeling it, which I mistook for a long time for actually being fine.
At some point, I don’t know exactly when, the strategies stopped working. Or I stopped reaching for them. It became clearer that I was expending a lot of effort to not feel a thing that was going to be there anyway, and at seventy, you start to wonder whether that’s really how you want to spend the energy.
So I stopped. I let Sunday evening arrive. I let it be what it is, which is quiet, and lonely, and mine. There’s something unexpected that happens when you stop fighting a feeling—not that it goes away, but that it becomes familiar. Less frightening. I know this feeling now. I’ve let it into the house. It arrives, I acknowledge it, and eventually we both move on. That has been, oddly, a kind of progress.
It’s not the people I miss—it’s the shape they gave to everything
This one took me a long time to understand correctly. I thought the loneliness was about missing specific people—my husband, my children in their busy lives, friends who’ve moved or gotten sick or died. And those losses are real. But that’s not quite what Sunday evening is made of.
What I actually miss is the organizing principle. The way having people around gave the week its architecture. Tuesday was different from Saturday because of what was happening, who was coming, and what needed to be done. Sunday had its own character because of what came before and after. The days had edges.
Now they’re softer. I’m free in the way that can tip over into formless if I’m not careful. No one needs dinner at a specific time, so specific time stops meaning much. Nothing has to happen, so nothing announces itself as significant. The week doesn’t have a shape—it just passes. What I’m grieving on Sunday evenings is, in part, the loss of a week that knew it was a week. That sounds abstract. It isn’t. It’s one of the most concrete things I know.
Turns out loneliness has an upside I didn’t expect
I didn’t want to find this. I wasn’t looking for a silver lining, and I’m not offering one. But something happened in the sitting-with-it that I didn’t anticipate: I started to find out what I actually wanted.
When your time is organized around other people—their needs, their rhythms, their presence—you become very good at knowing what they need and considerably less practiced at knowing what you need. The house being full meant I always had something to orient toward. The house being quiet meant I had to figure it out myself.
So I tried things. Some of them were embarrassing—classes I left after one session, projects I abandoned, a phase of cooking elaborate meals for myself that lasted about three weeks. But some of them stuck. A particular walk I take on Sunday afternoons, now that I would never have taken before. A correspondence I started with someone I lost touch with years ago. Small things, but they’re mine in a way that things chosen for me or around me never quite were.
I didn’t know at seventy I’d still be finding out what I liked. The loneliness is what pushed me there.
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I don’t need the old rhythm back—I need a new one that’s actually mine
What I wanted, for a long time, was to get the old Sunday back. The one that had people in it, and a shape, and the comfortable noise of a life being lived in company. I still want that sometimes. The wanting doesn’t go away.
But I’m starting to understand that the old rhythm belonged to an old life, and the life I have now is different, and what I actually need is something built for the version of me that exists today. That’s harder than it sounds. The old rhythm came with the people and the obligations—it arrived without effort. A new one has to be constructed deliberately, which is work I wasn’t expecting to be doing at seventy.
I’m doing it anyway. Slowly, imperfectly, with false starts and abandoned attempts. Sunday evenings are still the loneliest hour of my week. But they’re becoming something—not the same thing they used to be, something different. Something I’m making rather than something I lost. Most weeks, that feels like enough to keep going. On the weeks it doesn’t, I try to remember that I built this far, and the week will turn over again, and Sunday will come and go the way Sundays do.
Editor’s Note: This piece is part of our “As Told to Bolde” series where we share personal stories from individuals we have interviewed or surveyed. For more information on how we create content, please review our Editorial Policy.
