Merry Christmas eve eve

This week I was working a night shift nursing on christmas eve eve. (yes, that's the night before christmas eve).
Sometime in the week hours of the morning I was making rounds and happened to be in a patient's room bringing him some medication.
Being almost christmas, there was a certain buzz in the air. The nurses had hung up some decorations and in the nursing station there were stacks of boxes of chocolates from patients. (and you wonder why there are so many fat nurses.....what else do you think there is to do on a night shift except eat chocolates?) Most of the patients had told me about family members who were coming to visit them the next day, or what plans they'd made for christmas. Some of them had decorations up in their rooms and the odd poinsetta in the window.
I turned on the light in my patient's room and helped him sit up in bed so he could swallow the pills. He was a quiet man and I could tell he hated to put the nurses out, he never asked for anything. Since I had rudely awoken him at such an early hour I thought the least I could do was to make cheery conversation.
"So do you have family coming to visit you today or tomorrow?" I asked him.
In the pale shadows I could see he didn't meet my eyes.
"No."
I honestly didn't know what to say except "Oh." He didn't explain himself, he didn't jump in to say "They live far away" or some excuse like that. There was an awkward silence, in which I felt his embarrassment at his aloneness. There was nothing comforting to say like "I'm sure they're thinking about you" or some harmless lie like that. I could see by the look at his face that it would have been a lie anyway.
I met his eyes and said, very tenderly, "Well...."
I took my time in his room. I talked to him about the snow that was falling outside and how icy it was. We made quiet conversation for a few minutes and then I made him comfortable in bed and turned out the light when I left.
I still haven't stopped thinking about him. I can't remember his name, but it doesn't really matter. He is one of many. Our world is chock full of lonely, sad people. People without families, or people whose families aren't the kind that will cuddle on a couch and watch a movie on christmas night or sit in the hot tub squirting each other with rubber ducks until midnight or laugh at the dinner table together.
Loneliness is the most terrible feeling in the entire world. We should be very gentle with each other, because we are protecting that vulnerable place inside each other that feels aloneness. It is true that there is a God-shaped hole in each of us, and that God is gracious and compassionate and fills us completely. He is all we need and he is entirely sufficient.
But he also created us to need each other. We were designed to live in community and to learn to share and compromise and protect and love.