When I leave early in the morning for work, I often pass Eleanor Rigby. She is coming, I am going; her day ending as mine begins. She never looks at me as we pass, but I look at her.

Mostly what I see is through the glass of her windshield, but I occasionally pass her in the garage of our building as she climbs from her modest sedan. I have privately named her after The Beatles’ famous song because that’s how she strikes me: a lady utterly, utterly, utterly alone.

She is well past middle age, and she seems to dress in wintry clothing regardless of the weather. Spectacled, with page-boy gray hair, she keeps her head down and will not look me in the eye or return a smile. Her only concession to costume is an occasional lapel pin—a gold tree or a silver circle—fastened to her coat.

Like a host of government workers about the city, she apparently has the graveyard shift, and has evidently never relinquished it. I have noticed her leaving as the rest of the world is watching the late news—with a satchel, a lunch bag, and nothing more. No one sees her off.

I could be wrong about this. For all I know, there is a husband waiting for her behind that door from which she leaves; for all I know, there are children somewhere, only a phone call away. Perhaps there’s an extended family or at least a dog.

Perhaps. But I don’t think that’s the case.

I admit to having wondered how all this might change. Of course, it is a decided arrogance on my part; it is condescension; she may very well be quite happy and would resent the fatuous serendipities my imagination would have befall her.

Still, I don’t know when I’ve seen a sadder face. So I imagine on.

But in the end, I find my solutions failing, time and again. Because I’m a realist at bottom, and I know how difficult it is to make things change; even when you want them to with all your heart; even when you devote your whole life to working at it.

There is hardly a person who hasn’t experienced this confounding regularity: all avenues exhausted, all efforts spent, years into redoubled and re-tripled attempts, and still there’s nothing to show for it. A few steps forward, but ten big steps back.

In such circumstances, it can be infuriating to hear the old bromides: “If you don’t like things, it’s in your power to alter them”; “You make your own luck”; and “Take control of your life.”

Although I am in complete support of fortitude and self-help, you don’t have to be a shiftless coward with no ambition to find such advice tendentious and irksome. That’s especially so when you’re often reminded of how little control life allows you.

Take Eleanor Rigby there. How long she has worked nights, I cannot say; but in this economy—in any economy—she’s lucky to have a job at all. It’s not so easy to get the hours you want, to work on terms that suit you. So even if she doesn’t like the strain of it, and even if the people there are rotten and there’s no opportunity to make friends, what can she do? At least ghosts at midnight have a place.

And if there are obligations to pay for—a mortgage and a car and other loans, it’s much harder. Responsibilities bind us like handcuffs, and a good salary or an esteemed position—achieved through difficulty—can narrow a range of options. Not everyone can just take a fifty thousand dollar cut in pay and open a bakery in Breckenridge. Even if that’s possible, those fairy tales usually don’t end the way we pretend they do.

Plus, once you get to a certain place in life, people won’t cooperate with your planned changes so easily. You’ll be told you’re overqualified for most things, and even if you aren’t, that they’re really looking for someone else (i.e., Who wants somebody like you coming in here with your own ideas, unwilling to do what you’re told like someone half your age would have to do?)

On a personal level, how likely is eharmony or match.com for someone like her? And how, considering such a schedule, can she meet friends on weekends for that matter? Going to bed at eight in the morning five days a week isn’t something you can just stop doing on Saturdays.

The more I think about it, the more I believe that we all live the same life, if not at exactly the same time or to the same extent. I mean, Eleanor has a hard road, but there’s not a one of us in the parade that doesn’t have to face times when we’re marching it without a soul near.

There are depths that even those surrounded by family and friends cannot explain. Tragedy—loss—despair—can seal us away from even the dearest, even the closest. At such times, the world is too large, we too small, and our efforts only meet echoes.

So what I can hope for Eleanor, and for each who strives mightily, who is brave enough to keep rising, dressing, pinning that small piece of jewelry onto a coat and going to work in the dead of night, is the realization that what seems a private plight is really the plight of all.

Even God himself went through it at the three o’clock hour, at the nadir of his abandonment. He did not spare himself the hellish isolation that is our sorest and meanest trial. That, it seems, we share.

In the end, such is the news we must cling to: that no matter how frightening the thought may be, the room is not as empty as it feels. And no matter what the old song may say, Eleanor Rigby will not die alone with her name.