Ageing and Loneliness

After the previous blog we need to get more serious, and loneliness is serious indeed and often the inevitable accompaniment of the old age. Often it’s because someone you dearly loved has died. Katherine Whitehorn was writing about the experience of losing her husband in a recent newspaper article. Marriage’ she says, ‘is the water in which you swim, the land you live in: the habits and assumptions you share about the future, about what’s funny or deplorable, about the way the house is run- or should be….You don’t ‘get over’ the death; but you have to learn to live in another country in which you are an unwilling refugee.’

This refugee status typifies much of what it’s like to be elderly. You can feel lonely at being at the end of a generation which many people feel is out of touch with contemporary life and culture. As you try to relate to younger people you realise that you speak a different language and hold different values. The very words you use are different. You may be rated as someone with skills so limited and fragile that people speak to you as if you were a backward child, to be humoured and jollied along. It used to worry me when I visited people in hospital geriatric wards, that the staff called old people only by their first names, whereas in happier and more formal days they were known to others only by their family name.

And there is the loneliness of belonging to a reduced social group. When you were still working there were activities to share in the various communities you belonged to. Now you have less energy and are in touch with fewer people, and you may lack the stimulation they once provided. The horizons are more limited than they were and often we feel uncomfortable – lonely – as we live within them.

But all is not lost. Of course not. We’ve mentioned friends before and they deserve to be cherished especially younger ones whose future is as important to us as our own is limited. We can seize the initiative in our use of time of which we have more than ever before – routine can be boring but some pattern to our life that takes us out of ourselves is important. For some of us, reading becomes a precious resource as we are introduced to imaginative or researched worlds; history and biography have become more and more interesting to me I find, and there are some wonderful novels around. And reflection is one of the gifts of old age, as we survey the past and try not to range too widely in our thoughts, but delve deeply into the meaning and the value of life.

Bryan