The perspective of life changes as we get older. In adolescence, the only purpose is to enjoy your time to the fullest, without worries, beyond the obligations imposed to study. Then comes the stage of incorporation into the labor market. And, in the blink of an eye, you buy a new vehicle, which replaces the second-hand one that you had until then; you sign a mortgage, which chains you to a bank until old age and makes you dependent on a job, often underpaid and consuming you; and the package is completed with the formation of a family and the need to do accounts to reach the end of the month. Society imposes its values and obligations and makes you think that you are part of it only if you have complied with that program.
Meanwhile, life passes, slowly, with no option to go back. One day you stop, startled, because you are in the abyss of sixty years and everything seems to be going too fast. So, in your mind there is only one concern: time, that which you naively wasted in your youth and that is now slowly being shelled in your vital clock until there is no grain left and everything stops. Sooner or later, you know that time will come, but you avoid thinking about it because the best way to cope is to imbue yourself in your routines.
As if that were not enough, a pandemic called COVID-19 has called at the door, for which, to this day, we have no answers and we only know that it is expanding rapidly and with high mortality rates. We complain every day because this disease has conditioned our lives and this self-centeredness blinds us in such a way that we do not perceive the effects it has caused in the elderly. Their presence has meant that the latter have added another handicap to their particular long-distance career, which not only reduces their abilities and autonomy, but has also severely affected their social relationships and has created very harsh psychological situations. At all times the risks of a possible contagion and the weakness of their body’s defenses to face it haunt their heads. If old age was already a wake-up call on their vital clock, which is gradually being consumed, COVID-19 has been a blow, cornering them and giving up their normal life, giving rise to a group that suffers in silence its consequences.
Nursing homes, which often serve as prisons for fathers and mothers, who have been forcibly removed by their children from the space that was always their home, has made the effects that the disease produces on this group invisible. These effects are emotional and psychological because they do not receive visits or have done so with a restricted character by the protocols established due to this disease. In this way, they are committed to an evident sanitary protection, but they also suffer the effects of the lack of affection and love that those relatives professed for them.
Older people need to hug and be hugged by their loved ones, they require physical contact, evocative smells and positive emotions typical of a pleasant environment. For this reason, family and good friends are the best balm at the end of life and their absence is causing serious damage to them, accelerating their physical and psychological aging.
Reality strikes mercilessly and this, which happens in senior centers, is also extrapolated to many homes, where elderly people live alone. Faced with this situation, I feel that there is a lack of love, empathy and sensitivity towards them because all they demand is that we share part of our time to mitigate their loneliness and isolation to which they are subjected, at the same time that they demand understanding and stimuli necessary to not feel like objects.
Some mornings, when I return from playing sports, I greet a neighbor in my neighborhood, with whom, curiously, I don’t have much dealings either. That greeting has been increased in recent times in the form of dialogue, where any topic is worth as long as there is a minimum of empathy and courteous relationship involved. She, an octogenarian, talks about life from her roof; I, in the phase of carrying the cross of a mortgage, I am behind at street level. That situation seems to me like that of a girl who is looking forward to her birthday, not only to open her gift, but also to blow out the candles on a cake that she wants to share with others. But, now, there are no laughter or hugs and the voices of moments like this have been appeased by the silence, seriousness and isolation of both the people who live in that area and their families.
In those conversations, he reminds me over and over again that the neighborhood has changed, that nothing is like before, like a few months ago. We have only been with this disease for a year, but in the life cycle of people of that age range everything is much more amplified. He insists that the neighbors no longer greet each other or do so briefly from inside the vehicles, with the windows closed and without the intention of stopping.
He has not spoken to anyone for practically months and is overcome with nostalgia when he does with me. Her husband, in his nineties, barely moves. Silence has settled in his house, cold, deaf and terrifying. Where there used to be family gatherings, at this moment there is only a void, which causes a feeling of vertigo in the face of loneliness.
Parapetuated on that roof, like a sniper who feels safe, he insists that he hardly goes out on the street. Everything is fear and insecurity and any precautions I take are little in relation to how the disease evolves. Television has become the only vehicle with the outside, in the helping hand, and that speaks very clearly of how far we are capable of losing our freedom and suffering.
At an age, that fear is installed in the thought because the weakness of the body is evident and the rhythms change alarmingly, gradually giving way to physical efforts and abandoning ourselves to goals and routines that were previously at hand. That same fear has found an ally in that disease. Everything my neighbor talks about revolves around the effects of the disease and its irreversible ravages. For this reason, her home becomes the impregnable refuge from what happens outside and it is the only way where she, like thousands of other elderly people, feels safe.
The moral is that we cannot dehumanize ourselves in a situation like this in which the most disadvantaged and unprotected groups should receive our full support and understanding. One day we will be biologically in the same situation and we will demand something that is evident before our eyes, but that the rest do not understand because they do not want to put themselves in the shoes of an octogenarian.
Now, time is a cruel enemy for many people, who are saying goodbye in silence, with their arms crossed before the arrival of the irremediable. But there is another worse enemy, which lags behind: loneliness, feeling that there is no one around them who cares about them and that allows them to stay active to continue recognizing faces that give meaning to everything they are. It does not cost as much a daily conversation on the street to help those who have become invisible.
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