From a loneliness that stifles to a loneliness to live well with
- The importance of saying ‘good morning’
- Not being able to share what is happening to you with anyone
- From depression to the desire to live better
Their participation in the programme Siempre Acompañados (Always Accompanied) run by the ”la Caixa” Foundation has helped them find well-being in their situation. Their stories can be heard in a telephone booth installed in Granada (or through the online experience). This is an initiative aimed at raising awareness of the phenomenon of loneliness on the occasion of International Day of Older Persons.
"Loneliness squeezes, squeezes, squeezes more and more. Then you say, “My God, either I die or I get out of this”. Because you don't feel like doing anything. You don't feel like talking or answering the phone or going out... You're so obsessed with being alone... “Oh, how lonely I am! What am I going to do all alone?”. And you can't think of anything. Loneliness is a horrible thing.‘
That's how Teresa felt a while ago. She was a teacher, ran a travel agency with her husband, and took care of him and their three children. Now she is 80 years old. For her, loneliness means that ’inside you are empty and around you you are helpless."
Like many other parents, Teresa faced the ‘empty nest’ when her children left home, although she soon adapted and enjoyed living with her husband without anyone else: ‘You come back to life as if we knew each other. It didn't last long, but we made the most of it while it lasted.’
It lasted until, eight years ago, he died unexpectedly. ‘When someone you love very much dies, it's like a wave that drowns you. I was looking for something to hold on to, so I wouldn't drown, and I couldn't. Every day the wave, every day the wave,’ Teresa recalls. But even such a difficult blow can be overcome: "There came a time when that wave didn't come so often. It let me breathe a little, at least. And then it went away. I had a very hard time, but you have to go through the grieving process.‘
Teresa: ’When someone you love very much dies, it's like a wave that drowns you. The flat was closing in on me. It was the first time in my life that I found myself alone."
For her, her home played an important role in her feelings of loneliness and in how she coped with them. ‘I had a huge house and there came a point when I was sinking, the floor was closing in on me. It was the first time in my life that I found myself alone,’ she says. ‘I started saying “I'm alone”. I spoke less and less, I didn't even talk to myself,’ she recalls. She describes a loneliness that ‘envelops you: you're in a hole and it's sinking you, you're inside and you feel like you're getting lower and lower.’
Until, at one point, her children suggested she move out. She was excited to do so, but it wasn't easy. When she arrived at the new flat, she saw that ‘there was nothing there.’ ‘The first day I went to sleep, I said, “You're here with four walls, so what? What else is there? I have to find something. I have to prove to myself that I can live here!”’ Teresa recounts.
She managed to prove it to herself with two plants: one she bought and one that was old. She said to the new one, ‘If you grow in this flat, I will grow too.’ And to the ‘older’ one, which she identified with herself, she said: ‘If you start to sprout, even though you're a bit lazy, we'll both live here. If not, no one will live here.’ She watered the plants with enthusiasm and they did what she asked: "The plant sprouted some little flowers and lived. The other one also perked up. And I said, “If everyone lives here, I will too”. So I lived.‘ For Teresa, the key is enthusiasm: ’You just have to have enthusiasm. That's what makes you live. Today I'll make eggs with tuna, today I feel like buying some shoes... Being enthusiastic about simple things."
To learn how to deal with her loneliness, Teresa has had the help of the Siempre Acompañados (Always Accompanied) programme run by the ”la Caixa” Foundation. This initiative aims to empower elderly people who are lonely and accompany them in their search for a fulfilling life by fostering relationships of well-being and support. The aim is not to stop people from being lonely, but to make them feel good, even if they are. By 2025, it had already helped more than 3,300 elderly people in Spain and Portugal.
Teresa was referred to this service by her psychologist. The Siempre Acompañados team, through regular contact with her, guided her to achieve her goals: "See that notebook over there? That's where Ana wrote down everything I had to do. It helped me a lot. She would say to me, “Well, María Teresa, what have you done today in your new flat?” I would have to buy some pictures. She would write in the notebook, “This week we will buy the pictures”. The programme has helped her improve her well-being: “They taught me to live the way I want to”.
The importance of a ‘good morning’
Another person participating in this programme run by the ”la Caixa” Foundation is Javier. He is 70 years old and has spent 40 of those years working in the financial sector. Apart from his professional career, he likes to research and digitise old documents from the 18th and 19th centuries: "My hobby is making family trees, especially for my own family. I look at documents in different bishoprics or whatever to find the oldest generation possible. I've gone back as far as 1640.‘ ’I'm not a person who likes to sit still. I'm a person who needs to be active,‘ he says.
His life changed in 2022 when he was widowed: ’My wife, my mother-in-law and I caught Covid. My mother-in-law was 97 at the time. She and I got over it, I don't know how, but my wife died after 10 days in hospital.‘ That's when his feelings of loneliness began. ’When you come home, you don't even say good evening because the walls don't answer you. If you leave a piece of paper on the table, you find it on the table. I didn't expect to be in this situation," he laments.
For Javier, ‘the hardest thing is that you can't share with anyone what you really do on a daily basis.’ ‘It feels very long. Winter, the afternoons... You watch a lot of television, you end up with a headache, and then all you do is think. Think and think: “Why did this happen to me? Why did others overcome it and my wife didn't?”’
One of the things that helps him feel less alone is a WhatsApp group: ‘We're a group of friends who say good morning and good night to each other. It's not just saying good morning or good night, it's that someone is thinking about me and I'm thinking about them. This means that if someone doesn't reply within 24 hours, we check to see if something has happened to them.’ He also has ‘closer friends’ who go one step further: ‘They come over, take me out of the house, we go for a coffee or a soft drink...’
Javier: ‘In the Siempre Acompañados group sessions, I've learned to live with loneliness with dignity.’
He remembers that he got out of the rut, on the one hand, thanks to the help of those close friends, and on the other, by attending the Siempre Acompañados programme. The group sessions helped him there: "With what other people said, you thought: 'Wow, what has helped this person can also help me. There are people going through the same thing as me.‘ Javier says that in the group he has learned to ’live with loneliness with dignity.‘
He also reflects on how we often ’find it difficult to recognise that we are lonely‘ and ’ask for help." ‘Sometimes you need someone to say, “Hey, go see a professional to help you get out of this rut.”’ So Javier encourages others who are experiencing loneliness to ‘ask for help as soon as possible.’ ‘Don't wait too long, like I did. You can't get through things on your own,’ he warns.
Not being able to share what's happening to you with anyone
Blanca is 71 years old. She worked for a decade at a law firm, which she remembers as ‘a very nice experience.’ ‘I met people who had nothing and people who had a lot,’ she says. Until she left when she became a mother.
She then devoted herself to caring for her children. Her feelings of loneliness came after she separated from their father and her children grew up and built their own lives. "Then I found myself very alone. I have always liked having someone by my side to help me, and for me to help them. And I found myself alone, with an empty nest,‘ she says. ’My children are very good, and I know that if something happens to me, I just have to do this and they'll come. But I have to do that, and what I would like is for them to be the ones to say, “Mum, how are you?”. When they call me, it's usually because something has happened or they need something. And that hurts me," Blanca laments.
For a while, she didn't even want to leave the house: ‘Why should I go out? What was there to do? I'd already done everything.’ Now, it's the opposite: ‘I want to do more and more and more.’
Blanca: ‘For a while, I didn't even want to leave the house. Why should I go out? What was there to do? I'd already done everything.’
Another moment that caused Blanca to feel lonely was the death of her mother, who played a very important role in her life. ‘She was my rock. Just by looking at me, she knew what I was thinking, what I needed... When I had problems, I went to her,’ she says. She died unexpectedly. ‘Losing my mother, who was my mainstay, made me feel lonely, very lonely,’ she recalls.
For Blanca, loneliness is ‘having a void inside.’ ‘Things that happen to you and feelings you have, you can't share them with anyone, you have to keep them to yourself,’ she describes, ‘and in the end, it becomes a blockage that has to come out somewhere.’
She has managed to overcome that block with the help of Siempre Acompañados and is very grateful to Maica, the programme's technician who helps her. ‘I was lucky to have Maica. I didn't want to go, but she said, “Come on, come on, you'll see”. I went, and for me it was the last step I had to take to be well. She has helped me a lot and understands me,’ says Blanca.
From depression to the desire to live better
José has had a lonely life. ‘I'm single and I've always been alone,’ he says at 77. He was born in a village in Lleida, Agramunt, and at the age of 17 or 18 he moved to Barcelona with his uncle. There he had various jobs: delivery man, debt collector, salesman, warehouse worker... Until he became a taxi driver and worked as one for more than 15 years.
‘The taxi driver's job is very peculiar,’ says José about the social interaction in his work. ‘You might meet a customer who wants to talk a lot and you have to humour them, or others who say absolutely nothing to you except their address until they reach their destination,’ he explains. Outside of work, he found himself quite lonely: ‘I had friends, of course, but they were bar friends, with whom you only talk about trivial things, which have nothing to do with friendship or companionship.’
After giving up taxi driving on medical advice due to the stress it caused him, he returned to Agramunt at the age of 50 to look after his parents. He helped them for a few years. When they died, first his father and then his mother, his loneliness worsened: ‘When I was left alone, my world fell apart. I even suffered from depression because of it.’
‘For me, loneliness is a very great sadness. I wouldn't wish it on anyone,’ reflects José. ‘You're at home, you have the normal activities of a single person, but you miss something, the company of someone, whoever it may be. And since it doesn't happen, you have to put up with it, and that wears you down a little,’ he shares.
Now, however, his situation has improved because he has made some friends. With one of them, for a while, he spent his weeks going to the market in a nearby village every day: ‘Mondays to Tàrrega, Wednesdays to Mollerussa, Saturdays to Balaguer... We went to a market and we both enjoyed ourselves.’ Then that friend fell ill and is now in a nursing home. He meets up with another friend from time to time: ‘On Wednesday, I called him and we went for a snack at the village chocolate shop. He talked more about the things he likes and I talked a little bit about mine because sometimes he doesn't let me in. But the most important thing is that we keep each other company.’
José: ‘I signed up for Siempre Acompañados and since then my life has changed quite a bit: from being alone, bored, sad and depressed, with no desire to do anything, to being cheerful, happy and wanting to live better.’
Participating in Siempre Acompañados has been important for improving his well-being. He called after seeing an advertisement at the civic centre he attended. ‘I signed up and since then my life has changed quite a bit,’ says José. For him, it has been a “fabulous” experience that has led him to ‘talk to many people’. He believes that the programme is what its name suggests: ‘That's it, always being accompanied, that's the word.’ It has meant going ‘from being alone, bored, sad and a little depressed, with no desire to do anything, to being cheerful, happy and having some desire to live better.’
Loneliness is a reality that affects three million elderly people in Spain, but as these four stories attest, with the right support, it can be mitigated.