Old age is often associated with loneliness. This emanates from various obvious reasons: retirement from active professional life, distance from earlier friends / colleagues, and moving away from the sons / daughters
to different places as they grow young. The elderly are thus often left alone with “span of contact” shrinking by the day. Loss of the spouse may be the ultimate blow. All these eventual realities make the elderly lonely, aloof from the busy world and they often tend to limit their movements and lose interest in going out not only because of their physical immobility but also loss of general interest or appetite to do something new or innovative.
This construct of “mental loneliness” is one of the dreaded realities being faced by many elders and there appears to be no apparent remedies for the same. The only way to come out of the same is to have mental resolve and make new ways of living life.
