December 22, 2022

Connect with a Senior During the Holidays

Hannah Boulton defies the stereotype of the lonely retiree longing for companionship during the holidays. But after two-plus years of a pandemic, even this dynamic former nurse who’s lived on three continents started feeling a little isolated.

Then she met Ally Brooks, a high school senior, through the Sages and Seekers program at the senior center in Duxbury, Massachusetts, in September. The program, modeled on a national nonprofit’s workshop, paired up seven retirees with seven high school seniors. It was such a success – the program was Boulton’s’ idea – that a second one is planned in January for a new crop of seniors.

The 76-year-old Boulton and Brooks bonded immediately over their love of travel. Boulton shared her adventures, having lived in Okinawa during the Vietnam War, where her first husband was stationed, and in Karlsruhe, Germany, where her second husband worked.

And she encouraged Brooks to follow through with a plan to apply to four colleges in England and Scotland, including, coincidentally, one that Boulton’s late husband had attended. “I was so excited for her, and of course I’ll visit her” in college, she said. “I just feel like we’re connected.”

Chris Coakley, who manages the volunteers for the Duxbury senior center, said the Sages and Seekers program fulfilled its goal of easing the isolation she saw was affecting the town’s older residents.

A significant minority of older Americans in various surveys have said they are lonely, and the pandemic only heightened that feeling, which already existed for reasons ranging from hearing loss to struggles with the death of a spouse or a chronic illness.

The pandemic, Coakley said, made the center’s staff realize “how important it was to have connections.”

So consider taking the initiative yourself to reach out to an older family member or neighbor. Invite someone for a meal during the holidays or drop in for a visit.

It takes a little work. But the effort will make a difference. …Learn More

October 25, 2022

Cut off from Grandkids, Depression Sets in

The purpose of the 2020 restrictions on older people’s activities during COVID – whether voluntary or government enforced – were crucial: keeping them alive as the deadly Delta variant raced through the population worldwide.

But saving lives came at the cost of grandparents’ mental health, according to a study in the Journal of Gerontology: Social Sciences about grandparents in England.

In the scary early months of the pandemic, grandparents cut off or limited interactions with their grandchildren. In England, the grandparents who isolated themselves suffered more mental health problems, including bouts of depression, than the grandparents who maintained the same amount of contact with grandchildren as they’d had before COVID, the researchers found.

This isolation affected grandparents all over the world. American doctors warned older people against mingling with young family members, any of whom might be asymptomatic carriers of the disease. European governments imposed lockdowns or discouraged old and young from getting together. In Israel, the defense minister said, “the single most lethal combination cocktail is when grandma meets her grandchild and hugs him.”

The response by grandparents was echoed in a March 2020 article, “When Can I See my Grandkids?” The COVID-imposed isolation finally gave way to some normalcy after the older population got vaccinated at high rates.

But researchers said the pre-vaccine loneliness had an especially big impact on the grandparents of children under 15 who took the most dramatic step: cutting off all contact with them. Early in 2020, half of the English grandparents who had caregiving duties prior to the pandemic stopped interacting with the children. …Learn More

October 14, 2021

Caregivers Lament Elderly’s COVID Isolation

The magnitude of the tragedy is unfathomable: Americans have lost nearly 187,000 family members living in nursing homes to COVID-19.

Even when residents survive outbreaks in the facilities, their family caregivers experience trauma. Barred from visiting residents during the lockdowns, caregivers observed – on Zoom, over the phone, or from the other side of a nursing home window – loved ones suffering from the devastating impact of isolation.

“To think in her final year[s] when she is most vulnerable and most in need of love and support from her children and was denied this for 6 months is in my opinion devastating,” one caregiver said in a survey of 518 caregivers, the vast majority of them women and mainly daughters.

Granted, nursing homes – and the entire country – were not prepared for a once-in-a-century pandemic that has been difficult to control, given that COVID-19 is often asymptomatic. The lockdowns were a health precaution. Many nursing homes were also put in an untenable position when COVID-19 created staff shortages as nursing assistants and other workers took time off after contracting the disease or simply quit their jobs. And perhaps better communication between nursing home staff and family members would have eased some of the concerns.

Nevertheless, the caregivers’ perceptions of what unfolded inside nursing homes are alarming. “Anger,” “helplessness” and “heartbreak” were common reactions, conveyed in the survey compiled in the Journal of Aging & Social Policy.

The situation became so untenable for 30 of the caregivers surveyed that they pulled their parent or family member out of a facility and brought them home to live with them.

Four themes pervaded their descriptions of what their loved ones were going through: social isolation, cognitive and emotional decline, inhumane care, and a lack of oversight at the long-term care facilities.

The source of many caregivers’ concerns were nursing homes’ decisions to confine residents to their rooms to prevent contagion. But one caregiver said that while her mother’s facility went to great lengths to keep her healthy, the staff did little to ease her isolation: “Almost no effort has been made to ensure [her] mental health due to the isolation. Staff rarely stay and visit with Mom, no special in-room activities or stimulation has been attempted.” …Learn More

May 9, 2019

ROMEOs: Retired Old Men Eating Out

Every Thursday morning, five, six, seven of them meet for a hearty breakfast and freewheeling conversation at the Sunrise Bistro in Summerville, South Carolina.

The retirees’ talk careens from Tammany Hall and texting while driving to their military experiences and the aches and pains of old age. Several of the men had technical careers, so they recently dived deep into analyzing why a Coast Guard cutter carrying Zulu royalty crashed into a New Orleans dock.

“We talk about man things,” said Bob Orenstein, an 83-year-old Korean War veteran who is retired from a Wall Street computer firm. “Men are mainly loners frankly, but everybody has found something to identify with in the group.”

The truth is that the ROMEOs – retired old men eating out – get much more than that from their weekly assemblies. “I think it’s just the friendship, the camaraderie,” said Paul Brustowicz, 74, a former jack-of-all-trades for an insurance company.

Friendship is the best antidote to isolation, which is dangerous for older Americans because it can lead to depression, poor health habits, and other problems. Most of the men in the breakfast club are South Carolina transplants, and their meetings have led to socializing and phone calls outside the group. Two of the men go deep-sea fishing together for redfish, and others share memories of growing up in New York or the tricks of the trade for constructing sailboat and railroad models. …Learn More