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Before you know it, there's no one to pull a cracker with. Getty.
Christmas is a chance to end a miserable year on a high. That means raucous office piss-ups, anarchic family get-togethers, and impish toddlers greedily unpacking their stockings. Not so for our elderly, though. A shocking number spend the festive season entirely alone. Christmas simply serves as a painful reminder of past happiness and companionship as the spectre of death looms ever larger.
In the UK, we don’t do well by our elderly relatives. We make their final journeys about ourselves: the financial toll of their care, the grief we’ll feel when they’re gone. We infantilise them and dismiss them. Yet, they’ve lived through more than we can imagine, often adopting a resigned kindness to ease our discomfort at their lingering burdensome presence. Privately, many carers admit to feeling bittersweet relief when a loved one dies, unaware that the elderly know better than anyone the sacrifices made on their behalf.
As a nation, though, we struggle with the concept of mortality. Whether due to a misplaced cultural stoicism or sheer discomfort at the thought we all die one day, we shy away from discussing death. While we celebrate long lives well lived and mourn the departed with ease, the difficult liminal space between life and death often goes unexamined. And the elderly serve as an unspoken shorthand for the fate that awaits us all.
And so, rather than facing the fact of death head on, we render it an abstraction. Those miserable, lonely deaths happen to those people over there who are just unfortunate; that could never happen to us. We can’t get old people out of our sight fast enough and into our crumbling care system. The unsustainable, fragmented and means-tested care “system” offers little in the way of dignity. Local authorities provide support only to those with minimal assets, and private care is prohibitively expensive. While some nations integrate elderly care into community life, Britain isolates its ageing population in underfunded institutions, often reducing their final years to a slog of survival.
Our European neighbours put us to shame: Germany, France, and many Nordic countries provide extensive support with innovative systems that do more than delay death. The aim is instead to enhance life by reducing isolation, preserving dignity, and recognising every older person still has something of value to offer their community.
Earlier this year, I glimpsed what a more humane system could look like when I visited the House of Generations in Aarhus, Denmark, for my BBC Two series, The State We’re In. This residential project fosters connection between people of all ages, offering 304 rental units for families, young people, and seniors, alongside shared facilities including a library, workshops, and gardens. I joined a community sing-along where children played with seniors, highlighting the joy and dignity possible in later life. These people were old, yes, but they were vibrant and curious and keen to contribute. Thanks to their high quality of life, they were also more independent and less prone to mental health problems, and therefore able to support their neighbours, whether visiting other elderly folk or looking after young kids for a couple of hours.
This joyous scene starkly contrasted with the isolation I witnessed in Britain. Many elderly people I met here seemed resigned to a slow and painful decline, counting the days until their passing. The UK tolerates such indignities because we collectively deny that we too, will one day face them. If we admitted that such a bleak end likely awaits us too, we wouldn’t stand for the pathetic health offer currently made to the elderly in the UK. Truth be told, I came away from my many encounters with these beautiful old souls certain that a faster life would be no bad thing.
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SubscribeWeirdly, about thirty years ago I also made a programme for the BBC titled The state We’re In, about unrecognised poverty. It’s my impression that the whole country is even worse off now than it was back then, but that we still assume that Britain is an economic powerhouse when it no longer is. We’re running on nearly empty fuel tanks, and the way we can’t seem to look after the old, or indeed the young, or pay enough for education or the NHS, or even fix the potholes in the streets should be the most important political issue of our time. Britain got temporarily rich by colonial economic exploitation – that’s all gone but we still carry on as if somehow it hasn’t. Some of us – I’m alright, Jack – are very comfortable, but many millions of us are not.
“Britain got temporarily rich by colonial economic exploitation – that’s all gone but we still carry on as if somehow it hasn’t.”
Well not in my lifetime or even my parents lifetime. Go back 100 years and most ordinary people were in 0r close to poverty so when did they get temporarily rich?
When did Britain stop profiting from the resources held by other nations?
Try typing your question into Goggle. Lots of information there.
You might also change Britain for the other European nations who had colonies.
Britain was pretty much bankrupt after the 2nd World War. This is why the Empre ended and it has been pretty much living on borrwed money ever since.
By your name I assume you have been smoking something.
Who is this Britain you are talking about. I, like a lot of my generation, was born into poverty. There was no money, there was no wealth. The country had been bankrupted by 2 world wars and ordinary people paid the price.
It may well be that a class of people grew wealthy out of empire, but as Britain waned after WW2 they and their money crossed the Atlantic
While Europe probably did enrich itself through its “colonial economic exploitation” this was always predicated by class. When we say “that’s all gone” we fail to recognize that this enrichment has moved, rather than gone. The Europe of today like the USA is in the Neo Lib/Con period where the money has primarily moved to the top.
I thought Britain became wealthy mainly due to the industrial revolution.
Of course it did, and it made other countries wealthy too.
No one expects that one day they’ll end up spending Christmas day alone. I spend every Christmas Day alone, usually in a country where they don’t have Christmas. India this year. That said, I appreciate that there are 1.4 billion people in India, so I won’t be truly “alone”.
You should have kept that landline MM. At least then you’d have someone phone you on Xmas day to try and sell you something.
But teasing aside, would you agree difference being alone (sometimes a blessed relief!) and being lonely ?
This is absolutely the right way to view how one lives. There are many, including myself, who prefer to live alone in later years, having “been there and done that” in terms of family living.
The only time i’ve ever felt lonely was as a student in London, never since. I enjoy socialising, but not having it imposed upon me. And yes (before anyone else says it) there will come a time when independent living is no longer possible; i’ll meet that challenge when it comes, as with every other life challenge.
There are introverts and extroverts and introverts probably handle being alone better extroverts. Of course being able to choose how much one socializes is still preferable.
There are 28 million Christians in India who will be celebrating Christmas – so quite a few people really.
And it’s a recognised holiday in India, along with Good Friday.
There are many areas of India where there is a significant Christian population.
Good Article, bringing home a reality the majority of us don’t see until v late, but that with an aging population more will, whether as the ‘cared for’ or the ‘carer’.
One of the most disappointing things 6mths into this Govt is the silence on Social care reform. It is a v difficult subject and funding debates can get twisted into ‘death taxes’ etc. Yet confront it we must.
The social policy of Governments cannot though entirely substitute for our personal responsibilities to prepare, recognise more what is coming and make a broader contribution to our community. We can all do a little more to aid the lonely.
The critical time in someone’s life, particularly a man’s life, is the time of retirement. At that moment you choose either a start another life or to fade away. Those who choose to fade away certainly can’t rely on other people to be there for them because the world is too busy – just being busy. If you’re not busy with social events, then you don’t exist.
So retirement must be the start of a new life, not the end of a life. Not everyone likes social events – basically just talking endlessly about nothing. Christmas is the biggest ‘nothing’ around and becomes the time for articles like the one we are commenting on.
The answer really is to create an opportunity for old people to have a new life. Today, people don’t want to go to work – they might want to work from home because of the money but not because of the work. Older people have worked for many years – away from the home. So, jobs for older people – 10 to 20 hours per week – with a lower band of tax, would help the nation and the old people. A bit of thought would create thousands of opportunities.
Correct. Retirement suits some people, but kills others. I would be in the latter category, and so am not ever going to retire.
I’m in the former category. Retiring to do sports, social and voluntary activity has been excellent. I suspect far more people would join this group if they could just pause for a while and plan for it.
I retired at 60, had a break of a few weeks, and have just retired again at 75.
I gave up drinking when I retired. It was the worst 20 minutes of my life.
The obvious occupation for newly retired people is to help those who are infirm, as in most cases they are still quite fit and able. Our society however has been broken.
It can be a good idea to retire gradually by switching from full-time to part-time working.
Is that all you’ve got. Put them back to work.
Switching from full-time to part-time working isn’t putting them back to work.
From my experience most voluntary organisations would collapse if it wasn’t for the retired volunteers.
True that. The older generations grew up and worked in the real world and had to learn how to deal with real people doing real things for real reasons. Unlike today’s politically correct, DEI-laden, soul sucking, global organizations.
jobs for older people – 10 to 20 hours per week – with a lower band of tax
Good idea
I completely agree. If you are fit and able enough, working 10 – 20 hrs a week is ideal. In my early 70s, I went back into the workplace for 16 hrs a week 9 months ago. You can use your past experience to make a useful contribution, you can learn new skills, you retain five other days to spend as you please….and you work with lots of great people younger than yourself! What’s not to like!
If you can afford it, the same can be achieved though volunteering.
In Australia library books get delivered by volunteers to those who can’t get to the library, and after they’re read they get picked up and returned. I suggested this to the director of my local library here in the US and he rejected it outright saying they don’t have the money for a program like that. I explained that it would run by volunteers so how could it cost money. He said money for their gas. I said I doubted they would want to be reimbursed for gas and that I was sure retirees would welcome doing library work. He contuniued to dismiss the idea and was completely closed minded.
It’s very sad because I know it would be a win/win. Retired people get a sense of satisfaction from helping others and a sense of purpose in their lives other just waiting to die. The library delivery service might result in being invited in for a cup of coffee and a book discusion, aleviating the lonliness of both participants and perhaps friendships might result.
American local libraries, as you know, are generally public institutions with elected directors. So you got one jerk … seems like time to go to the elected board at the scheduled public board meetings
I keep trying to figure out what the writer means by “I came away from my encounter with these beautiful old souls certain that a faster life would be no bad thing”.
Part time status must be made clear to colleagues, eg by a change in job-title. I went to a 3-day week, but retained my previous job title, so my colleagues still fed me tasks at a 5-day volume.
Illich articulated the problem: institutionalisation from sperm to the worm. (vide: David Cayley. (2024, December 23). ‘Ivan Illich: The corruption of Christianity: Corruptio Optimi Pessim (2000)’ [Video]. YouTube.)
No mention of the elderly’s children?
The situation will only get worse as the men (mainly) who abandoned their children and their partners find their children and ex-partners will be indifferent to them in their old age.
Maybe’s that one demographic theme, but there are others. The main one being we no longer spend most of lives living and working close to where both sets of parents reside. Remember Tebbitt’s ‘on your bike’. We also have more parents living longer so the care-load is greater, at just time we need others to stay in the active workforce for longer – esp if we want lower immigration. But even if family carers were more available it’s not easy work at all.
Well don’t worry the Labour Party has the ultimate solution for the elderly through Dr Deaths Assisted Suicide bill.
I’m not sure why anyone downvoted this. It’s a simple statement of fact with a mildly ironic twist.
I’m not sure why anyone upvoted it. It’s an ironic comment that has no significant impact on the subject at hand.
In 2002 I visited a fantastic old-age community in Japan. The facilities were top quality, the residents were comfortable, valued and happy, and they were fully involved in the management and maintenance of the complex, including working in the large vegetable garden which supplied all food stuffs apart from meat and cereals. It was an inspiration to witness how to care for old folks and engage them in active living in a superb community. Our UK old age homes are frequently horrendous, urine-smelling prisons by comparison.
I would not be content working in a large vegetable garden.
Another tiresome lecture telling us we need to talk more about death. Those in favour of doing this should get together and desist from pestering us. Morituri salutamus vos.
Adult children are all for economic advancement to the detriment of their parents. I’m a voluntary care group driver in my village, (now suburbia due to housing development), and it is so sad the number of elderly parents who have moved to the area to be near their children and grandchildren and a year or two later the very people they wished to be close to have moved away!
But who built a society in which economic advancement was the be all and end all? I’m 35 and my generation was encouraged, from the age of about 12, to live for economic and personal advancement. We gained professional skills, not life skills. We left behind a settled life to build a new one at uni, then left that life behind to start another one wherever we could find a job. We were taught that this was the path to a good life, while we weren’t raised to value community, inter-generational ties and caring for children / the elderly. So don’t blame adult children for living the life their parents raised them to live.
This. There is a type of parent in Britain (and other Anglosphere countries) that insist that people should leave at 18 and not look back. That everyone should make themselves, buy their own house and not expect an inheritance Failure to do so is seen as a moral fault. An attitude that would be completely alien or abhorrent in Catholic cultures.
I am not saying this is wrong or not. It produces self-reliant people. But the concept that independence is everything and support to children has a time limit has its consequences and the treatment of elderly parents given this will be correspondingly circumscribed. Because early adulthood is also a challenging part of life, and a sense of abandonment then will not inspire much sympathy to those in a different and perhaps even harder stage of life.
You must be one of the sheep. I bet you were told university students were intelligent.
At least you didn’t end up, like my two grandfathers, in the trenches. Patriotic, but golly, has anyone worked out why WWI started and continued like it did?
Thank you. A well presented commentary on a sad state of affairs that exisists in Canada as well. Our support systems for the elderly are close to non existent and our embrace of euthanasia more fervent. And no Empire memories to fall back on.
Merry Christmas!
(85 of them for me, at last count)
My mother died earlier this year aged 104, with four children, nine grandchildren and seven great grandchildren, many of whom regularly visited her in the care home.
Rotten headline! Britain doesn’;t shame the elderly; Britain shames itself.
Working from home offers scope to bring back multi-generational homes and communities lost when young people had to ‘get on their bikes’ to go where the jobs were. An imaginative policy, for instance, of encouraging and enabling the old, who live in houses too big for their needs and too expensive to move from, to convert those homes to multi-occupation dwellings, so they could remain in their community but cohabit with their children or grandchildren.
The issue is that while medical advances have meant that the average age of death has risen by a decade over the last 30-40 years it doesn’t mean that everyone has a fit and healthy life right up to the point of death. Medical advances have meant that we can now keep people with pretty severe medical conditions alive a lot longer. Basically we get a set amount of decent health, and while doctors can extend our lives they are in effect actually just drawing out our deaths instead. My late father spent the last 5 years of his life confined to a bed, blind and unable to move, after a fall when he broke his hip (his sight went after failed eye operations in his 50s). Had nature taken its natural course he would have died pretty suddenly from heart failure aged about 70, as his father did. But a heart bypass operation gave him 15 more years of life. But also condemned him to that 5 year purgatory at the end, basically living in a manner we would not allow a dog to be treated.
The human body just cannot cope with surviving to ages approaching 100. You can patch critical systems up, but everything else fails too – sight, mobility, brain function. And you end up with perfectly fit people whose minds have gone, or people whose minds are fine but they are trapped in bodies that don’t work any more. As a society we need to realise there is no free lunch with healthcare – everything involves trade-offs. Yes we can fix health problem X now, but you’re going to pay for it later.
Well said, it’s quality of life not quantity that’s really important. My mother said it was science that was keeping her alive well after her ‘used by’ date, so she took it into her own hands to make her final exit. We really are like cars whose parts start to go after 100,000 miles.
Such a silly article – seeking to argue that more Welfarism is needed when, in fact, it is the very cause of the problem. The cancer which is Socialism increasingly makes us all dependent on a morally and financially bankrupt State. All our problems are to be offloaded on our neighbours as a shared responsibility and preferably at at no real cost to ourselves. The duplicity of it is staggering.
It’s a shame we don’t have a people factory. People would start to exist at the level of experience where they could work. They would work and spend whatever they earned to consume. When they could no longer fulfill that role, they’d be terminated and disposed of. No need for childcare, healthcare, or elder care.
Except, of course, for the top 1/10 of 1%.
Not that long ago, seniors – particularly those in care facilities – were shut off from everyone else over the Covid virus, even after it became apparent that it was not going to be ebola or the new black death. And there was no Christmas to blame it on then; just bureaucrats decreeing how people could live. Hospice facilities – Hospice, where people go to die – had rules about visitation; that’s how stupid things got.
A different phenomenon has emerged in the US: people, usually 50 and up, choosing to embrace relative solitude. The videos are on YouTube: the 51-year-old who avoids others, the 60-year-old doing likewise, and the 70-year-old who needed two parts to fully explain why. They and others have discovered there is quite a gap between being alone and being lonely.
Another commenter here made a great point about what happens when one retires. When my professional career ended, I found something else to fill at least part of the time, with the rest devoted to the gym and my wife. Between that and retirement income, the total is not that far from where I was, which balances out with some lifestyle adjustments.
We never see ourselves as others see us. You may never think you are old when you are aged 70. However, if someone who is obviously in their twenties offers you their seat on a bus or a train, you get an idea of how you are seen.
Conversely, we probably rarely if ever see ourselves in others. Imagining you will be like an elderly lady shuffling along while grumbling about all men being b@st@rds is too farfetched to put oneself into her walking frame. (I did wonder, as I often do when meeting elderly people, what she was like as a teenager in the swinging Sixties. If only we could do that all over again; how we’d enjoy it better).
When I see a girl with tattoos, I can’t help imagining her in her 70s.
Soylent Green is the answer!
Leigh Taylor Young is the answer! She would improve my spirits anyway.
Yes many good points. The introduction of Assisted Suicide, so enthusiastically embraced by a young batch of new MPs, and a lavishly funded marketing campaign (adverts had young healthy people endorsing the idea of some unspecified assisted death, all down the Westminster tube tunnel) reinforces the point. The bill at 2nd reading was crude. A couple of doctors’ signatures and an early dispatch can be carried out. It would be great if the organisations who are pushing this bill, diverted some of the Cadbury money into improving the quality of life, living, palliative care & pain relief. But their funds go toward selling the idea of a perfect death. Do they realise it makes the right to enjoy and embrace old age, that much harder? There comes a point where it will be hard to resist, as the law (according to the wishes of many MPs) is expanded to include more people.
I liked this article, despite the downer attitude. I watched as my own mum sat for over 2 years in a death warehouse/care facility waiting to die. None of her 3 children (me included) would take her in and sacrifice our personal economy to care for her, which would have been a full time job as she was confined to a wheelchair after choosing not to be active in her later years. Hard to admit this, but rendering a child to the poor house, in order to provide elderly care, surely doesn’t seem right either.
“We” is doing some heavy lifting in this piece. Speak for yourself.
Perhaps the first thing we do is to get rid of the word ‘senior’ which instantly separates older people from the rest of the community.
This residential project fosters connection between people of all ages, offering 304 rental units for families, young people, and seniors, alongside shared facilities including a library, workshops, and gardens. Sounds nice, but I am not living in nor intend to live in high density rental housing.
I live in N Ireland. Old people here are in the whole cherished and respected as part of your extended family. I don’t know for how much longer but at the moment we’re fine!
The U. S. is even worse, if that is possible. Here, the frail elderly are herded into profit-making nursing homes and assisted livings, where at best, you’ll be talked to in a hugh–pitched voice reserved for children, and at worse, neglected so you die earlier and in more distressing circumstances just so some LLC can make a quick buck.