Rosa ter Toro prepares her dinner for a second dinner in solitude.
This epidemic should be an invaluable rare moment to spend time with her family on the eve of Christmas, the second daily installment of her life as a widow living alone.
The 83-year-old Ter Toro usually travels from his small, tidy apartment in Barcelona, around Spain, to northwestern Galicia to spend the fox holidays with his family.
But travel restrictions and requests by health officials that the infection is on the rise have reassured Otero’s family that they are canceling this year’s holiday plan.
“I don’t feel like celebrating anything,” Terro said as he sat down to eat a plate of salmon with potatoes. “I don’t like Christmas because it brings me bad memories. My husband died in January seven years ago. Since then I feel very lonely. ”
Ter Toro is one of the many old men, mostly poor and hiding inside the house, which looks even more different than usual before Christmas Eve.
Ter Toro misses the senior center companionship that runs in his neighborhood’s public that he and many others frequently come to meet with friends, chat, or play a game of cards. That island of society has been cut off due to the epidemic.
The only link that connects their fragile lives to the wider world is the local primary care clinic. Medical workers, who have given birth to a heavy burden of fighting the virus in Spain in a second place, have done what they can to keep the elderly from lacking the means to take care of themselves.
The lifelong home of 80-year-old Francesca Cano has become a warehouse in Mississauga. Canoe knits, cross-stitches, makes paper flowers, and makes collages from bits of wood, plastic and paper that he finds on the street.
Epidemic means she can only talk to her two sisters by phone.
“We’ve lost each other this Christmas,” Canoe said. “As I got older I went back to my childhood, crafting like a girl. That’s my way of exposing loneliness. ”
Then there are those whose social connections were already erased before Covid-19, endangering society.
Jose Rebase, 84, is accustomed to living on his own because he is his wife. He kept eating prawns on the eve of Spanish Christmas. She gave him a shell in bed and ate, where he had all the meals and smoked cigarettes that gave his house a permanent smell of stale tobacco.
“My life is like my mouth,” Rebes said. “I don’t have any teeth on top of me, while all the bottoms are still there. I’ve always been the same, it’s all, or nothing. ”
V Lavaro Puig has similarly rarely noticed the effect of the virus that has prevented many families from reuniting.
Puig, 81, lives in an old butcher shop specializing in horse meat that he ran after he inherited it from his parents. Long closed for business, the countertops that those customers present, the scales where the meat weighed, the cash register where it billed, are all intact. The disk-in refrigerator, unused, has become a miniature living room for its survival as a chlorinated bachelor. There he watches television with his pet rabbit, which he rescued from the street.
“I find solitude these days. I often feel frustrated. “Instead of making me happy, these holidays make me sad. I hate them. Most of the family has died. I am one of the rest. I will spend Christmas alone at home because I have no one to spend with. ”
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AP author Joseph Wilson contributes to this report.
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