RetComs are strange places that many of us are forced into due to circumstances much beyond our control. Some, like me, are “elder orphans”. We basically have no one to depend on when difficult times arise.  Some are forced there by their families as no one wants, or is able, to take care of them.

Some of us retreat into our apartments, often not by choice, but out of exhaustion. There are so many different reasons in becoming a loner in a RetCom.  Loneliness is not simply being alone but is instead the absence of recognition by others. In my years before retirement in 2000 I never really thought of myself as a loner. That title  became very much attached to me starting in 2011 and for the last ten years of my wife’s life. 

Her health continued to decline to where she just didn’t want any “outside distractions” and everything was a distraction. Many of her health conditions were for the most part self-inflicted. She had a twenty year bout with heart disease but refused to take cholesterol meds, she said they made her feel funny. She had half a lung removed because of cancer, but began smoking again seven days after that surgery. So, for her last ten years, the only people we say were people we paid to be there. It was a decade of almost TOTAL isolation. Add to that, many like me, end up in RetComs because there is basically no where else to go.

A RetCom is a place where residents do not choose each other, many have lost spouses, roles, and identities. Loneliness becomes personal experience  Unfortunately, many RetComs complicate that picture. Many residents are not loners by temperament; they are loners by circumstance. The simple fact of suddenly being around hundreds of strangers complicate things. From what I have learned RetComs just don’t do a good enough job of helping  alleviate their new residents sudden loneliness.

Often times what happens is that trying to combat loneliness takes the form a simply shared greetings in the hallway, or a brief exchange in the dining room or at special activities. These types of encounters are not friendships. They don’t build the needed social interactions for most residents. They are simply interactions that interrupt the feeling of solitude but do nothing to really counter it.

Personally speaking, I desperately tried to fit in my first year here but simply found it too exhausting. I would slowly browse through the dining room and other special events waiting for an invitation to join them but that never came.  It seems I was just too different from many so maybe they became fearful in my presence. It took me a better part a year to finally understand I was bound to spend the majority of my days alone in my apartment, and that is in some ways a good thing, not a bad.

I don’t know the solution to these types of problems, but I only wish my RetCom had worked it out sometime in the 20+ before I got here.