A few years ago, my flatmate came home from work to see police cars on our street, and officers going in and out of the house next door. Our elderly neighbour had died, and nobody had noticed. He had lain there for weeks, perhaps 20 feet from where we sat with our partners or family or friends, chatting and watching TV and eating dinner, and we had not realised. When someone asked me who had died, I couldn’t tell her his name.
Stories like this have become a part of the mythology of modernity, imprinted by films like Carol Morley’s devastating docudrama about the last days of Joyce Vincent, Dreams Of A Life, or endless stories of lonely deaths, as with the recent news of Grange Hill’s Terry Sue-Patt, who was widely – and inaccurately – reported to have been dead for a month before he was found.
These stories resonate with the uneasy sense so many people have when they see an old person from their neighbourhood shuffling to the shops, always on their own. We think of a pile of post behind the front door, and the myriad cats of popular cliche, and shudder, and get back to our comfortingly integrated lives. We’re afraid of age, and of loneliness; we act as if they’re infectious. And we have a hazy sense that it wasn’t always so.
Today Jeremy Hunt will speak about the plight of isolated old people, and urge us all to do more – to consider inviting older strangers into our homes, and to keep in better touch with our ageing relatives. He’s absolutely right to do so, of course. Anyone blessed with the invincibility of youth who would prefer not to think about this should remember that when we say our society is ageing, we mean that all of us are ageing, and doing so in an ever more atomised culture: if we remain collectively indifferent to the plight of those who see out their last days with no company but the TV and their cats, we will all pay for it in the end.
And yet I do balk, just a little, at the hell-in-a-handcartism that sometimes engulfs this discussion. My flatmate went to our neighbour’s funeral. His name was John. It turned out that he had lots of friends, who saw him often enough that they would normally have noticed if something was wrong; but he died over the Christmas period, and they thought he had gone to stay with relatives. And the story of Sue-Patt is much more complicated than it first appeared, and less indicative of a man cast aside by society. It’s possible that we overemphasise the problem of loneliness because we so fear it, because anything that seems like such a fable of our times will swiftly become impervious to scrutiny.
Meanwhile, the atomisation wrought by a digital age might be bad for social cohesion – half of all meals are now eaten alone, we learn today – but on the other hand it offers the most isolated access to a community that may be more welcoming than their neighbourhood is. And if we look back through rose-tinted spectacles on a time when old women were greeted warmly by apple-cheeked children, and helped home with their shopping by obliging local policemen, we might also think of another old woman, from stories immemorial, who lacks proper community care or a decent pension and is terrorised by kids who express their gleeful horror in their conclusion that she is a witch. In many ways, not least because of umpteen electoral bribes, an elderly person in 2015 is better off than she has ever been.
It is hard to find concrete evidence that we are all just crappier people now. I suspect the real explanation is simpler, and presents Hunt with a problem that he cannot simply outsource to the “big society”. There are more lonely older people now because there are more older people, a trend that is gathering pace. More problematically still, 25% of older people will be childless by 2030; as the IPPR argues, the real problem is a growing “family care gap”, where the number of older people who need care outstrips the number of adult children able to provide it – a situation that it predicts we will see as soon as 2017.
Hunt would like the rest of us, and the charitable sector, to fill this yawning chasm. But as the Social Care Institute for Excellence explains, the voluntary sector is already delivering the majority of the most effective work to combat social isolation; to do more, they will obviously need more resources. To blame the rest of us for not being nice enough to old people is a brilliant evasion, because it is built upon a foundation of truth. But to wag the finger without acknowledging that the government, too, must play a greater role is an insidious and austere sort of fantasy; a neat rhetorical solution that will never be enough in reality.
The state, lest we forget, is not simply a service delivery mechanism. In the choices it makes, it expresses the moral priorities of our whole society. The irony is, in accusing the rest of us of abdicating our responsibilities, Hunt is doing exactly the same thing.
