Rosa Otero prepares her dinner for another evening meal in solitude.
This Christmas night pandemic has turned what should have been a very rare time to spend time with her family into another daily delivery of her life as a widow living alone.
Otero, 83, normally travels around Spain from his small and tidy apartment in Barcelona to the northwest of Galicia, to spend the winter holidays with his family.
But travel restrictions and health authorities ’urgencies for infections to increase have convinced Otero’s family to cancel their holiday plans for this year.
“I don’t feel like celebrating anything,” Otero said as he sat down to eat a plate of salmon with potatoes. “I don’t like Christmas, because it brings back bad memories. My husband died in January seven years ago. Since then I feel very alone ”.
Otero is one of the countless old people, mostly poor and hidden inside, who feel even more isolated than usual the night before Christmas.
Otero misses the accompaniment of the center for the elderly in her neighborhood that she and many others frequent to meet friends, chat or play a card game. This island of society has been cut short due to the pandemic.
Almost the only link that keeps their fragile life connected to the world at large is the local primary care clinic. Medical workers, who have suffered the heavy burden of fighting the virus in Spain as elsewhere, have done everything possible to maintain home visits for the elderly who do not have the means to take full care of themselves.
The lifelong home of 80-year-old Francisca Cano has become a miscellaneous warehouse. Cano weaves, makes cross stitch, makes paper flowers and builds collages from pieces of wood, plastic and paper he finds on the street.
The pandemic has meant he can only talk to his two sisters on the phone.
“We missed this Christmas break,” Cano said. “As I grew up, I went back to my childhood, doing crafts like a little girl. This is my way of keeping loneliness at bay. ”
Then there are those people who had already erased social connections before COVID-19 made socialization a danger.
José Ribes, 84, has been used to being alone since his wife left him. He maintained the Spanish tradition of eating prawns on Christmas Eve. He shelled them and ate them lying on the bed where he eats all his meals and smokes cigarettes that give his house a permanent smell of stale tobacco.
“My life is like my mouth,” Ribes said. “I don’t have any of the upper teeth, while all the lower ones are still there. I’ve always been like that, I’ve had everything, or nothing. ”
Álvaro Puig also did not notice the impact of the virus that has deterred many families from coming together.
Puig, 81, lives in the old butcher’s shop specializing in horse meat that he ran after inheriting it from his parents. For a long time closed for business, the counter where he served customers, the scales where he weighed the meat, the cash register where he called the bills, are intact. The disused refrigerator has become a miniature living room for its existence as a closing bachelor. There he watches TV with his pet rabbit, which he rescued from the street.
“Loneliness comes to me these days. I often feel depressed, ”said Puig. “This holiday, instead of making me happy, makes me sad. I hate them. Most of the family is dead. I’m one of the last ones left. I will spend Christmas alone at home because I have no one to spend it with ”.
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AP writer Joseph Wilson contributed to this report.
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