Neither a full house nor an empty apartment. There is a third place: where the empty chairs are occupied by those who don’t ask, just sit
As a child, I listened to my grandmother Helena’s stories trying to understand how difficult it was to take care of five children, a husband and four grandparents all living in the same house. She grew the food they would eat, prepared the bread, cheese, yogurt and sausages used as food and currency between women subjected to the same scarcity. My grandfather dreamed of being a doctor, but he became a carpenter of coffins — those that served as a final shelter for family, friends and acquaintances. During the raids, he hid with other men. In that crowded house, death was always present.
My parents and their brothers, children of a destroyed country, spread across the world in search of life. My mother, a widow, prefers to live alone when she is 86 years old. Lucid, she waits for visitors without giving up her own home.
We are born alone. We will die alone. In between, we need someone to notice
our presence. Or miss us.
And me? How do I plan to grow old?
My grandmother’s full house no longer fits in the cities we live in. In Japan, solitary death gained a name: kodokushi. People die at home and are only found days, months or even years later. I experienced something similar a few years ago. Heartbreaking experience.
It is estimated that tens of thousands of elderly Japanese people die this way every year. Brazil is also approaching this scenario: we are getting older, we live mostly in cities and, in 2025, 15.6 million people lived alone in the country. Of this total, around 40% were aged 60 or over. Millions of people living without daily companionship. Some by choice. Others don’t.
Loneliness, today, is no longer just an intimate experience. It has become a public health issue. The WHO warns that it is associated with around 100 deaths per hour worldwide. In cities, where families are spread out, friends live far away and routine consumes the days, even looking at each other competes for space on the agenda.
In recent years, I have learned something that my grandmother Helena might have found strange, but which I call supportive solitude.
It is solitude chosen and shared in the few minutes left for a leisurely meeting. The company, in this case, does not invade: it lives nearby, keeps a key, knows about the trip, notices the absence.
In my condominium, there is a group of neighbors that formed without hierarchy or kinship. They are a social family, far from the biological ties sustained with difficulty at the end of the year festivities. A retired nurse, a couple of musician doctors who only play on Friday nights, a brother who takes care of his sister with Alzheimer’s, a couple who separated but continue to live together in coliving. We don’t eat pizza on Saturday night. We are not a family. But we changed the emergency keys. We exchange messages on Whatsapp from time to time. We know when someone travels or gets sick or needs someone to talk to. And, above all, we don’t ask "why are you alone?" because we understand that loneliness, when shared with those who don’t judge, stops being abandonment and becomes common territory.
The other day, the nurse told me about an elderly woman in the neighborhood who every day, at 3pm, sits on the same bench wall with her elderly dog and an empty cushion next to her. The place is for the son who lives abroad. She knows he won’t come. But someone always sits next to her for ten minutes, including me, in silence, just so she doesn’t have to pretend that the absence doesn’t hurt, and there they remain together, each carrying their own lack, without expectations.
My grandmother Helena, in the interior of Greece at war, had a garden, a full house, living and dead bodies going through the same routine. Their loneliness was collective. Mine is urban: I live in crowded buildings, walk through elevators in silence, depend on keys left with neighbors and messages answered in time. In it, even death runs the risk of being outsourced.
So how do I plan to grow old?
I still don’t know. For now, I observe the empty cushion.
*This text does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Jovem Pan.
