Other times, loneliness felt like a big life falling in on itself. Her older son came by with food sometimes, but he spoke so quietly that Virginia couldn’t always hear him, and then she felt bad for being irritating. “They say, ‘Oh, you aren’t bothering!’ But, you know, you don’t want to be a bother.” Her daughter was in Florida. I have a family, but I don’t want to bother them,” she told me. Virginia said that her loneliness came and went and felt sort of like sadness. Other people have likened theirs to hunger. John Cheever wrote that he could taste his loneliness. But everyone who used to attend their parties was either dead or “mentally gone.” Decades ago, Virginia and her husband, Joe, who ran a nearby campground, had entertained at this table. Her white hair, which she used to perm before it got too thin to hold a curl, was brushed away from her face. Virginia was holding a doughnut very carefully, her thumb pressed into the glaze. On a Thursday this spring, Jennie (the cat) sat on the dining-room table, by Virginia and her daughter-in-law Rose, who is subsidized by Medicaid to act as Virginia’s caregiver for nine hours each week. Nobody mentioned that it was part of a statewide loneliness intervention. The Joy for All Companion pet was orange with a white chest and tapered whiskers. He was so eager to show it to her that he opened the box himself, instead of letting Virginia do it.
#Lonely screen cant delete driver#
A Meals on Wheels driver brought Virginia the pet, along with her daily lunch delivery. Did she want one? She could have a dog or a cat. It was Jennie (the person) who told her that the county was giving robot pets to old people like her. She named the cat Jennie, for one of the nice ladies who work at the local Department of the Aging in Cattaraugus County, a rural area in upstate New York, bordering Pennsylvania. “It makes you feel like it’s real,” Virginia told me, the first time we spoke. Virginia knows that the cat is programmed to move this way there is a motor somewhere, controlling things. Sometimes, on days when she feels sad, she sits in her soft armchair and rests the cat on her soft stomach and just lets it do its thing. She likes that it’s there in the morning, when she wakes up.
The walker has a pair of orange scissors hanging from the handlebar, for opening mail. It keeps her company as she moves, bent over her walker, from the couch to the bathroom and back again. Virginia Kellner got the cat last November, around her ninety-second birthday, and now it’s always nearby. It felt good to love again, in that big empty house. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
0 kommentar(er)
