A pungent smell wafted from the cluttered apartment.
Tak boleh tahan1, the neighbours raised the alarm. When the police came to pry open the door, they saw a rotting corpse that belonged to an old man. He had been dead for days; no one had noticed.
Lest you think that old people dying alone in their apartments happen only in Singapore, I’m sorry to share that this is not an isolated phenomenon. About 68,000 senior citizens are expected to die alone in Japan this year. It’s so common that there is a term for it: koritsushi (isolated death). Suffice it to say that many of these victims are cut off from society. They neither have family nor friends; their acquaintances are few and far between; and social workers can only do so much in terms of checking in on them.
Due to research studies and Netflix shows like Live to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zones, the observation that people who have cultivated many meaningful connections with other human beings are likely to live to a ripe, old age is now commonplace knowledge. Which makes the trend of old people dying alone in their apartments even more poignant. If they had been more socially active, they might have found a greater will to live longer.
I’m sure that we all want to prevent such lonesome deaths. People tend to lose friends as they grow older. And nope, while we can attribute the decline in friendships to the COVID-19 pandemic, there are other larger forces at play here. After all, when you raise a family and are trying to climb the corporate ladder, you are living from wire to wire, which gives you limited time to maintain friendships. I regularly shower my two children and feed them dinner three times a week by myself. Alone. Dog tired doesn’t begin to cut it.
In spite of the odds being against me, I’m fairly certain that I won’t die friendless, even if I only get to meet most of my friends a couple of times a year. Maybe it has got to do with Singapore being such a compact country. I can meet anyone - from my primary school classmates to my current colleagues - within an hour, if I want to. So, while I don’t have time to socialise due to my parenting responsibilities, I know that I can pick up the slack when my life’s season changes.
Regardless, I have some ideas for time-pressured parents who are striving to maintain their friendships.
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Make friendships a priority. Work is like a cobra that can swallow a python whole. See if you can get an afternoon off and catch up over lunch with friends. This term, I have had the pleasure to meet up with a South African friend and her family, as well as an ex-student from my polytechnic teaching days on two occasions. Taking time out to have leisurely lunches made me more efficient in the workplace as I engrossed myself quickly in work to fulfill my duties. No time for idle chit chat with colleagues!
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Be honest about what you need. Honestly, I dislike the idea of play dates because I crave having adult conversations with my friends and do not relish the prospect of having my meetup being disrupted by unpredictable children and their whims. However, I got to be realistic about my circumstances and prioritise my desire for social interaction above all else. This meant that I requested a friend visiting from Japan to meet my family and me at a shopping mall reasonably near my home. This meant that I got to excuse myself several times because both children were restless and needed to be released for a walk. The childless me would be mortified at inconveniencing my friend like this. But you know what? This is not the time to let my pride stand in the way.
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Be the first one to text. Even if I don’t meet my friends often, it doesn’t take much effort to keep a friendship alive. Of course, texting is not a match for face-to-face gatherings, but I regard it as oiling the friendship and reducing the friction. Some people find it awkward to resume friendships with those whom they have lost touch with. Well, if you are my friend, you can drop me for other reasons, but you can’t accuse me for not keeping in touch.
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Broaden my definition of friendships. I mean, if we subscribe to the conventional thinking that a true friend is one whom we can call at 3am to bail us out of trouble, we may be setting ourselves for failure and unwittingly lose interest in making friends because we don’t see the point in doing so. This is especially so in this day and age, where we are all communicating with other global citizens on social media platforms anyway. Your mileage may vary, but I consider an online friend my friend in real life if we add each other on Facebook or YouTube. So far, two people have crossed the chasm from anonymous nyms to omg-this-is-how-you-look-like mates. I probably won’t call them at 3am ever, but those glorious days of shitposting at r/cryptocurrency helped me develop genuine affection for these folks.
I believe that we parents have to role model the art of keeping friends. As it is, our children don’t bother to hang out with their peers as much as we used to.
If we want them to have a chance for longevity, we got to show them how to build and maintain connections.
Footnotes
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Singlish for cannot endure ↩