Elderly Parent Living Alone? No One Should Feel Forgotten

No one should grow old, feeling forgotten

It's two o'clock on a Tuesday in a kitchen in Mississauga. The kettle has been boiled twice. Your mother has her cardigan on and the good chair pulled toward the window, the one that looks out on the driveway.

Nobody is coming. Nobody said they would. She just got into the habit of watching.

When you call on Sunday she'll tell you the week was fine. She'll mostly mean it.

It doesn't happen all at once

Nobody decides to be forgotten. It happens in small pieces, and each piece makes sense on its own.

Your dad stops driving after a near miss in the Costco parking lot. Right call. His friend Harold moves to Calgary to be near his daughter. The Thursday card game drops to three people, then stops. Church gets harder in winter. The doctor's office switches to online booking, and he'd rather not bother anyone about it.

None of that is a crisis, and that's exactly why it slips past everyone. There's no single day you could point to and say this is when it started. There's just a week where the only person he spoke to was the pharmacist. Then a month like that. Then it's normal.

Statistics Canada asks Canadians how often they feel lonely. In its Canadian Social Survey for early 2024, 10% of people 65 and older said always or often. In the 2021 survey, among people 75 and up, it was 14%.

Those numbers are lower than most people guess. Plenty of older adults wouldn't call themselves lonely at all. Their world is just getting smaller, with fewer places to go and fewer people who'd notice if they didn't turn up.

What you're up against

If you have an elderly parent living alone, you probably know all this already. You're the one who calls. Maybe you live forty minutes away. Maybe it's a flight. You've got work, and kids, or kids who just moved out, and a to-do list that never quite clears.

Maybe you've typed "someone to take my dad to appointments" or "companion for elderly mother Mississauga" into Google at eleven at night, read half a page, and closed the tab.

And your mom has her pride. Ask if she's lonely and she'll say she's fine, she's busy, she has her shows. Suggest she get out more and what she hears is that she's become a project. So you drop it. You feel bad about dropping it. Next Sunday it's the same call.

That's what loving someone from a distance looks like, and nearly everyone doing it carries the same quiet guilt.

The worry has research behind it. Psychologist Julianne Holt-Lunstad led a 2010 review of 148 studies, and a line you may have heard comes from her work: "Lacking social connection is comparable to smoking up to 15 cigarettes per day." You don't need a study to know something's off when your dad hasn't left the house since Thursday. It does explain why the knot in your stomach won't go away.

What company actually looks like

Forget the brochure version. Real company is ordinary.

It's someone sitting with your dad in the cardiologist's waiting room, so he isn't trying to remember everything the doctor says on his own. Afterwards they get a coffee, since they're out anyway.

It's a slow loop of Square One before the stores open, at your mom's pace, with someone who remembers she taught grade four for thirty years and actually asks about it.

It's help carrying the groceries in, then staying twenty minutes to finish the argument about the Leafs.

None of that replaces you. It fills the days between your calls with a real person in the room, who'll be back next week. For a lot of older adults, someone who expects to see them is the thing that quietly went missing.

Where we come in

This is why Meet n Greet Worldwide exists. We match older adults across the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area with local companions for appointments, errands, meals, outings, or just a good conversation. Every visit is in person and strictly platonic.

Every companion is vetted and background-checked before they meet anyone. You're trusting us with someone you love, and that trust has to be earned before the first knock on the door.

Companions don't take the place of family, and they don't provide medical care. They show up, and they keep showing up.

If your mother bristles at the word "companion," that's fair. Let her meet the person first and decide for herself. It's her afternoon.

No one should grow old wondering whether anyone would notice they'd gone quiet.

If you've been thinking about your mom or dad living alone in Mississauga, Toronto or anywhere in the GTHA, get in touch with us. Tell us about them. We'll take it from there.