Rosa Otero is preparing dinner for another night’s meal alone.
This Christmas Eve pandemic turned what should be an extremely low time to spend time with her family into another daily slice of her life as a single widow.
Otero, 83, normally travels to Spain from her small, tidy apartment in Barcelona to northwestern Galicia to spend the winter holidays with her family.
But travel restrictions and health authorities urging growing infections have convinced the Otero 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 and potatoes. “I don’t like Christmas because it brings back bad memories. My husband died in January seven years ago. I’ve been feeling very lonely ever since. ”
Otero is part of a myriad of elderly people, most of them poor and hidden inside, who feel even more isolated than usual on the night before Christmas.
Otero misses the company of the senior center run publicly by her neighborhood, which she and many others meet frequently with friends, discuss or play a card game. The island of society was cut off due to the pandemic.
The only connection that keeps their fragile life connected to the wider world is the local primary care clinic. Medical workers, who have given birth to the heavy burden of fighting the virus in Spain, as elsewhere, have done everything they can to maintain home visits for the elderly who do not have the means to take full care of themselves. by themselves.
The lifelong home of 80-year-old Francisca Cano has become a diverse warehouse. Cano knits, sews, makes paper flowers and builds collages out of pieces of wood, plastic and paper that he finds on the street.
The pandemic meant he could only talk to the two sisters over the phone.
“We missed each other this Christmas,” Cano said. “As I grew up, I went back to my childhood, doing jobs as a girl. This is my way of keeping loneliness at bay. ”
Then there are those whose social ties had already been erased before COVID-19 made socialization a danger.
José Ribes, 84, has been used to being alone since his wife left him. He kept the Spanish Christmas Eve tradition of eating shrimp. He peeled them and ate them leaning against the bed where he takes all his meals and smokes cigarettes that give the house a permanent smell of old-fashioned tobacco.
“My life is like my mouth,” Ribes said. “I don’t have my upper teeth, while all the lower ones are still there. I’ve always been like that, having everything or nothing. ”
Álvaro Puig also barely noticed the impact of the virus, which discouraged many families from gathering.
Puig, 81, lives in the old butcher’s shop that he ran after inheriting it from his parents. Long closed for business, the counter where he assisted customers, the scales where he weighed the meat, the cash register where he called the bills, are intact. The refrigerator that came into use has become a miniature living room for its existence as a cloister bachelor. There he watched TV with his pet rabbit, which he saved from the street.
“Loneliness comes to me these days. I often feel depressed, “said Puig. “These holidays, instead of making me happy, make me sad. I hate them. Most of the family died. I’m one of the last ones left. I will spend Christmas alone at home, because I have no one to spend it with ”.
___
AP writer Joseph Wilson contributed to this report.
___
Follow AP coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-pandemic, https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus- vaccine and https://apnews.com/UnderstandingtheOutbreak