“I don’t know how to move forward. The thought of loneliness and a helpless old age terrifies me…” The story of a woman who has been through it all and ended up alone.
Sometimes I feel like my life is a long, drawn-out film with no happy ending. I’m 62. I sit by the window of my small flat on the outskirts of Manchester, watching the cars go by, and I think about how quickly everything passed. It’s all gone. All that’s left is me, with anxiety inside and fear of what tomorrow may bring.
Fourteen years ago, my life split into ‘before’ and ‘after’. First, my dad passed away — he fought cancer, and each breath he took was like a hammer to my heart. A few months later, my younger sister died — the same illness, the same hopeless ordeal. Then came what I never expected: my mum suddenly developed dementia. She stopped recognizing faces, confused day with night, and got lost in her own home. She turned from an adult into a helpless child. And my husband… He couldn’t handle it. He left. Said he was tired of living with the shadow of the woman he once loved. Left for someone young, carefree, and unencumbered. I was left alone, with a sick mother and a daughter from my first marriage who resented me.
She never forgave me for marrying again. When I remarried, she was eleven, and as it turns out, she harbored resentment for years. We became strangers. I had no one to turn to for help. Friends drifted away, acquaintances stopped calling. I was barely surviving, driven to madness from the pain and exhaustion, but wouldn’t let myself break. My regular visits to a therapist were the only thing keeping me afloat. Mum was like a newborn — feeding her with a spoon, changing nappies, bathing her, singing lullabies at night when she cried. We went through it all: strokes, a fractured hip, a major surgery. I lived on the edge for six years.
Then she passed away.
You’d think I could finally breathe. But no. Instead of relief, there was emptiness. And with my daughter, there was only pain. Constant reproaches, complaints, accusations that I didn’t help enough financially, that she couldn’t afford a holiday because she didn’t find a “proper job,” and of course, it was all my fault. My fault that her stepfather left. My fault for not supporting her when she needed it. My fault for having her at the wrong time, with the wrong person.
I transferred the family home to her. Only my therapist knows how many tears, nerves, and sleepless nights that cost me. Later, I was diagnosed with cancer. A hellish diagnosis. Chemotherapy. Surgery. And more arguments. My daughter moved in temporarily, not out of compassion, but because my survival was uncertain. Silent, angry, indifferent. She was physically there but not in spirit.
That was six years ago. Thankfully, my health has stabilized. I’m working again, quietly enjoying the little things, and slowly rediscovering myself. My daughter got married and had a wonderful baby. They live separately. We talk, but I constantly feel how fragile that connection is. One wrong step and the bridge falls.
I’m alive. But it feels incomplete. Inside, there’s loneliness. I come home in the evening, and the silence is deafening. During the pandemic, that feeling became unbearable. Friends either moved away or got absorbed in their families. No one calls. No one to share my dreams with. No one to complain to about the ache in my leg. No one to ask, “Did you eat today, Helen?”
I remember times when I was needed. Cooking dinners, ironing school uniforms, knitting socks, running to hospitals, gathering documents, sitting by my sick mother’s bed through the night. And now — silence. No one’s waiting. No place for me. And it scares me. Scares me so much that sometimes I wake up in a cold sweat, fearing I might fall in the bathroom one day, and no one will know. That one day, I could just disappear, and the world wouldn’t notice.
I dread the future. I fear becoming that lonely old woman with a vacant gaze, sitting by the entrance just to hear a voice. I don’t want pity or sympathy. I just want to matter to someone. Even just a little.
Thank you if you’ve read this far. It means today, I was heard, and thus, I am not entirely alone.
