“What’s there to live for? Why am I here?”
That’s what one 86-year-old man living alone in Thornton recently told Jayla Sanchez-Warren, who leads a regional agency on aging, as she tried to help him get vaccinated against COVID-19.
“He was struggling to get a vaccine and was frustrated. His wife had died, I think three years ago. He didn’t have family in the area,” she said. “He was feeling this malaise.”
She said his despair is a typical symptom of a “failure to thrive,” a term many experts in aging use to describe what they’ve been seeing a lot of this past year of the pandemic. Other symptoms include isolation, loneliness and depression. That’s often followed by a lack of desire, or inability to eat, or get nutritious food for yourself.