Carl Smigielski, 61, is now single, having been a caregiver for his husband, Moshe, who died in 2019. He hopes to be a “lone ager,” someone who doesn’t have a family member to rely on as he grows up. Ashley Milne-Tyte for NPR hide title toggle title Ashley Milne-Tyte for NPR Stay up to date
Carl Smigielski, 61, is now single, having been a caregiver for his husband, Moshe, who died in 2019. He hopes to be a “lone ager,” someone who doesn’t have a family member to rely on as he grows up.
Ashley Milne-Tyte for NPR
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Ashley Milne-Tyte for NPR
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Ailene Gerhardt hears a lot of stories. It’s all part of your job. She is a patient advocate and helps people navigate their care and the complexities of the healthcare system. Over the past few years, you’ve heard of more and more people aging without adult children, a spouse, or both. But the health system remains stuck in the past, he says, assuming seniors have a family to support them, when that’s often not the case.
Gerhardt started and runs a network called Navigating Solo, which offers support and community to this group of older adults, often referred to as the “lonely ages.”
“Instead of looking at the concept of aging alone as something that is a crisis that needs to be solved, it is not a crisis that needs to be solved,” he says. “It is a reality that must be supported.”
That reality is growing as Baby Boomers and Generation X age. According to a 2023 AARP report, one in ten adults over age 50 live alone and have no partner or children. Different lifestyles and changing social attitudes suggest that these numbers will increase in the future. Many people are single by choice.
More inclusive systems
Gerhardt says that right now single seniors are expected to take the lead in planning their housing, finances and transportation to appointments, often hiring professionals to help them. But rather than feeling like the outsiders in systems that serve couples and families, she says, why can’t the systems themselves be more inclusive for single seniors?
To give an example: Instead of assuming that every patient has someone who can pick them up at a doctor’s appointment after being under anesthesia (and take them home), you would like hospitals and doctors’ offices to have the responsibility of arranging transportation and escort. She says she’s heard of people canceling a procedure because their transportation was delayed at the last minute.
“Both in my role as an advocate for aging and in my role as an advocate for health care [hat]”It’s just infuriating,” he says, “that people don’t have the support they need to productively maintain their health.”
But Gerhardt says this is not an intractable problem. “Let’s look at designing the system, or redesigning it, so that everyone can have strong support. Honestly, that benefits everyone,” he says, citing the curb cuts as a good example of this. Disability rights advocates fought for years to get towns and cities to install curb cuts – a slope from the sidewalk to the street that allows a wheelchair user to cross the street easily and safely. But curb cuts quickly became popular with strollers, cyclists and anyone else looking for an easier path to the street.
Building services for the future
Sara Zeff Geber has been writing and speaking about aging alone for more than 10 years, including speaking to lawyers and financial planners, “to raise awareness about the fact that not everyone is a couple and not everyone has that proverbial adult daughter to help them.”
She believes she was the first person to use the term “solitary aging,” considering it much more positive than the previous description: “older orphans.”
Ideas about relationships and parenting are less rigid than before. With this in mind, he says, “whatever foundation we build now” for single adults, “will be enormously important for generations to come.”
Jason Resendez hopes those generations will have more government support than the current generation of seniors. He is executive director of the National Alliance for Caregiving. He says there is growing recognition that many people age on their own. That said, federal funding cuts are coming to senior home services and Medicaid, he says, “making it much more difficult to grow old when you don’t have a family caregiver to absorb the elimination of those social service supports.”
In general, Resendez says, American society is still hooked on the idea of ”individual toughness.” But as we look to the future, “more and more people will grow older, more and more people will grow old alone” and the social safety net will come under a lot of pressure. “I think when we’re at that boiling point, maybe policymakers will finally recognize, ‘Hey, this isn’t just an individual responsibility.'”
Creating the resource you will need
Carl Smigielski was the family caregiver for her husband, Moshe, a Vietnam veteran who died in 2019 after living with Alzheimer’s for several years.
But Smigielski doesn’t expect to have a caregiver of his own. He’s 61 years old, lives alone in Richmond, RI, and thinks he’ll stay that way. “At this point it wouldn’t be in my best interest to have another intimate relationship, so I was pretty clear,” she says. “You’re going to do this alone.”
Carl holds a photograph of himself (r) and his late husband Moshe Gara (l), towards the end of Moshe’s life. Carl was Moshe’s caregiver when he had Alzheimer’s disease.
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But he became involved with a nonprofit that has long recognized lonely seniors. It’s called Villages (not to be confused with the large retirement communities in central Florida). The Village Movement is made up of hyperlocal groups run mostly by volunteers.
The Villages began 25 years ago with a village in Boston. There is now a network of them spread across the US. Their aim is to help people live independently by offering a mix of practical and social support, such as transport to appointments, help moving furniture or changing light bulbs, friendly visits for those who want it, and social events.
People gather for lunch at the Richmond Community Center in Richmond, Rhode Island, where Carl Smigielski is about to explain the concept of a local “village” for seniors.
Ashley Milne-Tyte for NPR
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Ashley Milne-Tyte for NPR
Members join together to take advantage of network resources. Volunteers make it happen. While not specifically designed for single seniors, Barbara Hughes-Sullivan, executive director of the Village to Village Network, says that “between 30 and 60%” of village members fall into that demographic, depending on each village.
Smigielski is a member and volunteer. He’s helping start a new village in his rural Rhode Island area. “I wanted to retire to something,” says the veteran software engineer. “I didn’t want to be bored… and I’ve really met the nicest people.”
He will spend part of this day at a community center explaining the village concept to a group of seniors over lunch, including his mother, Jacqueline. She is 87 years old, widowed, and eager to volunteer. She then returns to the house she used to share with her husband. After speaking in front of the group, you need to relax in the silence of the house and garden.
Smigielski says he’s not an obvious candidate for a network like this. You enjoy your own company and don’t expect to need help changing light bulbs for decades. But after years of caring, followed by Covid years, she realized something.
“Social support, no matter how capable we are, is intrinsic to us,” he says. “I went through my battles thinking that I was an exception to that rule, that I could be the human being who didn’t need social connection, because I don’t need much of it, but I do.”
For now, he still has his mother to drive him to medical procedures where he needs help getting home afterward. But over time he hopes to leverage the network he’s helping to create to sustain himself as he grows.
Carl Smigielski and his mother, Jacqueline, outside the Richmond Community Center in Richmond, RI. Each is part of the other’s support system.
Ashley Milne-Tyte for NPR
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Ashley Milne-Tyte for NPR
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