The Life is “Solitary, Poor, Nasty, Brutish”, But Not Short: The Deserted Old in the Extreme Reality

Abstract

Abstract Aging is an inevitable reality of human lives, and hundreds of thousands of studies address the questions of what makes people old. However, the underlying fact behind the question of what makes us old is the apprehension to face the grim reality of the life in the old age. Like other social sciences, a range of debates rises over the years that make the question more complex by bringing it to the theoretical realm where empirical examples often given less focus, and sometimes completely ignored. The paper presents some well-known cases, published in the daily newspaper (the Daily Star, Dhaka, Bangladesh) about the people in the old age, mostly living in the old home, and intends to interpret them with a purpose to outline the factors that change the plot of lives. The study concludes that people in the old become disengaged from the society primarily after three events, first, the death of the spouse, second, the marriage of the children, and third children left the home country and staying abroad. In addition, there is also the case that simply tells us disengagements do not imply the end of life, contrarily people can re-engage to a different form of lives after disengaging from the life they know.