Ailene Gerhardt hears a lot of stories. It’s all part of her job. She’s a patient advocate, helping people navigate their care and the complexities of the healthcare system. During the last several years she’s heard from more and more people getting older without adult children, a spouse, or both. But the healthcare system remains stuck in the past, she says, assuming older people have family to support them, when that’s often not the case.
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Gerhardt started and runs a network called Navigating Solo, which offers support and community to this group of older adults, often referred to as “solo agers.”
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“Instead of looking at the concept of solo aging as something that’s a crisis to be solved — it’s not a crisis to be solved,” she says. “It’s a reality to be supported.”
That reality is growing as Baby Boomers and Gen Xers age. According to a , one in ten adults over age 50 lives alone and doesn’t have a partner or children. Different lifestyles and changing societal attitudes suggest these numbers will grow in the future. Plenty of people are single by choice.
More inclusive systems
Gerhardt says right now, solo agers are expected to take the lead in planning for their housing, finances, and transportation to appointments, often by hiring professionals to help them. But rather than feeling like the odd ones out in systems that cater to couples and families, she says, why can’t the systems themselves be more inclusive of solo agers?
To take one example: instead of assuming every patient has someone who can pick them up from a medical appointment after being under anesthesia — and drive them home — she’d like the onus to be on hospitals and medical offices to arrange transport and an escort. She says she has heard from people who have canceled a procedure because their ride backed out at the last minute.
“In both my solo aging advocacy hat and my healthcare advocate [hat], like, that is just infuriating,” she says, “that people do not have the support they need to maintain their health in a productive way.”
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But Gerhardt says this isn’t an intractable problem. “Let’s look at designing the system, or re-designing the system, so that anyone and everyone can have strong support. Quite honestly that benefits everyone,” she says, citing curb cuts as a good example of this. Disability rights advocates fought for years to have towns and cities install curb cuts — a slope from the sidewalk to the street that lets a wheelchair user cross the road easily and safely. But curb cuts quickly became popular with people pushing strollers, bikers, and anyone else seeking an easier way into the street.
Building services for the future
Sara Zeff Geber has been writing and speaking about solo aging for more than 10 years, including giving talks to lawyers and financial planners, “to bring awareness to the fact that not everybody is a couple and not everybody has that proverbial adult daughter to help them.”
She believes she was the first person to use the term “solo aging,” seeing it as a lot more positive than the previous description: “elder orphans.”
Ideas about relationships and parenthood are less rigid than they used to be. Given this, she says, “Whatever foundation we build now” for solo agers, “is going to be hugely important for generations that follow.”
Jason Resendez hopes those generations will have more government support than the current crop of older adults. He is CEO of the National Alliance for Caregiving. He says there is growing recognition that many people are aging by themselves. That said, federal funding cuts are coming to home-based services for older adults, and to Medicaid, he says, “which makes it a lot harder to age in place when you don’t have a family caregiver to absorb the elimination of those social service supports.”
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On the whole, Resendez says, U.S. society is still hooked on the idea of “individual ruggedness.” But as he looks to the future, “More and more people will be aging, more and more people will be aging alone,” and the social safety net will come under a lot of strain. “I think it’s when we are at that boiling point, that maybe we’ll have policymakers finally recognize, ‘Hey, this isn’t just an individual responsibility.'”
Creating the resource he will need
Carl Smigielski was a family caregiver to his 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, lives alone in Richmond, R. I., and believes it’ll stay that way. “Right now it wouldn’t align with me to have another intimate relationship so I was pretty clear,” he says. “You’re going to be doing this alone.”
But he’s gotten involved with a nonprofit organization that has long recognized solo agers. It’s called the Villages (not to be confused with the large retirement communities in central Florida.) The Village Movement consists of hyperlocal groups that are mostly run by volunteers.
The Villages started 25 years ago with one village in Boston. There’s now a network of them dotted across the U.S. Their aim is to help people live independently by offering a combination of practical and social support, such as rides to appointments, help moving furniture or changing lightbulbs, friendly check-ins for those who want them, and social events.
Members join to tap the network’s resources. Volunteers make it happen. While not designed specifically for solo agers, Barbara Hughes-Sullivan, executive director of the Village to Village Network, says “anywhere from 30 to 60%” of village members are in that demographic, depending on the individual village.
Smigielski is both a member and a volunteer. He is helping to start a new village in his rural part of Rhode Island.”I wanted to retire something,” says the longtime software engineer. “I didn’t want to retire to boredom … and I really have met the kindest people.”
He’s spending part of this day at a community center to explain the village concept to a group of older adults over lunch, including his mother, Jacqueline. She is 87, a widow, and eager to volunteer. Afterwards he heads back to the home he used to share with his husband. After speaking in front of the group, he needs to decompress in the quiet of the house and yard.
Smigielski says he’s not an obvious candidate for a network like this. He enjoys his own company, and doesn’t expect to need help changing lightbulbs for decades. But after years of caregiving, followed by the Covid years, he realized something.
“The social support, regardless of how able we are, that’s intrinsic to us,” he says. “I went through my battles of thinking I was an exception to that rule, I could be the human who didn’t need social connection – because I don’t need a lot of it, but I need it.”
For now, he still has his mom to drive him to medical procedures where he needs help getting home afterwards. But eventually he expects to tap the network he’s helping create to sustain him as he gets older.
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