"All lined up in lawn chairs under the trees Lost in their thoughts and their old memories They've outlived their friends and their enemies They're the last of the line, and they're taking their time But their minds are as clear as old summer wine"
With Alzheimers, that's certainly not true, and it is a cruel disease. But one of the things I've seen repeatedly is people who've" outlived their friends and their enemies."
For two or three years, my wife and I visited a woman in a nursing home, and tried to offer as much support as we could to her husband. My wife worked with the woman many years ago, and we did what we could to lift her (and her husband) up. They never had children and even though they had been very generous to a niece and nephew over the years, the niece and nephew never came to visit them. The couple complained bitterly about being abandoned, and I envisioned the niece and nephew as these snot-nosed, spoiled ingrates. That was the way they were presented. When the woman died, we went to the funeral and there were only five or six people there. The niece had come and when I saw how she was barely able to walk with a cane, I realized how exagerated the criticism had been of her. I suspect that the couple still pictured their niece and nephew in their 40's. The nephew wasn't able to come and it was very difficult for the niece.
When people reach an age when they are housebound or in a nursing home, many of their friends are already gone, and others are in such poor health themselves that they aren't in any position to go visit someone else.
I've watched my Mother over these last few years. She has been in a retirement complex... first in an apartment with my Father until he died 9 years ago, and these last few months in Assisted Living. In the 13 or 14 years she's been there, she's made many friends who have since died. It goes with the territory, I'm afraid. Now, even though she's 99, she has as many friends as she did when she was 29... more, actually. As one friend died, she made another friend. The day she stops making new friends will be the day she dies.