Age Melancholy of Older Mizrahi Women Residing in Tel Aviv as a Social Loss: Exploring Intersections of Health and Social Support in an Ethnographic Study

Abstract

Inspired by Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia” and expanding upon his notions within the social context, this article proposes an innovative concept called “age melancholy” to describe the multifaceted elements of social loss experienced by empty nest older adults. While most studies emphasize a psychological–individualist approach to this phenomenon, age melancholy frames older age as a process marked by a loss of social engagements. The findings are grounded in anthropological fieldwork conducted from 2010 to 2013 in a lower-income neighborhood of Tel Aviv. They are based on deductive comprehension of social melancholy, combined with inductive qualitative analyses of 29 meetings within a designated narrative group of older Mizrahi women—Jewish immigrants from Islamic countries. The results reveal that empty nest older adults perceive their loneliness, fragile health, and approaching death as interrelated aspects of social detachment, leading to melancholy. However, whereas their emotional experiences are tainted by age melancholy, it is temporal and contextual and may be mitigated through social support.

Introduction

Coping with various aspects of loss may occur at any age and stage in life. However, it is more common among older adults, who are more likely to experience the loss of their family members or friends (Fang & Carr, 2021; Lekalakala-Mokgele, 2018). This may result in deep pain, affecting their daily life and identity construction process (Holm et al., 2019; Richardson, 2014), and arousing negative emotions, such as stress, anxiety, guilt, and depression (Grover & Dang, 2013; Mitchell & Wister, 2015). While most studies have examined loss among older adults from a psychological and individualist approach, there is a dearth of studies concerning the social aspects of loss as experienced by empty nest older people.

The present study narrows this gap based on the findings of ethnographic research conducted in HaTikva, a lower-income neighborhood of Tel Aviv undergoing social transformation. It aims to address how long-time older residents cope with various aspects of social loss related to their loneliness, fragile health, and fear of death. To comprehend this process, this article traces the life histories and daily routines of older women who have met every day in a center for older people and developed a strong sense of local belonging and entitlement.

The present article is based on anthropological fieldwork conducted from 2010 to 2013, particularly inductive analysis of findings from a group of older women in HaTikva, combined with a deductive comprehension of social melancholy achieved through my ongoing work (Shamur, 2018, 2019, 2023a). Informed by these findings, I claim for the existence of “age melancholy.” This is an umbrella term encompassing the sorrow many of them feel in response to the series of losses they have experienced, mainly in old age. The thematic analysis of the group’s meetings revealed the women’s loneliness, health challenges, and fear of approaching death as important factors arousing “age melancholy.”

The article begins with a review of the literature on loneliness and the empty nest syndrome and on psychological and social aspects of loss at old age. It then introduces the theory of melancholy and its development from the psychological to the social realm. Following a short introduction to the local context and the methodological section, the ethnographic findings are discussed in relation to age melancholy. Finally, the conclusion presents the contribution of the concept to social gerontology, bereavement studies, and the theory of melancholy.

Theoretical Background

Loneliness, Social Isolation, and the Empty Nest Syndrome Among Older Adults

Loneliness and social isolation affect older adults’ health and well-being (Hwang et al., 2019; Kitzmüller et al., 2018; Morlett Paredes et al., 2021; Tomaka et al., 2006). They are associated with poor mental and physical health and are particularly challenging in old age due to the limited social networks, reduced financial resources, and changes in the family structure of these adults (Bergman & Segel-Karpas, 2018).

Gerontologists have debated the definitions of both loneliness and social isolation (Giuli et al., 2012; Nummela et al., 2011; Valtorta et al., 2016). Whereas loneliness is commonly defined as a subjective negative feeling associated with a perceived limited number of meaningful relationships, social isolation is often understood as a more objectively measurable account of reduced social networks, indicating lack of integration of older people in the social domain (Courtin & Knapp, 2017). Although there is no necessary relationship between social isolation and loneliness, they often overlap in practice (Kharicha et al., 2021; Newall & Menec, 2019).

Several circumstances may lead to social isolation and trigger loneliness among older individuals in the public as well as private domain. They include public health crises, such as the recent COVID-19 pandemic that affected older people disproportionately (Shahid et al., 2020). Moreover, preventing transmission required social distancing, particularly among older people, resulting in further negative effects due to the disruption of routine, denial of social support, and fear of death (McKinlay et al., 2021).

In the private domain, loneliness may occur when an older person is widowed, living alone, or grieving (Prieto-Flores et al., 2010; Tomaka et al., 2006), often referred to collectively as the empty nest syndrome. Empty nesters are at higher risk of being socially excluded as they have limited social contacts and participation (Feng & Phillips, 2022; Feng et al., 2018; Van Regenmortel et al., 2016). The relative absence of such contacts is more noticeable during the evenings and weekends, when distracting activities are scarce (Cohen-Mansfield & Eisner, 2020). Moreover, some older empty nest parents may experience various emotional responses toward their children’s leaving home and what they perceive as the breakup of close family ties, such as stress, anxiety, guilt, and depression (Grover & Dang, 2013; Kabiri et al., 2023; Mitchell & Wister, 2015), exacerbating the outcomes of the empty nest syndrome. Feng and Phillips (2022) highlight that being empty nesters can involve even less emotional support from older children, exposing older people to the psychological and physical problems of old age, and to the experience of loss, as elaborated below.

Loss at Old Age: Between Psychological and Social Melancholy

Loss may occur at any stage of life. It is particularly common in old age, when many experience the loss of a partner, sibling, or friend (Fang & Carr, 2021; Lekalakala-Mokgele, 2018), often resulting in deep pain (Holm et al., 2019; Richardson, 2014). Larsson et al. (2017) stress that older people are in a state of continuous disconnection as they are irrevocably losing other people, places, and belongings to which they have been attached.

Following Freud’s seminal essay “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917), bereavement studies emphasize that the absence of a loved one may contrast with the meaningful ties that survivors have with the deceased, negatively interfering with their psychological health (Dutton & Zisook, 2005; Meichsner et al., 2020). While the health and emotional consequences of bereavement may be resolved within several months, some older people experience prolonged acute grief, resulting in severe mental health condition (Shear et al., 2013). For example, the COVID-19 social distancing requirements meant that older adults had to grieve for loved ones without social support (Goveas & Shear, 2020).

Whereas extensive literature relates to loss and grief, its focus remains psychological and individualist. Consequently, there is meagre research on the social aspects of loss. Bevan and Thompson (2003) pointed out that despite the emergence of a solid body of work related to the sociological aspects of loss, less attention was given to social work practices for people experiencing loss. Similarly, Neimeyer et al. (2014) articulated a more general social approach toward loss. They responded to the dominant conceptions of bereavement and their intrapsychic emphasis in Western societies by proposing a “social construct of grief,” calling to explore familial, communal, and cultural dimensions of loss. Finally, Maciejewski et al. (2022) proposed a micro-sociological theory of grief to complement the psychological approach, suggesting addressing the social vacuum created by bereavement by enhancing social contacts to alleviate grief and improve adjustment to loss.

Following this recent research strain, the present article adopts the social approach to loss in old age. Thus, it applies a critical social approach to articulate the social loss that comes with old age. Moreover, instead of the common psychological terms for loss in old age, such as grief, bereavement, or depression (Noguchi et al., 2021; Schladitz et al., 2021), I use the term melancholy, given its recent development in relation to social loss among disadvantaged groups (Alush-Levron, 2015; Gamliel & Hazan, 2022; Oliver, 2002; Shamur, 2018; Yosef, 2006).

From Psychological to Social Melancholy

The term melancholy was first used in psychology by Freud (1917). He identified what he called “melancholia” among his patients as an emotion aroused when one had to cope with the loss of a loved person, country, liberty, or ideal. In Freud’s interpretation, while mourning enabled acceptance of the love object lost and the individual became free once again, melancholia was pathological, since it involved the denial of the loss. Moreover, since the individual did not come to terms with the lost object, the libido associated with that object would not transfer to a different one, with negative implications for the ego.

Applying Freud’s terminology to the social realm, Oliver (2002) proposed the term “social melancholy” to refer to the social, rather than individual–psychological factors that oppressed the individual. For Oliver, it was not the lost object that aroused the melancholic emotion. Rather, she highlighted the lack of positive representations of one’s social groups as preventing self-love. As a result, the individual internalized the oppression and suffered low self-esteem and emptiness.

In a similar vein, social scientists began associating melancholy with broader power relations in given socio-political contexts, identifying obstacles preventing disadvantaged individuals from constructing their multilayered identity and belonging to wider society. Specifically, they related to ethnic (Alush-Levron, 2015; Yosef, 2006), spatial (Navaro-Yashin, 2009, 2012), and gender melancholy (Butler, 1995). Ethnic melancholy is the sense of sadness aroused following the loss of the “melting pot” myth among non-White immigrants who, despite their formal citizenship status, failed to assimilate in mainstream American society (and by extension, other Western societies). This emotion indicates their inability to imitate the values and norms this culture embodies and the frustration they feel as they encounter structural obstacles denying them a sense of belonging. Spatial melancholy is an emotion of sadness aroused during national conflicts due to people’s inability to mourn the loss of an “enemy community.” Although this community appears to be absent, it exists in space and in the belonging its people have left behind, arousing melancholy. Finally, gender melancholy is the feeling of sadness aroused among LGBTQ people following the loss of gender identification, particularly same-sex relations, in a culture of compulsory heterosexuality. Heterosexual identity is considered the exclusive normative gender identity, and lack of representation and denial of same-sex identification may lead to guilt and shame, arousing the melancholic emotion.

In a previous work (Shamur, 2019), I proposed a new interpretation of both gender and spatial melancholy. Moreover, based on feminist intersectionality theory, I showed how ethnic, spatial, and gender melancholies interacted. Thus, as opposed to the tendency to discuss these concepts separately, my work showed how they were manifested jointly in the lived experiences of marginal agents in the city. Consequently, I proposed two concepts capturing the melancholic sentiment aroused due to social loss. The first, melancholic citizenship (Shamur, 2018), described the collective sadness among discriminated groups of citizens when encountering a social process indicative of their marginality, such as gentrification or immigration. The second, place melancholy (2023a), referred to a sense of loss among long-term residents following urban transformation that leads them to lose their sense of belonging.

Whereas place melancholy is shared by long-term residents regardless of their ethnoclass and gender identities, the older women in HaTikva share yet another element of melancholy: age melancholy. The proposed construct refers to the sadness older people may feel upon experiencing age-associated loss following their loneliness, fragile health, and upcoming death. Age melancholy may be mitigated by the support of other older people who experience similar challenges.

The Present Study

This study is part of a larger anthropological field research conducted in the lower-income HaTikva (“Hope” in Hebrew) neighborhood in south Tel Aviv from 2010 to 2013 to investigate place belonging among its long-time residents. In HaTikva and elsewhere in Israel, Mizrahi Jews—immigrants from Islamic countries—encountered ongoing discrimination and symbolic and material obstacles to their inclusion in mainstream society (Sasson‐Levy & Shoshana, 2013; Selinger, 2013; Shamur, 2023b). Over the years, HaTikva’s Mizrahi residents left or died while other groups became dominant. These include Jewish migrants from former Soviet Union in the 1990s and more recently many of the 22,000 asylum seekers from Sudan and Eritrea who arrived in southern Tel Aviv (Israeli Population and Immigration Authority, 2016), outnumbering the long-time residents in some areas. In addition to an unknown number of Africans, HaTikva neighborhood currently has 12,000 Israeli residents, of whom 40% are Mizrahi Jews, 25% Jewish migrants from former Soviet Union, and the rest Israeli-born Jews (Shamur, 2018).

Early in my fieldwork, I detected melancholy in the way my informants discussed their personal histories and relationship to the neighborhood’s ongoing transformation. While they did not explicitly used words like “melancholy” or “sadness” to describe themselves or their weakened sense of belonging, I could discern their despair when they realized this current migration wave was an indication of their social marginality. Historically, this marginality was related to the peripherality of HaTikva since its establishment in 1935 by Yemenite-Jewish manual laborers. Its liminal location between the Palestinian city of Jaffa and the Palestinian village of Salameh affected the lives of old-time Mizrahi residents, who took an active part in the 1948 war. Until Israel’s establishment, the Tel Aviv municipality refused to include the neighborhood in its jurisdiction, and therefore, the residents had to rely on each other for support when dealing with environmental concerns, poverty, crime, and neglect (see Shamur, 2018; Shamur & Marom, 2021). The neighborhood’s marginality was part of the socio-economic disparity between north Tel Aviv’s affluent Jews of European descent and the poorer Mizrahi south ( Cohen & Margalit, 2015; Marom, 2014; Rotbard, 2015; Shamur, 2018, 2019).

Whereas Israeli public discourse highlights the residents’ response to this migration wave as racist, I offered the term “melancholic citizenship” to refer to the motivations for their protest against it (Shamur, 2018). I also suggested that urban transformation may lead to a “place melancholy” due to the contradictions between the older residents’ nostalgic memories of a homogeneous ethnoreligious community and its current diversification, perceived as tainting its “original” nature and as alienating them from the public sphere (Shamur, 2020, 2023a).

Here, I turn the gaze to the private domain, suggesting the term age melancholy to describe a collective sadness among older Mizrahi women following manifold social losses associated with their age. Whereas their home used to be a major anchor of their traditional gender and ethnoreligious identities, its emptiness is now perceived as an indication of social loss and approaching death.

Method

As mentioned, this article is part of a broader anthropological research of Mizrahi place belonging following urban change (Shamur, 2020, 2023b). The main method used was participant observation: I moved into HaTikva and became involved in various community activities, immersing in the long-term Mizrahi residents’ everyday life and many local sites, as elaborated elsewhere (Shamur, 2019, 2023a). Here, I wish to emphasize the ethnographic materials collected in the local day center for older adults, particularly in a narrative group I have established and moderated with local women.

The choice to investigate place belonging in a particular urban setting derives from my own Mizrahi background. Although personally I have not experienced ethnic discrimination in childhood, certain forms of racial microaggressions (Sue et al., 2007) in young adulthood have led me to research ethnic and racial identity construction in the urban periphery.

I first became acquainted with the participants by visiting the day center several times a week. Each visit lasted about 5 hr and was documented in my field notes. During the visits, I helped the staff with various tasks and developed rapport with several older women, by participating in their daily routine including lectures and open conversations. This helped me form close ties with them and the staff. This rapport was also positively affected by my Mizrahi background. It played a significant role in the women’s identification with me and their ongoing engagement to participate in the narrative group. To express their affection for me, some called me “our grandson” or “our son.” The warm feelings I developed toward them were inspired by memories of my grandmother, who came from a similar cultural and religious background and encountered comparable constraints in her patriarchal family and in Israeli society.

After a year of volunteering, I suggested forming a weekly life history focus group as part of the classes available for older women; all narratives presented here derived from this group. The group was inspired by Barbara Myerhoff’s seminal work, “Number Our Days” (1980), which described what she called a “life history group,” tracing the life trajectories of older Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union before and after their arrival in the United States. With the support of the day center director, 16 women in their 70s and 80s attended the first session, and 12 women arrived consistently to 29 weekly meetings held over 8 months. The average session lasted 45–75 min. With the participants’ approval, all meetings were recorded, transcribed, inductively coded, and anonymized. All research participants gave informed oral consent.

When the data for this research was collected, my university did not require a formal ethical approval. However, ethical discussions were essential to my training as an anthropologist and ethnographer, including privacy and dignity concerning the participants. Accordingly, in the first group meeting, I repeated the explanations I had shared with the women in the day center about the anthropological fieldwork I was conducting. I also elaborated on my commitment to protect their privacy due to the personal nature of the stories shared in the group. I emphasized that I was recording the sessions and that I would use pseudonyms in future academic publications.

The topics suggested by the participants for group discussion varied, as my instructions were minimal: focus on personal or communal biographies and histories. Following their narratives, I presented appropriate questions. For example, when they spoke about the neighborhood, I asked: “Could you describe your attachment to it?” and “How do you feel when leaving the neighborhood to travel to other parts of Tel Aviv?” When discussing intersections of space, family, and gender relations, I asked: “How did you experience your home when you were young mothers?” and “Can you describe your relationship with your husband?” As a man, I was surprised that the women felt comfortable sharing with me (and the group) issues of emotional attachment, love, and sex. This was probably thanks to the uniquely accepting environment created in the group and my rapport with them as a symbolic family member.

Health and age challenges were often brought up upon the return of a group participant from healing at home following a major health event or injury. In such cases, I usually asked the returning group member how she felt, and other group members, including me, followed up with questions regarding their physical and mental health, particularly in the context of their empty nest and limited social support.

All group meetings were transcribed and anonymized, and I wrote field notes on the group sessions. I used the thematic analysis method (Braun & Clarke, 2006; Kotliar, 2016; Vaismoradi et al., 2016) to identify major themes and concepts brought up by the women as they emerged and when reading the ethnographic material. No data analysis software was used, and I conducted the entire analysis by myself. Due to the complex nature of ethnographic research with older, often illiterate adults struggling with health concerns, I was unable to return to my informants with the findings.

As I was the only coder and informants’ approval of the findings was unavailable, trustworthiness was achieved through rigorous data analyses that included several interconnected phases—preparation, organization, and reporting (Elo et al., 2014)—as detailed below. Moreover, the reflexivity I engaged in, which revealed ethnic similarities and kin-like connections with the participants, increased the findings’ credibility and deepened the research development and analysis comprehension (Dodgson, 2019). My “insider” position helped me in “opening the doors and hearts” of the informants, while my “outsider” position as a researcher helped me gain a critical perspective during data collection and analysis (Zaban, 2023).

In the preparation phase, every group session transcription was saved on the computer as a separate file that included additional ethnographic commentary on the researcher’s interpretation of the content, atmosphere, and setting. Next, all files were merged into a single file. Before the analysis started, I read the complete transcription of the merged file to become acquainted with the ethnographic material and locate initial ideas of the themes.

In the organization phase, I began open-coding and labelling subthemes representing a “meaning unit” (Graneheim & Lundman, 2004). Next, the codes were grouped into broader themes. Some were removed or changed to provide better descriptions and links between subthemes. Next, the identified themes were reviewed and classified according to their final qualities and definitions as the relationship between them was suggested (Braun & Clarke, 2006).

The thematic coding suggested major categories including health-related challenges (physical and emotional), gender asymmetry (i.e., living in a patriarchal family), poverty, ethnic discrimination, and neighborhood transformation. I focused on health-related challenges, which included the following themes: (1) loneliness (with subthemes including family structure change, the absence of intimate partner and grown-up children, and the contradiction between the current empty nest and the previous one teeming family life); (2) unstable health conditions (falls, doctor’s appointments, and traumatic health events); and (3) fear of approaching death (the husband’s death as a preview of their own, the hope for an “appropriate” death, and death as social detachment). These interrelated processes were subsumed under the term age melancholy.

Whereas the research engaged in inductive findings that justified the new conceptualization and argument, it also archived trustworthiness by referring back and engaging with the literature (Nowell et al., 2017). It employed dialectic deductive and inductive approaches given the previous author’s development of a social melancholy literature (Shamur, 2018, 2019, 2023a), combined with the narrative group analyses.

The last phase aims to achieve trustworthiness was the reporting phase, addressing the results’ organization according to the broad themes identified and interpretation of informants’ quotations. Next and prior to the description of the results, supplementary contextual cultural data was elaborated.

Age melancholy may characterize the emotional lives of many older adults worldwide. However, these women have several unique characteristics that should be considered when analyzing the findings. First, they are mostly observant Mizrahi Jews unable to fulfil their religious identity, particularly after their husbands’ death, as their illiteracy prevents them from reciting prayers. Second, they have had to negotiate the restrictions of the patriarchal family: many have experienced a complicated relationship with their husbands throughout their lives, but now, due to their failing health, they cannot perform their household tasks, an important factor in their feminine identity. Third, many have been forced to marry at a young age with considerably older men, subsequently becoming young mothers and early widows. All these factors have contributed to their experience of age melancholy.

Results

Age Melancholy Among Empty Nest Older People as Multilayered Social Loss

Age melancholy is an umbrella term that captures three interrelated processes common in old age and are interconnected—loneliness, fragile health, and upcoming death. All were central thematic topics and concerns that surfaced during the discussions with the women. For the purpose of the analysis, I discuss them separately, unpacking their relative contribution to the development of the melancholic emotion. Thus, I apply a holistic approach that points to age melancholy as a multilayered phenomenon in the emotional lives and experiences of older people.

Loneliness

As previously shown, older people may experience loss following the family structure change. Indeed, many of the participants experienced loneliness in the absence of an intimate relationship, as they were widowed or divorced. In one of the group discussions, Sima expressed her honest desire to start a new relationship. Most of the others, however, insisted that their husbands were their only intimate partners in life and preferred coping with their familiar loneliness rather than starting a new relationship.

The absence of an intimate partner became even more apparent when the children left the nest: older parents’ expectations from their older children were not necessarily met, highlighting their loneliness. Their children would visit from time to time but were not as committed as the women’s husbands used to be. The participants’ intimate relationships were not necessarily easy-going or satisfying, but they were committed to them, among other things out of their religious faith. Zehava shared, “When a woman loses her husband, it’s a completely different life […] the children, God bless them, come [to visit…] but when a man leaves home, everything changes completely […].”

The social loss embedded in the empty nest stands in stark contrast with the women’s memories of previous times, when their homes teemed with life, and they were busy negotiating childrearing, household chores, and, in some cases, paid work. Whereas home used to be a site of belonging, today, many of the women experienced their home as a deserted place, a feeling exacerbated by the fact that their health challenges prevented them from performing the household tasks identified with traditional womanhood. This feeling would intensify when their older children were busy and could not find the time to visit them, or arrived only for short visits, just to make sure their older parents were OK, as explained by Haviva:

I have children, but nobody pays me a visit, [they say:] “Hello mom, how are you?,” and after a little while, “Bye mom, we’re leaving.” What can you do? I close the door and there’s no one [home]. God bless them.

Indeed, many participants confided to an ambivalent relationship with their grown-up children. As we discussed the uneasy relationship, Sima was unable to hide her disappointment with her children:

When you’re younger you’re not bored, as your friends will visit you tomorrow if they haven’t come today. But when you’re growing older your home, that used to be filled with kids and grandchildren is suddenly [empty…] and your grandchildren tell you, “We don’t have the time to visit you.”

Sima criticized her children’s generation for abandoning their parents in older age. She quoted her neighbors, who told her that they had invested so much effort in raising their children and now when they were married, they rarely visit them. Sima elaborated, “Nobody comes to see how we’re doing. It’s awful to leave the [older] women behind and me, included.”

Sima was not alone in her ambivalence toward her grown-up children. Many of the older women were preoccupied with the absence of their children in their everyday lives. Usually, the children made sure their mothers would not be left alone, hosted them in their homes on weekends and holidays, and supported them when they were ill. However, it was difficult for the children to look after them on a daily basis. For example, in one of the group meetings, Rachel complained that none of her daughters came to help her clean up her home, which she was simply no longer able to do herself due to her fragile health. Besides cleaning, she wanted to spend quality time with her children.

Although the older women expected their children to take care of them, when they actually did meet that expectation, the participants felt uneasy, as they did not want to become a burden, even on weekends. Haviva, for example, said she was embarrassed to be hosted every weekend by a different child. Yet, she was proud that they made sure she would not stay alone and added she never arrived empty handed. Despite the embarrassment when she was in the company of her family, Haviva was able to escape the loneliness common among older adults, intensified in the weekends due to the lack of communal and leisure activities.

The women quoted the scriptures and claimed that “nothing stands in the way of your will.” They reminisced that they themselves had to deal with the same obligations and yet did not leave their parents behind. Regarding her own mother, Geula remembered:

I went to clean her house three times a week in the early morning. Her house was spotless. I had a strong will to go [help her]. If I didn’t want to go, I would say: “My husband doesn’t allow me to come, I don’t have time, or it’s too far away.”

Some of the women were more forgiving, highlighting their children’s justified reasons for not visiting them often, particularly geographical distance and the grown-up children’s difficulties in meeting both family and work obligations.

Echoing Sered’s (1988) findings of Mizrahi Jewish women in Jerusalem, the women in this study considered their daughters responsible for their emotional and physical health. Although many had had complicated relationships with their husbands, the latter had been committed to them, provided company and intimacy, and also helped them maintain their religious identity by reciting the Hebrew prayers, which were now difficult for them to learn. Thus, their empty nest was an indication of social loss and a painful breakup of intimate ties which constructed their gender, ethnic, and religious identity.

A conversation about gender expectations of caring for them in old age began when Geula, who suffered intense pain in her mouth, told the women, “You have daughters, I don’t have a daughter. If, God forbid, God himself won’t hear my cry, who knows what would become of me?” Rachel immediately responded in a broken voice indicating anger, sorrow, and melancholy: “I haven’t seen my daughters in the past three months,” and confessed, “I lock the door behind me when I get back home from the day centre [in the afternoon…] I don’t see them. Why should I lie?”

Although most of the older women were visited by their adult children in weekends and holidays, or if they encountered severe health problems, it was clear that on weekdays they experienced painful loneliness. Their home, which used to be bustling with life, was perceived in old age as alienated, a site of social loss, and even as dangerous, as suggested by Rachel. In other words, besides loneliness, the emptiness of the nest could have critical and devastating effects on the participants’ health. Another dimension of age melancholy will be elaborated on next.

Fragile Health

My analyses of melancholic emotion in old age go beyond the mere indication of the depression symptoms following a major health event or severe injury, as commonly discussed in the literature. Instead, I emphasize fragile health as an impediment to current and future social engagements in the lives of older adults, arousing melancholy due to the loss. This sentiment often begins with the unfortunate outcomes of the empty nest syndrome discussed in the previous subsection. When my informants returned from the day center, the older women tried to pass the time by watching television or by sitting on their porches watching passers-by, or occasionally visiting or hosting friends and family members. However, their loneliness meant more than boredom but could have severe implications when encountering major health problems:

It’s horrible when a person is home alone. I was yelling for help and nobody heard me. If Guy [the driver to the centre] hadn’t come to see where I was, nobody would have known [about my fall]. Even the emergency alarm wasn’t working […]. In the hall there’s nothing to lean on, so I fell back and couldn’t get up.

In their routine, many of the women had difficulties moving around as well as performing essential everyday activities. Rachel explained, “When you get to this age you can’t walk anywhere, you can’t hang out and have a good time here and there. You can only be in bed or at home.” Being confined to one’s bed and the social isolation attendant on fragile health threatened the women, who expressed the hope “Just not to be sick [or] confined to bed—that’s what scares me the most!” (Adina).

Health was thus an ongoing preoccupation with the fear of losing the ability to meet with friends and maintain everyday social activities. Many of the participants felt distressed, particularly when unexpected health problem occurred that disrupted their routine. Yet, they also drew comfort from other members of the day center who were with similar challenges when they were able to visit the day center. For example, when Geula suffered from severe pain in her mouth and struggled with speaking, her friends at the center encouraged her to try and speak when she was surrounded with friends, as opposed to when she was home alone. While doing so, they recalled health problems they had experienced before and empathized with her condition to make her feel better. Geula cheered up a bit and spoke with cautious optimism, overcoming her pain: “I’m happy to be with my friends.”

On a different occasion, when Lea felt that her hearing was deteriorating, she told the women that her daughter would take her to an otolaryngologist. Sima calmed her down and expressed confidence that “she has nothing” and that her hearing would return, “if not today—tomorrow.” She advised her to use drops of arak (anise-flavored spirit) to release the blockage in her ear. Other women explained to Lea what to expect in the doctor’s appointment (ear irrigation or a recommendation for a hearing aid) or tried to alleviate her stress using humorous or calming remarks. All provided emotional support based on their own experience.

This support was no substitute for occasional visits to the doctor, often accompanied by family members, but it was an additional source of encouragement, helping the women overcome difficulties, especially due to their ambivalence toward doctors. On the one hand, they knew they needed their professional help to maintain their health, but on the other hand, they criticized them for making decisions that negatively affected their health and could interfere with their ability to perform their routine activities. Therefore, they allowed themselves to decide which of the doctors’ orders they would follow, based on their own intuition and life experience, and the advice of other women who had encountered similar health challenges.

Yet, the women did see the doctors as important. Evidence for that sentiment could be seen when they were excited toward a visit of a medical doctor to the center. The doctor—a tall, bearded middle-aged man—was very kind to the women. He explained clearly about health challenges in old age and the women were very attentive to his lecture. He elaborated particularly about the risk of falling which is very common at this age. He explained that when older people fell for the first time, they felt depressed and were afraid to walk again, resulting in limited mobility and in turn increasing the risk of a second fall due to the weakness of the leg muscles. During the doctor’s talk, one of the older women asked me to serve him a glass of water. When I rose to do so, she asked me, “Could you make him a cup of tea?”

Following the lecture, Oshrat looked at me and confirmed his emphasis on the risk of falling with a nod. Only several weeks prior to the doctor’s talk, she told me she had slipped in the shower while home alone. After she had managed to get up by herself, she called her daughters and chose to go with them to the doctor only the next day. When I met Oshrat, she, like many other women in the day center, had difficulties walking steady, and therefore her everyday functioning was limited. She said, “They all know what I used to do in the day centre—singing, dancing, having a blast […], but since I can’t walk on my feet, I sit here like a fool.” Nevertheless, Oshrat continued to be an active and vibrant member of the day center.

Indeed, many of the participants saw fragile health as a risk for becoming socially disengaged and personally dependent. This was not just depressed mood following a fall, as the doctor pointed out, but a major event that might have a devastating effect on maintaining the older people’s social worlds. Unable to cope with a major health problem would often force them to move in with their children, leading to an extreme loss of independence. Paradoxically, although this event would bring them closer to their older children—whose leaving had aroused melancholy to begin with—in practice, the negative sentiment worsened due to the older people’s loss of independence.

For example, Matania told me that after her husband’s death, her adult children asked her to sell her house in HaTikva and move next to them. However, she insisted on staying in the neighborhood since she did not want to leave a place she had known all her life. She elaborated, “What have I lost there? […] Will my children be with me 24 hr a day? Eventually, they will do this to me, and I will have to go there.” This possible lack of independence could be seen as a preview to the third component of age melancholy related to the women’s approaching death.

Approaching Death

Most of the older women began addressing the issue of their approaching death by referring to the loss of their husbands. This loss was associated in their biography as observant Mizrahi Jews whose marriage was often arranged by others, with men who were significantly older. The age difference, sometimes decades, resulted in being widowed at a fairly young age, contributing to the loneliness they experienced following the emptying of their nest (see also Shamur, 2019, 2020). Zehava recalled her husband’s absence by reflecting about her life as a religious Jew who is obliged to bless her food, after depending for so many years on her husband to do so:

When the man is in charge of the kiddush [blessing the wine to sanctify the Sabbath and holidays] or the blessing [of the food], the woman is more relaxed. [Now] I don’t know the second blessing for the food, so I recite only the first part […]. It’s [emotionally] difficult.

When Zehava shared with the group the night of her husband’s death, she emphasized that he “died at home, like a king,” at the age of 95, with “his mind still sharp.” Before his death, he took an active part in Passover Eve dinner: “He was sitting in the middle of the table holding the Haggadah [the religious text read on that occasion] and was looking around.” After her children took her husband to bed, Zehava noticed that he was not well and called her daughters, asking them to call a doctor. She described what happened next:

I went back to the room. You would not believe what a perfect death he had. He looked at me, closed his eyes and took his false teeth out […] this was his faith. He didn’t move. I was scared of his death. I was looking at him, and after 10 minutes, I raised his hand and saw it was falling, and then I knew it was over […].

In this case, the unity of the extended family was highlighted as a source of identity and support when first cracks in this valuable unity appeared. As many of the participants had already lost their husbands, they could easily identify.

The older women seldom discussed death directly, and the issue surfaced only once in group discussions, when Ruchama confessed her (and their) fears:

Ruchama: We are afraid of dying.

Tal: You mean because of your age?

Rina: No! What’s wrong with you? What are you scared of?

Tal: Ruchama, are you afraid from dying?

Ruchama: I want to live longer. I’m afraid of dying.

Haviva: She’s right. We don’t want to die—we want to live.

Ruchama: Me too. We raised children and worked hard. But now we want to live.

Adina: You shouldn’t be scared of death. When death comes you won’t feel a thing.

Ruchama: I told my son—please don’t put me in the fridge.

{Laughter all around}

The women objected to Ruchama’s engagement with the topic and asked her if everything was OK with her, and suggested that she woke up on the left foot. When I tried to delve into the source of her fear, she emphasized her will to “live a dignified life until the very end, and not to suffer, to enjoy meeting the children, the grandchildren and the great grandchildren.” When reflecting on death, intergenerational family ties were perceived by the participants as important, as they wanted to maintain their physical and mental abilities without suffering and without becoming a burden on their children. The women’s fear was related less to the uncertainty of (in)existence after death and more to the possible loss of independence in old age due to their fragile health and loneliness, preventing them from engaging in the social world. For them, death was the last stop in a process of social detachment, arousing the melancholic sentiment.

Discussion

Engaging with the literature on loss in old age (e.g., Fang & Carr, 2021; Holm et al., 2019; Richardson, 2014) and particularly with studies on the social construction of loss and grief (Bevan & Thompson, 2003; Maciejewski et al., 2022; Neimeyer et al., 2014), this article contributes to the understanding of social loss among older individuals. Inspired by the emotional turn in the social sciences (Anderson & Smith, 2001; Davidson et al., 2012) and the social theory of melancholy (Alush-Levron, 2015; Navaro-Yashin, 2009, 2012; Shamur, 2018; Shamur & Marom, 2021), I proposed “age melancholy” as an innovative umbrella term enhancing our understating of the combined effect of loneliness, fragile health, and upcoming death to describe a sense of sorrow among empty nest older adults. Importantly, age melancholy sheds light on these interrelated elements of loss in the social realm, as opposed to the common tendency in bereavement studies to adopt a more individual–psychological approach. In other words, whereas studies of loss in old age adopted standard psychological terms such as grief, depression, or bereavement (Noguchi et al., 2021; Schladitz et al., 2021), this article suggested the term melancholy to highlight the social loss among older adults, particularly among marginalized groups (Alush-Levron, 2015; Gamliel & Hazan, 2022; Shamur, 2018).

My findings reveal that age melancholy is not aroused due to a single event but is rather a gradual process whereby older people experience a series of social losses that contradict positive memories of their life when they were active and masters of their own household. The older women discussed in here demonstrate that the melancholic sentiment begins when they face an empty nest, highlighting the ambivalence they feel toward their grown-up children’s limited availability to care for them. Over time, as health challenges become more common, the empty nest itself has a potentially devastating effect on their ability to overcome major health problems as they might find nobody to help them in crucial circumstances that expose their extreme vulnerability in older age. Those major health concerns may confine them to bed and threaten their independence and may also be interpreted as a frightening preview of upcoming death as the ultimate social loss, which they seldom discussed.

Yet, the age melancholy experienced by these women is not a constant sentiment that dominates their entire emotional lives but more of an indication of the physical, emotional, and mental fragility associated with their age-related health challenges and manifold social losses. Importantly, age melancholy can be mitigated by existing social relations, particularly when meeting other older women who cope with similar challenges. As shown above, the women supported one another when encountering health challenges by sharing their experiences. Together, they also processed complex emotional issues such as their loneliness, ambivalent family ties, and fear of death. The group itself mitigated age melancholy: first, as it allowed social engagement, counteracting social loss, and second, by providing a comforting space to deal with the negative emotions of old age.

To conclude, this article makes three main contributions: first, a theoretical contribution in developing the term age melancholy based on deductive comprehension of social melancholy and inductive group narrative analyses. Whereas the gerontology literature deals particularly with the individual–psychological effects of loss, the new construct focuses on the social loss experienced by older adults when coping with these challenges. Second, the article presents a holistic approach emphasizing the interrelations between health challenges, loneliness, and the fear of death to better comprehend lived experiences and negative emotions among older adults. Finally, in terms of methodology, the article incorporates life history group narratives with findings from anthropological field research to trace age melancholy as well as the social ties among the day center members that act as a source of resilience that mitigates their melancholy.

Clinical Applications

The interlinked factors that might increase the melancholic sentiment as discussed above may contribute to health practitioners’ awareness of the harmful effects of loneliness, fragile health, and fear of death. They can directly address those sensitive issues in personal or group therapeutic sessions with older adults or their families to extend empathic understanding. Moreover, health practitioners working with older adults can use narrative groups as a therapeutic space whereby older people engage with their histories and places and receive social support that may reduce the melancholic sentiment common in later life.

Limitation and Future Research

The concept of age melancholy has been developed based on a particular cultural context. It will be interesting to examine its applicability in other sociocultural settings worldwide. Furthermore, as the data in the research was collected more than 10 years ago, it will be interesting to collect more recent anthropological data on this phenomenon in similar groups in Israel, as well as elsewhere. Moreover, this study is limited to the meaning of aging and age-related loss in an urban environment. Exploration of such issues in rural areas and in different institutional and familial settings will be revealing (i.e., in the absence of day centers for older adults and conversely the presence of extended family support). Finally, whereas the narrative group provided valuable data on health challenges and supported intimacy among its members, it may have limited the involvement of less dominant participants in group discussions. Therefore, future research may benefit from one-on-one, in-depth interviews about age melancholy’s construction and possible effects.