Variations of loneliness: temporal experiences among elderly spousal caregivers
This article describes how the loneliness of older people who live with their spouse who needs help or support on a daily basis is expressed and how temporalities are mobilized when this loneliness is evoked. Even though rarely mentioned explicitly during the interviews, the analyses show that loneliness is found in many “folds” of the existence of these spouses, and that the experience of caregiving multiplies the conditions of its manifestation. To sustain a daily caregiving situation, which becomes more and more intense in the present, these spouses rely heavily on the evocation of a conjugal past and a continuity of identity. As for the future, it is difficult to apprehend because, even when exhausted, they know that it is the disappearance of the other who awaits them and a “new” life in which they will have to rebuild themselves, alone.