The making of a Scrooge: Experts weigh in on why some older people are angry, isolated

[jtuck004]

...

Nobody ever stopped him in the street to say, with gladsome looks, “My dear Scrooge, how are you?” No beggars implored him to bestow a trifle, no children asked him what it was o’clock. Even the blindmen’s dogs appeared to know him; and when they saw him coming on, would tug their owners into doorways.

But what did Scrooge care? It was the very thing he liked. To edge his way along the crowded paths of life, warning all human sympathy to keep its distance.

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“Often when someone isolates socially by choice it’s because they are depressed,” said Dr. Lesley Blake, a geriatric staff psychiatrist at Eastern State Hospital.
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“We’re social creatures,” she explained.

There he was, alone again, when all the other boys had gone home for the jolly holidays. (The door) opened; and a little girl, much younger than the boy, came darting in.

“I have come to bring you home, dear brother! Home, for good and all. Father is so much kinder than he used to be, that home’s like Heaven!”

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And as Blake explained: “A lot of people who have problems as they age lost a parent early on, either through death or being put in orphanages or the parent was in jail. “Older women are more able to deal with grief. For older men, it is seen as a weakness. They use a lot of denial. And then they take it out on other people.”
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http://m.spokesman.com/stories/2009/dec/19/the-making-of-a-scrooge/

It's an old link from 2009.

We're social creatures. If we had a way to connect again, over a bowl of beans, be able to talk - something, but most importantly not let people slip through the cracks and withdraw so easily - might be a few less incidents to deal with, in those who have aged and those who started thinking that way too early.

Or maybe we have passed that point.