The medical staff of the Chilean Foundation awarded the Matilde Maresca International Prize, in their daily work of assistance and comfort for the old in the various institutes all around the country (picture on the left and below).

But when you are alone and without light, like the old man in the cafe! When you have to return home and meet yourself! When the feeling of nada weighs on your soul, then how is it possible not to feel despair? Not try to kill oneself? It isn't possible to live with nada.
As long as you are young it is different: it is possible to fill life with exciting adventures, you can get drunk and live outside yourself, forgetting the true human condition.
But when the body begins to disintegrate and one can hear, albeit still distant, the steps of that «obscene thing» which is death, then it is difficult to continue living.
And this is what happened to Hemingway. On the morning of 2nd July 1961, when he was only 61, he took his life with a shotgun.
He saw the vanity of the many things with which he had filled his life - hunting, wars, women, wandering, literature - and the presence of nada prevented him from facing old age.
If living - as he believed - meant chasing and trying out new sensations, with intensity and dignity, it had no sense. It is better to do away with it by killing yourself.
The hero of Giovanni Arpino's novel Passo d'addio drags out his days under the same closed and empty horizons.
A former professor of mathematical logic, old and decrepit, he lives with regrets and memories, threatened by diminishing faculties and the «repugnant Nothing». A shell of a man.
Without any scientific or religious beliefs, cared for by two dried-up spinsters, without interests or emotional ties, without either earthly or unearthly hope, he courts and invokes death, the only prospect for an old man for whom «life is either style or error» (3).

For him, it is now error. So it should be ended. It is what he wants, and what he will obtain, and so avoid showing himself as a fearful and detestable sight («[...] all old people frighten us, we want to keep well away from them because they disturb our illusory, stupid beauty»).
Solitude is another spectre which haunts the days of many old people. It is a loneliness which is condemnation, alienation and isolation and which brings resentment, hate and desperation along with it.
The old man, victim of this solitude, is a social outcast, locked in himself; someone excluded from the banquet of life, feeding himself with rancour, a living being who chooses to live in the cemetery.
In a bitter and melancholy story, Dino Buzzati writes about the old Signora Luisa, reduced to living in an attic as a baleful presence. At the back of a drawer she has found a photo of young school children with her among them. Finally she can relieve her solitude. How? By recalling the misadventures and deaths of her companions.
«Alone, in the cold, in this loathsome attic, without anyone to care about me, with my bad heart, poor, without any teeth, despicable to look at, this is Luisa!... And I'm not sleepy, the night is long, and no one will come to visit me... Let me console myself by telling you how they died!» (4).

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(3) G. Arpino, Passo d'addio, Einaudi, Turin 1986, 3.
(4) D. Buzzati, In quel preciso momento, Neri Pozza, Venice 1955, 106.D.

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