JANUARY 15 — In 2014, 126 seniors aged 60 and above killed themselves. This is a jump of nearly 60 per cent from the 79 seniors who committed suicide in 2000. There were 95 of them in 2010 as reported by The Straits Times.

Read like this, the reality is abstract and shrouded in the detachment that statistics offer but if you take a moment to consider what’s happening it is heartbreaking.

In wealthy, shiny Singapore, it is easy to not think about things like elderly suicide and it is also easy to push it to the state.

Let the state create the safety nets to catch these individuals as they fall but the same article shares the more relevant insight behind the heavy headline.

It is not necessarily a lack of access to medical care or basic necessities — things that one can ordinarily and reasonably argue is the onus of the state — but rather it is social isolation that is proving to be the major issue.

The women and men who raised us feel alone and you can’t legislate for loneliness.

Singapore is a world-class city but many of its elderly suffer from social isolation. — Reuters pic

We have all read the occasional horrific case of elderly abuse with the most recent one I’ve seen chronicling the misery of an old woman caged by her son and daughter-in-law and these instances are abhorrent and for most of us it is easy to sit smug that we could never be so cruel to the the old people in our lives.

Yet, as awful as these anecdotes are, they are rare and the exception. The norm, however is a much less malicious cruelty — we ignore old people.

An entire life, an entire person is suddenly someone to rush past because we have so much to do that their fragility and frailty is annoying.

A friend wrote yesterday to grieve his grandmother’s recent passing and his one recurring thought was remorse — he fervently regretted all the evenings he returned home from work and walked right past the room of the woman who had loved him all his life and right to the TV.

Today, weeks after her death he finds walking past that empty room wrenching.

We spoke a little about why he did it — he loved her, he cared for her if ever she was ill or hospitalised — and in the end she passed away surrounded by her family and supported till the end but we struggled to explain why we take our old people for granted.

Is it so easy to forget we too will get old?

* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.