An elderly man found dead in his home, a decade and a half later. Spain today; Portugal yesterday and, if we change nothing, tomorrow.
The question is simple and terrible: how is it possible? In a country with a health network, social services and police, in a neighborhood with condominiums, health centers, parish councils and neighbors, how do fifteen years pass without anyone noticing the accumulated mail, the light that doesn’t turn on, the silence that doesn’t get old?
What is revealed, beneath the well-behaved routine, is a selfish society: used to outsourcing care, delegating attention to the “system”, removing discomfort and protecting its own comfort, even when the price is the invisibility of others.
In Portugal, we have already seen this.
We saw elderly people left for days and weeks in hospital corridors, with no family to come and pick them up and no social plan to accompany them.
We have seen high “techniques” that are, in practice, administrative expulsions into nothingness.
We have seen violence disguised as impatience and abandonment hidden under the word “autonomy” when, in fact, it is helplessness. There is no guarantee that it will not happen again — because nothing structural has been done and because selfish indifference continues to be tolerated.
The right to dignity, physical and moral integrity, protection in illness and old age has no place in slogans; it requires mandatory signaling protocols, effective integration between health and social action, and responsibility.
Responsibility with name: State, local authorities, private social solidarity institutions, hospital administrations. And also the uncomfortable responsibility: family and neighborhood.
What fails is always the same.
Identification and monitoring fails, because there is no updated register of single people at risk, with data crossing from health centers, social security and local authorities; Without a map, people get lost.
Binding protocols fail: when an elderly person is hospitalized without support, discharge cannot be a ticket out of the void; it must automatically trigger a social response, home monitoring and legal support whenever there are signs of abandonment or violence.
Responsible neighborhood fails: it is not enough to think that the neighbor has gone to a home; it is necessary to check, report, knock on the door.
Indifference also kills.
This is not just a tragedy; It is a legal and ethical failure. A system that tolerates invisibility manufactures moral autopsies. And we, who write, legislate, judge and govern, cannot accept that loneliness is an administrative destiny.
Love is not legislated, but responsibility is legislated.
Tenderness is not required, but care is required. And when the State says “I don’t have the means”, the answer is: there is no cost more expensive than silent death.
A man spent fifteen years dead in a house in Spain. Time passed, the world changed and he didn’t.
The only question that matters is whether this can be tolerated here.
It cannot be tolerated.
And there will be no rest until the door that separates society from dignity is replaced by a network of care and responsibility that links it to essential duty: no one is left behind.