It's six o'clock on a Sunday afternoon, and Paco is heading back to the nursing home after having lunch at home with his family. The moment he steps out the door in his wheelchair, Antonia, his wife, collapses onto the sofa. "This breaks my heart," she says, unable to stop the tears from streaming down her cheeks. A recent decline in Paco's health has forced him to move into a care facility while she continues to live at home. Antonia has cared for her husband for years, even at the expense of her own health, and although the situation was no longer sustainable, they tried to postpone his move as long as possible to avoid being separated. Like them, many elderly couples are forced to separate after a lifetime together. While moving into a care facility is often the most logical decision at this stage of life, taking the step involves emotional difficulties. Paco is experiencing this change with some anxiety, because he says that many elderly people die in the center and that he would like to be surrounded by his family in his final days. "The centers are often the final destination; therefore, being admitted can bring with it a more existential loneliness, the feeling of never having been so close to death," acknowledge Laura Coll-Planas, a doctor with the Catalan Society of Geriatrics, part of the Academy of Medical Sciences of Catalonia, and Dolors Fitó, a member of the same society representing residents.

I'd been away for a few days from someone I interact with daily, someone you have casual conversations with, exchange a quick joke now and then, and then it was off to work. When I saw her again, I asked where she'd been during her absence, and before I'd even strung two sentences together, she burst into tears to explain the turmoil caused by her increasingly dependent mother. She loves her unconditionally, but she's realized that if she doesn't create some physical and emotional distance, she'll suffocate—a conclusion she reached after several pangs of guilt, not without a heavy burden of responsibility as a daughter (more tears), but one she no longer questions for an obvious reason. Anyone who's been through it knows it's a terrible time in adulthood, because everyone involved suffers, because the burden of care often falls on women, and because the outcome is predetermined and not a happy one.

Michel Foucault proposes a very apt dichotomy to define our ambivalent relationship with what we have called "the welfare state." While the pre-modern state "kills and lets live," the contemporary state "makes live and lets die." I also recall another one that always makes me think: "Health has replaced salvation." These are memorable summaries that show us that the Leviathan is no longer an impersonal and distant force that merely punishes those who break the law, but has become a solicitous agent whose main function is to watch over the population, and which incorporates a function that was formerly the monopoly of the Church: caring for souls. All this may seem quite abstract, but it becomes concrete if we think about the conflicting feelings that almost everyone has experienced as a result of the country's lockdown due to the storm and the proliferation of mobile phone alerts. What should we do about the irritation we feel toward the state's excessive care?

We've all been there: a loved one tells us they're going through a difficult time, and we feel compelled to react. Let's take a sadly common example: a friend tells us that they or a family member is seriously ill. Many, many of us, despite being genuinely affected by the news, simply write a WhatsAppHowever often we hear the phrase, once it's written down, it becomes a cliché: "I'm so sorry," "Cheer up!", "If you need anything, you know where to find me," "Everything will be alright."

"I consider myself a somewhat atypical grandfather because, for a number of reasons, including the fact that I don't live in the same city as my grandchildren, I'm a long-distance grandfather. Also, because of my personality and hobbies, I have a pretty busy life with a number of activities I do regularly, and therefore, I don't have Josep available either." His case is less common, but increasingly prevalent in a context where intensive care for grandchildren has been a social pillar. Although there's no manual for being a grandparent, the data reflects a well-established pattern: 42% of Spanish grandparents (between 55 and 69 years old) with minor grandchildren take care of them daily or at least once a week, mainly because the parents can't (41%). These tasks include picking them up from school or extracurricular activities (39%) and doing leisure activities like going to the park or for a snack (39%). according to the V Mapfre Foundation Senior Consumer Barometer (2025)

Suffocated between two diaper sizes. Invisible amidst digital calendars that remind us of appointments with other people's "first-degree" relatives. Crushed by an army of human resources that treats us as if we were being given "vacation" to demand hard-won rights. Buried in a system that thrives on us, women in our forties and fifties who care, work, and care, care, care, care until others take over and care for us, care, care, care; or not.

She goes into the nail shop, whose name is amusing—in Spanish, of course—and which refers to the bad name a wicked stepmother can have, with nails as red as if she'd just ripped out a chicken's heart. "Yesterday I was planting peas," she excuses herself. Her nails are "in mourning," as they used to say: she'd heard her grandparents say it, when they were working. "Could I just get a little fix?" she asks. And the worker, Yoli, tells her yes, of course, but that she'll have to register her first. She was schooled in Catalan and speaks it perfectly. Her parents speak it immediately; they're Ecuadorian. She came to live in Catalonia when she was nine. She lives in Hospitalet, and to get to Barcelona, ​​she explains, she takes the metro to the university area and then the bus. It takes an hour, between everything.

There is a commodity scarcer than water and more precious than gold: the time that eludes us. Everyone talks about it, everyone pursues it, but not everyone possesses it equally. In societies that advance and generate new rights, the right to time emerges with force. But who can truly exercise it?

The temporary demographic imbalance caused by the fall in the birth rate, combined with the more permanent increase in life expectancy, is leading to a pronounced aging of European populations. This is turning the provision of care to the elderly into a critical issue.

Accessorizing dogs and cats is a common practice. Nowadays, it's no longer just bows and coats. Especially in the summer, accessories of all kinds proliferate: hats, flip-flops, and even costumes, which are added to aesthetic practices such as painting their nails or dyeing their hair. Behind all this, for the most part, there is a process of humanization—or rather, anthropomorphization—of animals, that is, an attribution of human characteristics to beings that are not. Experts warn that, while some humanization is inevitable and the result of coexistence, the use of certain ornaments and the desire to follow trends funny In the eyes of others, they can put the well-being and health of animals at risk.

This Tuesday's protest is the second in two months that the Union of Mothers with Functional Diversity (SinMaDiF) has called before the Ministry of Social Rights and Inclusion to demand more financial and human resources to cover the needs of dependent people and their primary caregivers, a role that falls in 90% of cases on mothers, women, or women. They denounce that "the abandonment" they suffer is institutional sexist violence because, when a family member is diagnosed, "rights go out the window" and the family is left with the "horrible loneliness" of having to seek services, resources, and support to get by. "We can't take it anymore!" they exclaim.

They find it funny, even mocking, that so many women spend their afternoons doing what they contemptuously call "adult extracurricular activities." And it's true that reading clubs, conferences, workshops at community centers, and courses on a wide variety of subjects are mostly supported by an attendance almost always made up of women of a certain age. Men who prefer to devote their remaining vital energy to watching a couple of dozen children in shorts chasing a ball don't wonder how women behave this way, how they have acquired this hyperactivity. First, because they have no interest in little boys running around on the grass, and second, because many of them are part of a generation that has never been able to do what they wanted, that has gradually put aside, over the years and decades, all those interests that weren't strictly useful for supporting family life and other work. Some complain about this massive and normalized theft. One of them expressed it with reasonable indignation: "Now I realize that I've been deceived my whole life." Others remain silent, leaving their husbands "staring at them on television" (a phrase used by a Valencian feminist when explaining her beginnings in equality associations in the 1970s and how she managed to attend meetings), and have their own time now that they no longer have to care for children, grandchildren, parents, or even friends.