Late one night in January, Jonathan Coffino, 78, turned to his wife as they sat in bed.

“I don’t know how much longer I can do this,” he said.

Coffino was referring to the caution that’s come to define his life during the coronavirus pandemic. After two years of mostly staying at home and avoiding people, his patience is frayed and his distress is growing.

“There’s a terrible fear that I’ll never get back my normal life,” Coffino told me, describing feelings he tries to keep at bay. “And there’s an awful sense of purposelessness.”

Despite recent signals that the coronavirus’s grip on the country may be easing, many older adults are struggling with persistent malaise, heightened by the spread of the highly contagious omicron variant. Even those who adapted well initially are saying their fortitude is waning or wearing thin.

Like younger people, they’re beset by uncertainty about what the future may bring. But added to that is an especially painful feeling that opportunities that will never come again are being squandered, time is running out and death is drawing ever nearer.

“Folks are becoming more anxious and angry and stressed and agitated because this has gone on for so long,” said Katherine Cook, chief operating officer of Monadnock Family Services in Keene, New Hampshire, which operates a community mental health center that serves older adults.

“I’ve never seen so many people who say they’re hopeless and have nothing to look forward to,” said Henry Kimmel, a clinical psychologist in Sherman Oaks, who focuses on older adults.

To be sure, older adults have cause for concern.

Throughout the pandemic, they’ve been at much higher risk of becoming seriously ill and dying than other age groups. Even seniors who are fully vaccinated and boosted remain vulnerable: More than two-thirds of vaccinated people hospitalized from June through September with breakthrough infections were 65 or older.

For Kathleen Tate, 74, a retired nurse in Mount Vernon, Washington, the constant stress of wondering if she will be OK and what the future will look like has been hard. She has late-onset post-polio syndrome and severe osteoarthritis.

“I guess I had the expectation that once we were vaccinated, the world would open up again,” said Tate, who lives alone.

Although that happened for a while last summer, she largely stopped going out as first the delta and then the omicron variants swept through her area. Now, Tate said, she feels “a quiet desperation.”

This isn’t something Tate talks about with friends, though she’s hungry for human connection.

“I see everybody dealing with extraordinary stresses in their lives,” she said, “and I don’t want to add to that by complaining or asking to be comforted.”

Tate described a feeling of “flatness” and “being worn out” that saps her motivation.

“It’s almost too much effort to reach out to people and try to pull myself out of that place,” she said, admitting she’s watching too much television and drinking too much alcohol. “It’s just like I want to mellow out and go numb, instead of bucking up and trying to pull myself together.”

Beth Spencer, 73, a recently retired social worker who lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan, with her 90-year-old husband, is grappling with similar feelings during this typically challenging Midwestern winter.

“The weather here is gray, the sky is gray, and my psyche is gray,” she said. “I typically am an upbeat person, but I’m struggling to stay motivated.

“I can’t sort out whether what I’m going through is due to retirement or caregiver stress or COVID,” Spencer added, explaining that her husband was recently diagnosed with congestive heart failure. “I find myself asking, ‘What’s the meaning of my life right now?’ And I don’t have an answer.”

Bonnie Olsen, a clinical psychologist at USC’s Keck School of Medicine, works extensively with older adults and says the pandemic’s consequences on seniors’ emotional well-being has worsened overtime.

“At the beginning of the pandemic, many older adults hunkered down and used a lifetime of coping skills to get through this,” Olsen said. “Now, as people face this current surge, it’s as if their well of emotional reserves is being depleted.”

Most at risk are older adults who are isolated and frail, who were vulnerable to depression and anxiety even before the pandemic, or who have suffered serious losses and acute grief. Watch for signs that they are withdrawing from social contact or shutting down emotionally, Olsen said.

“When people start to avoid being in touch,” she said, “then I become more worried.”

Fred Axelrod, 66, of Los Angeles, who has a serious form of arthritis, lost three close friends during the pandemic: Two died of cancer and one of complications related to diabetes.

“You can’t go out and replace friends like that at my age,” said.

Now, the only person Axelrod talks to on a regular basis is his therapist.

“I don’t do anything. There’s nothing to do, nowhere to go,” Axelrod said. “There’s a lot of times I feel I’m just letting the clock run out. You start thinking, ‘How much more time do I have left?’”

Still, Kathie Supiano, an associate professor at the University of Utah College of Nursing, who oversees COVID-19 grief groups, said older adults’ ability to bounce back from setbacks shouldn’t be discounted.

“This isn’t their first rodeo,” Supiano said. “Many people remember polio and the AIDs epidemic. They’ve been through a lot and know how to put things in perspective.”

Alissa Ballot, 66, realized recently that she can trust herself to find a way forward. After becoming extremely isolated early in the pandemic, Ballot moved last November from Chicago to New York City. There, she found a community of new friends online at Central Synagogue in Manhattan and her loneliness evaporated as she began attending events in person.

With omicron’s rise in December, Ballot briefly became fearful that she’d end up alone again. But this time, something clicked as she pondered some of her rabbi’s spiritual teachings.

“I felt paused on a precipice looking into the unknown and suddenly I thought, ‘So, we don’t know what’s going to happen next, stop worrying,’”  Ballot said. “And I relaxed. Now I’m like, this is a blip, and I’ll get through it.”

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