There are days when 74-year-old "Anna" is perfectly content with a book, some music and her dog by her side. There are others when the quiet feels different.

After losing the people who knew her best, she has found that growing older alone can mean missing not just company, but the familiarity of being truly known.

Speaking to The Malta Independent on Sunday, Anna said that for her, loneliness is not simply being alone. She enjoys her independence, her books, her music and her pet's company.

What she misses is something less easily replaced - the familiarity of having someone who knows your moods and quirks, and with whom even silence can feel like company.

"There is no familiarity anymore. One normally goes home and sometimes a person - your mother, your father, your boyfriend, your husband, whoever - all they need to do is look at you, and they know. They know what you're feeling, your mood. Now I have lost all that."

Anna - not her real name - was not always accustomed to such quiet.

She grew up surrounded by her parents, grandparents and her mother's aunt, in what she remembers as a large and close family.

She later married, but never had children, and over the years the family around her gradually became smaller.

Her husband died more than 10 years ago, before pensionable age was reached. Afterwards, Anna still had her mother, whom she cared for at home until her death. Eventually, she found herself living alone.

It is a situation she speaks about without self-pity. Anna said that she is comfortable in her own company and does not want somebody beside her around the clock.

But being comfortable alone, she has found, does not prevent loneliness.

Although she has friends, she believes there is a particular closeness that comes from spending years of everyday life with somebody - the kind of relationship in which little needs to be explained.

"Although I have friends, they don't know me, because they haven't grown with me," she said.

Her marriage was unconventional and, by Anna's own account, far from perfect. Her husband was a "free spirit" who once spent three years abroad, and the couple lived separately to an extent without ever separating.

Yet they were always there when they needed each other, Anna said.

When Anna fell ill, he returned to care for her. Later, when he became ill himself, she was there to care for him.

"It was a relationship that many people didn't understand, but it was there, and we always had each other's backs when it was necessary," she said.

What she misses now is not necessarily constant conversation. Sometimes it is simply another person occupying the same house.

"Having someone there even if you do not talk - what I call a comfortable silence, another breath in the house."

After her husband died, her mother remained that familiar presence. Anna described her as her "cushion" and "safe place", and even when she became bedridden and could no longer physically support her daughter, Anna said she could still feel her presence and love.

When she lost that too, another absence became apparent.

"What I miss is the giving," she said. "I have no one to give my time to, my day to, my evening to. I eat on my own, make my meals on my own."

Anna said she finds weekdays easier to navigate, partly because they give her a sense of routine and more opportunities to occupy her time, while weekends tend to bring a greater awareness of the quiet around her.

She deliberately gives herself slow mornings after promising herself upon retirement that she would never again wake up at 6am.

Then, she reads, does housework, prepares food and, weather permitting, takes the dog for a walk.

Classic FM is frequently playing in the house, and upstairs, an internet radio allows her to listen to BBC Radio 4 discussions about literature and other subjects.

She still writes little passages of her own and occasionally shares them with a small circle of friends online.

Keeping her mind active is important to Anna, although weekends can be more difficult, as many of the people she knows have husbands, partners, children or grandchildren and she is reluctant to intrude on their family time, even when they tell her she can call.

"I don't want to be a demanding friend. Sometimes all Saturday and all Sunday, I do not use my voice except to talk to the dog."

After a pause, she added: "It's like I'm not part of the world."

Anna had wanted children herself and, as a young woman, imagined getting married and having a family, but health problems meant she could not have children.

Instead, she built a working life and maintained her independence, graduating in English language and literature, later studying librarianship and taking numerous courses simply because she enjoyed learning.

She even took a journalism course and, some years ago, contributed a handful of articles to a magazine. That desire to learn has not disappeared with age.

"Let me make the most of what is left. Let me enjoy my mind. Let me keep my mind active," she said, laughing at one of the standard suggestions made to older people.

"Let me not go and play tombola, please. I don't like playing tombola."

She has tried groups aimed specifically at people experiencing circumstances similar to hers, but found they sometimes made things worse.

Joining a widows' group, she said, left her thinking constantly about being a widow: "Then, you become defined by the group that you join."

She would rather volunteer in a library, attend a concert, take a course or spend an afternoon learning to knit, but the distances involved in getting there have increasingly made such activities difficult.

Anna experiences pain which limits how far she can comfortably walk.

Even relatively short distances can become difficult, particularly during the summer heat, meaning that simply walking to an activity or relying on public transport is not always a practical alternative.

Anna gave up driving around two years ago as traffic became more stressful, a decision she now regrets to some extent, while taxi services that initially gave her freedom have become difficult to sustain on a pension.

A roundtrip to a jazz performance in Senglea, for example, cost around €40 in transport alone, while volunteering at church archives in Tal-Virtù, something well suited to her professional background, would again require regular spending on transport.

She has looked into council and government services, but said their hours, geographical limits and need for advance booking do not always accommodate appointments, evening concerts or other activities.

Anna said that she is not asking for free transport, suggesting instead some form of subsidised or "frequent user" arrangement for older people who regularly rely on private transport, particularly those living alone.

"I want to enjoy my home. I want to go out in the evening to the theatre or to somewhere, and I want to come back home. But it seems it is too much to ask."

For Anna, this is also about resisting assumptions about what an older person's life should look like.

Having previously gone through serious illness and treatment, she appreciates that she can still shower, cook and look after herself, but being physically capable of staying home is not the same as having a fulfilling life.

"How can I feed my mind?" she asked.

Her concerns about living alone can become sharper in the early hours of the morning.

She recalled waking at around 2am on one occasion, becoming increasingly anxious and eventually taking a taxi to hospital alone.

"You start ruminating, and you stack thought upon thought upon thought. And then I went on my own."

There was once someone she could have called at that hour.

"People all have someone they can call at three o'clock in the morning if they get a panic attack or negative thoughts. Now, all I have is a helpline."

Her dog has been beside her through much of this transition.

Anna has had dogs since she was five, and her latest pet arrived before her mother's death, remaining with her as she cared for her mother, left the family home and moved into a smaller house without the memories accumulated over generations.

That old home contained almost her entire history: Anna was born there, married there and eventually watched her mother die there.

Moving somewhere without those memories, she said, was ultimately healthy, and the dog made the move with her.

Anna said she still misses the familiarity of human companionship, a feeling that comes to the fore when she sees couples sitting together in cafés, each absorbed in their own phone. "They're so lucky to have somebody to talk to. Talk to them. Don't look at your phone. They're so lucky they have another human being to be with."

She said she does not want her remaining years to revolve around waiting for occasional holidays or accepting that ageing means retreating from the things that interest her, although she recognises that the people she has lost have left an absence that cannot simply disappear.

"I know there is an emptiness I will always have because they are not here," she said.

People tell her that those she has lost are watching over her, but the sentiment does not change everyday life.

"I'm still a physical person. I still need people to talk to. I can't have conversations with a spirit, because I'm a human being still."

What she wants now is relatively simple: "I want to be happy for the time that I can be happy."

For Anna, that does not mean escaping her life twice a year on holiday.

"I would rather give up a holiday and be happy here because I'm going to a concert here and investing in my everyday life."

That everyday life - books, concerts, conversations, and evenings at the theatre - is what she wants to continue enjoying, while holding on to both the independence she values and her connection to the world around her.

Growing older alone should not mean gradually becoming removed from the world around her, as Anna said she still has the curiosity and independence to participate in it.

The name "Anna" is a pseudonym used to protect the subject's privacy, given the sensitive nature of the topic discussed.