When People Die and No One Notices

This story kept sticking with me. So I thought I’d comment. Recently, a man was found mummified in front of a blaring TV set. They estimate he’d been dead for about a year. His neighbors didn’t really notice, thinking he’d been shipped off to a home. Apparently, no family checked in, or there was no family. There were no friends or anyone else to check in either.

How does this happen? There’s lots of issues here, like how we dismiss the elderly and tend to warehouse them and how we can be so isolated in a modern society that is all about communication and interaction.

But what I keep coming back to is probably a universal fear we all share. What if we die and no one notices? This is a case of it happening quite literally, but doesn’t it happen every day? I guess we all like to think we make a difference, have caring friends and family. However, under the right string of circumstances this could probably happen to any of us.

I guess I’m particular sensitive to this issue, since I have a personal experience along these lines. Years ago, when I lived in Woodland Hills, a nice intown little neighborhood, I had an elderly next door neighbor. She was nice enough, not the friendliest person, but a retired professional, educated, having a nice little home. I remember she smoked a lot of pot, mostly with her maintenance man who seemed to be his main visitor.

We had pretty typical small ranch houses, close together, and the windows on the side were high on the walls, so you could see into the next house if the curtains were open, but only the top part of the room. I’d often put my tie on in the living room on the way out the door by a big mirror there. The way the mirror sat I also got a view of my neighbors back room. I noticed one day there was a note stuck to the wall. Just like a piece of notebook or legal paper taped right to the wall. I remember at the time wondering that it was, and deciding it was probably a note to her handy man, Something like instructions on painting the wall or something.

A week passed, then another, in the third week I came home after work one day to find all this activity in my neighbors yard. There was an ambulance, the police, other cars. Turns out my neighbor had quietly killed herself, and the note I was seeing everyday as I put on my tie, was not some instructions for the handyman, but actually her suicide note. A note that hung on the wall, right over the couch on which she lay dead. A body that just because of the way the windows were laid out, I just barely couldn’t see.

So how does this happen?

How does someone pass away in front of their TV set and not be discovered until a year later?