Last Updated on January 21, 2017
Okay, so I got it wrong.
I’d like to think that it doesn’t happen very often, but once in a while, I botch things. In this particular case, it’s the story of a woman who died alone in her home. Months later, her body was found only after her home was sold at auction because she failed to pay her property taxes.
It was March when her body was discovered, and only after the person who bought her home at auction, despite the fact that no one had set foot inside the house before the sale to have a look around, complained that a car was sitting there outside the home, apparently indicating that the former homeowner had no intent to vacate.
A few people took issue with what I said there, and I did this follow-up post.
These two posts led to some interesting comments, in which several people seemed to think I was unreasonable for suggesting that someone should have noticed her absence, even though she was a recluse, according to neighbors.
But here’s the fact error that may change things just a little: that “last transaction” that anyone can find a record of was in October of 2007, not 2008. Her power was cut off for non-payment in February of 2008, not just a month ago.
So it wasn’t, as I originally reported, as if she’d just been unaccounted for up to five months. No one would have heard from her, potentially, for up to seventeen months.
It was right there in the original news article, but I still managed to get the dates wrong. Sorry about that.
If you didn’t see your neighbor for seventeen months, despite a car that never moved, wouldn’t you notice?  Even if she was the rude, “leave me alone” type?
In my last post, I raised the issue of the postal carrier. Whether this woman had a mailbox on her property or a post office box elsewhere, seventeen months’ worth of junk mail should have gone somewhere. Seventeen months’ worth of junk mail should have gotten someone’s attention.
Unless the post office, like the electric company, just cut her service for non-payment and stopped there.
So what am I suggesting here? As I said last time, it’s not our job to be our neighbor’s keeper. To put it another way (as one of my longtime readers did), there’s nothing wrong with “minding our own business.”
But maybe it wouldn’t hurt us, once in a while, to at least take notice of the people around us, and look for ways to reach out when it becomes at least possible that everything may not be right.
I don’t think that’s too much to ask.
Because no matter how reclusive each of us thinks we really are, I suspect that there’s some part of us that really hopes our neighbors would do the same for us.
Yeah, I gotta agree with Cat, only my reaction didn’t even warrant the “that changes everything” part. Of course, I deal with odd stuff on a daily basis, so my reactions to this sort of stuff are pretty subdued.
I know this part will sound terrible, but with some of my neighbors, if I could go that long without running into any of them for more than a year, I’d probably be grateful. Horribly unsocial of me, I know, but that’s just me. I might share a neighborhood, but their company isn’t something I necessarily want.
Would I notice something seemed odd, though… after that length of time? Probably, but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything. I suppose the part that does strike me as odd is the part regarding the mail, but I’m not sure how the mail service deals with backed-up mail or if that’s even all that odd.
Hmmmm, this is interesting. My first reaction was, “Holy ****! A year, that changes everything!” And then I thought, no, really it doesn’t, not really. I dunno. I agree that we should all be more aware of those around us, but I can’t even tell you for sure what cars belong in which garages in my neighborhood, much less whether they’ve moved this week. [I would notice if the guy with the Harley never rode his bike–I love his Harley!] I recognize the kids and dogs, to a certain extent, and some of their parents (and owners)are good friends, but the other 150 houses in the neighborhood, I have no idea about anything.
To be honest, this story makes me sad because clearly this woman had no one. No relatives, no friends, no one. That’s the horrifying thing, that she lived her life so completely cut off from people that no one noticed when she stopped living. The sad part is the months/years before her death. How does someone cut themselves off from us so completely?
The flip side is that I’m unwilling to judge her neighbors and local social services for what seems pretty cold–there’s definitely some failure there, but who knows what the details are. I used to say I was going to grow up and become the neighborhood witch, the scary lady who kept weird pets and never cleaned her car. Then I realized that I actually like people, so this wasn’t going to work out.
I do wonder about the mail!
To be honest, of the surrounding houses, I *maybe* pay attention to or even bother to notice approximately three or four of them. The rest…meh…may as well not even be there. I’m not saying it’s something I’m terribly proud of, just being honest.