[Ugnet] MARRY LIVED 3 DOORS FROM MINE We just did not know, it is sad the way we live.

Edward Mulindwa Tue, 29 Mar 2005 04:54:10 -0800

Alone in life and in death

JOE FIORITO

Mary was 62 years old. She lived on an upper floor in a highrise apartment building in St. James Town. She lived alone and she died alone. The shock is not that she died.

The shock is that she died six months ago and her body was not found until Tuesday.

None of us is spared a death, but how is it possible for a woman to die in her apartment and not be missed by anyone for so long that her lifeless body decays, dries up and mummifies where it falls?

I went to Mary's building, on Wellesley St. E., yesterday and talked to a couple of tenant representatives. Dorothy Butler has lived in St. James Town for 25 years. Cliff Martin has lived there for 17 years.

Dorothy knew Mary slightly. "She was a big woman. Her legs would swell up like this. She had to go to the hospital last year, quite a while ago. The fire department came. They put her on a stretcher. She wouldn't fit into the ambulance, so they had to call a Wheel-trans van to take her. She hadn't been out of the house for three months."

At least she was alive.

But how did she survive for those three months without ever leaving her apartment? "There was a crackhead on her floor," said Dorothy. "He lived down the hall from her. She used to give him money for groceries." Cliff said, "He was more of a wino." Dorothy said, "Well, he'd bring her food from the food bank and then he'd spend the money she gave him on wine."

Cliff said, "I went up to her apartment once. She was about to be evicted. She was delusional. I called a lawyer for her, and he called the property manager and they managed to call the sheriff off. Her place was dirty and messy and barren. She didn't have a lot of furniture and she was incapable of cleaning. She was on social assistance, but she wasn't getting any home help."

Dorothy said, "Her place was bare of furniture because she needed the room to walk. Her floors were black. The ambulance driver asked how long she'd been living like that."

Too long, too long.

When Mary came home from the hospital, in spite of all the signs of trouble in her life, it seems that nobody came to look in on her, and nobody called her, and nobody came to her door, and then she died, and it seems that she was not missed.

How was she finally found?

"She got behind in her rent," said Cliff. "She was getting an Ontario disability pension, and her rent payment was automatically deducted, but every now and then ODSP has a computer hiccup and she didn't get her money, so she didn't pay for a month."

You'd think that someone would have smelled the sickly sweet smell of decay during all those months? "The window was open," said Cliff. He shook his head. "I'd like there to be an inquest. This shouldn't happen." He's right. It shouldn't.

And we all should pray that if we are ill, we will get some sort of help so that we do not die before our time, and we all should pray for a shred of dignity so that, when death comes, we do not simply rot where we fall.

Cliff took me up in the elevator to Mary's floor; it was safe to go up because most of the crackheads are at rest during the day. There was no sign or smell of death by Mary's door.

A man who lives down the hall walked by, and I asked if he knew her. He said, "I've lived here 14 years. I don't know anybody. It goes with the territory. This place is like a cage. You come in, you go out. This is normal. But I know it is not right."

He has to pass in front of her door on his way to the elevator. "Nobody smelled anything. If we would have smelled, we would have called."

Of Mary he said, "Had we been of the same culture, somebody would have called. Normally human beings are social creatures, but there is no atmosphere here to promote that. Where I come from" � he comes from East Africa � "all the doors are open. Here, everyone is hostile."

Hostile and alone and afraid.

As I was leaving, I bumped into Lisa Henderson. She is a senior property manager for Greenwin, the company that looks after the building in which Mary died. She looked shaken. I asked about Mary.

Lisa said, "I don't have an answer. Even social services wasn't aware. She just slipped through the cracks � no next of kin, no family." Her eyes misted over. She looked away. She took a breath. "You might as well know. We found another one." Another one what?

"I was looking at the people who hadn't paid their rent for a while. I knocked on this man's door a couple of days ago. There was no answer. I just went up again, just now, a couple of hours ago. I wanted to see if he was in. I had security with me. There was no answer when I knocked, security had a key. The chain was on the door. He broke the chain." And the two of them went in and found a man named Janos. He, too, lived alone and died alone and he, too, was not missed.

How long had he been dead? Lisa said, "He was mummified."

No next of kin, no close friends, the window of his apartment open. And someone said Janos was an artist, and someone said he liked his privacy, and that he didn't believe in doctors, and that he was doing his own thing, and he deserved to be left alone.

What he did not deserve was to fall dead and to lie rotting in his apartment for months until, through some glitch, his rent payment stopped kicking in and someone went to check on him.

How can this be? Public housing is not, or it ought not to be, a kind of existential warehousing for the poorest, the weakest, the most vulnerable in our midst. We ought not to be condemned to live without human contact, save for random encounters with crackheads.

Are we not all in this together? Is Mary not your sister? Is Janos not your brother? Do we not have some responsibility for each other?

[Ugnet] MARRY LIVED 3 DOORS FROM MINE We just did not know, it is sad the way we live.

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