It takes ALL the villagers...

CAUTION: This is about death. A little bit.

Recently, our long-time friend and community stalwart, we’ll call him Bob (not his real name), was in distress. We used to see him around town, or at Friday night “church” at our local watering hole, but we hadn’t seen him for a while. We just figured he doesn’t go out much anymore.

It’s hard to know the actual chain of events, but essentially, Bob, who is our age and lives alone, had fallen and couldn’t get up, just like the old commercial. He doesn’t really know how long he was on the floor. He says he was screaming for help. He also says he had NPR at top volume on his radio. He also says he was “visited” by an elderly Black woman who sat in the corner, and that a large group of people moved in with him. Neither the old woman nor the group would talk to him, though he remembers talking to them. He says he was on the floor for 3 days, and that he hadn’t had anything to eat or drink for at least that long, probably longer. And he either fell once or more than once.

Finally, a neighbor in the complex heard Bob yelling, found a manager with a key, and went in. They got him up in a chair, and he called our friend L. She called us, and we all converged on Bob’s apartment. Somehow, though he’s typically a pretty stubborn guy, we talked him into going into the ER, “just to check him over.” He needed help to stand and walk. Of course they admitted him.

We never got the straight scoop from the docs, but it seems his heart enzymes (he’d had a previous heart attack and had ended up on a ventilator that time—a very narrow escape) and his kidney function were wonky, and that at some point, he’d broken his tailbone. He was down almost to my high school weight (I looked damn fine in HS, but on Bob it’s skeletal) and was completely dehydrated. He may have been living on Coke and Camels for a while before this.

While Bob was in the hospital inching back from the brink, we all went over and cleaned his apartment, enough to make it a safer place to live. Bob hadn’t had much strength for a good long while, so things had been piling up around him. He’d been too weak to get very far, even around his apartment, and he hadn’t been able stand at the stove and cook. He didn’t have a microwave. Even if he had been able to cook, he’d lost enough weight so that his teeth no longer fit. At this point, he looked like he’d been living under the Dakota Street bridge, and he was so weak, he needed help to get up from a chair. I’m sure no one in the hospital would have believed that Bob is among the most talented folks we know...book…cover….

We never dreamed the powers/angels would allow him to go back home again and live alone. But after 2 days in the hospital, they sent him home. And here’s the rub: While we were getting him settled back in his apartment, a family gathered down the hall outside another apartment. Soon the police arrived. Then the coroner. What started as a “welfare check” became an “unattended death.” I suppose this brought back my horror when some years ago, they found my friend and former paramour Dave dead on his toilet, in his house where he lived alone. He’d been there a couple days. There are other stories I could tell of family and friends who died alone, but you get the idea.

So here’s my real point: I’m not afraid to die. I know we’re all headed there from the day we’re born, and that in a philosophical sense, we’re each alone when we go. BUT, I don’t want to be an “unattended death”—to be discovered after days (or longer), discarded, alone. And it’s not that I care about the state of my body once I don’t need it anymore, and maybe I won’t care about anything else at that point; it’s just that I believe we each deserve to leave this life in some measure of love, or at least with company to say bon voyage.

For now, our “Bob Team” has come up with a daily call schedule to check on Bob. Home Health will set up visits with him starting next week, IF he’ll agree to it. Did I mention he’s stubborn?

I can’t tell you how grateful I am to live in my Little Town community, with friends who I know will check on me if I go silent for too long. I wish that the person down the hall from Bob had had someone who missed her/him sooner—there’s no blame here; we all just assume things are okay until they’re not. But it’s a powerful reminder for us all not to wait. Call. Stop by. Send someone over. Don’t be afraid to get involved. Because regardless of age, it takes a village—all of us—to raise a villager.