The loneliness of the disconnected

An elderly woman was found dead in Sydney early this month. She lived by herself and she died all by herself in her own home. This was not in itself an unusual occurrence. But then it turned out that that she had been dead the past eight years and no one had known, no one had come to visit or cared enough about her to at least report her missing. Her last known contact with the outside world was with her older brother and his wife who lived on the other side of Sydney. She made a short visit to them back in 2003 when she was 79 years old. When she left to go home to Surry Hills, Sydney, that was the last time she was ever seen alive.

Her name was Natalie Jean Wood. Her lonely death made all the headlines. The media called her “the woman a city forgot”. There was a good deal of handwringing and puzzled queries from the general public as to how such a thing could happen in modern times.

But it did happen. Could happen again, too. In the last decade of her life, Mrs. Wood had been disconnected from society. There may be other such lonely and disconnected people in the world.

The papers carried photos of her as a young lady, pretty and vibrant in the postwar years.

She had been married but the marriage didn’t work out. They divorced and he moved interstate and died young. She had no children. She raised no pets. Her parents died, leaving the family home to her. When Mrs. Wood retired from work in her sixties, she had no known close friends; she only had her brother and his wife and they lived in East Sydney. They rarely saw each other. Starting back in the 1990s, Mrs. Wood started to be reclusive, not answering door knocks and at most, acknowledging neighbors’ greetings with a distant wave. When her death became known, her own next door neighbor said he had not seen her for over 20 years and thought she had closed the house down and moved away. Mail had been redirected to her brother’s address. She had no telephone, no computer, and no outside mail box for junk mail to accumulate in.

When her brother developed cancer in 2005, the sister-in-law came to visit. No one answered the door and neighbors said there was no one there. The power connections had been cut. She then went to the police who were reluctant to take the matter further since local records indicated no one to be residing at that place anymore. Amazingly, social workers from the local council had reportedly visited Mrs. Wood’s house and reported the same thing, based on neighbors’ reports.

Even more amazingly, the local council (municipal office) had not taken action even though property rates had gone unpaid for a number of years. Again, somebody from the local council office had visited the property, noted that gas, water and electricity had been disconnected, asked around and was told vaguely that the homeowner may have had dementia and moved away. In February, 2008, some cog in some computer mainframe clicked and Social Security stopped pension payments to her account. This might have been the final disconnection.

The brother died in December, 2009, aged 90. Late last month, as the widowed sister-in-law packed her belongings to sell off their house and move in with her own family, she came across property documents to Mrs. Wood’s house. The documents had been left with them for safekeeping almost two decades ago. A solicitor was asked to contact Mrs. Wood to turn over the documents or do whatever else was necessary to determine the proper disposition of Mrs. Wood’s residence. When no one answered the door, the solicitor went to the police. This time, they broke the door open. They found only her skeletal remains.

Apparently Mrs. Wood died of natural causes and there were no suspicious circumstances. Her bank account and corresponding records were intact, even reflecting the last social security payments which were automatically credited to her account before the bureaucrats disconnected her.

From the news reports, there is no suggestion at all that she died unhappy. In fact, she died as she had lived - a recluse - and that was her own choice. Her sister-in-law said it best in an interview: Natalie just didn’t want to be found ….when people hide away and don’t want to be found, there’s not really much you can do.

Not much really, I guess. Mrs. Wood had no one really to connect to, and in the end, she chose not to remain linked with anyone at all. I see the point of the bloggers who have written in sad admiration of her achieving the ultimate in privacy. In a world gone hypersocial with emailing, texting, facebooking and twittering, here was a lady who shrunk away from other living creatures and just faded away, like her old-style floral curtains.

Most people, elderly and lonely too, make other choices. I mind my mother-in-law, whose first year death anniversary is coming up soon this August (and will be observed by kith and kin in three separate countries) had made her choice firmly and in sound mind. Mommy was not, and never wanted to be, disconnected from the human race.

She was an American citizen but in 2005, she made the decision to come home to Manila for good. The arthritis had quelled her mobility quite a bit and though she was well taken care of by her children in L.A., the reality was that they all worked for a living and she was usually alone the whole day, with only cable TV for company. There are no maids in the U.S., as we know, no “kasambahay”.

For all her life, Mommy had been surrounded by family and extended family. No, she would not end her days in the sterile and forced cheeriness of an aged care facility. Advertise for a ladies’ companion ? That was not her style.

So Mommy came home to the Philippines, aged 82, to be cared for and kept company by her youngest daughter, the only one left in the old country, and the only housewife among her children. In time, Mommy faded away too, became bedridden and progressively weaker, and died peacefully in her own room, surrounded by family still. Though weak and ailing, she had stayed in the family loop, with her birthdays annually celebrated with reunion parties and overseas phone link-ups. Her daughter bathed her and cared for her as well as she could; her grandchildren would come to her room on weekends and in the evenings, and listen bemusedly as she talked of people long gone, or who only existed in faded photographs. But the connection was there; she remained one of us and part of us, till the day she died.

Maybe that’s what matters in the end – being part of the main, a clod but a part of the Continent, that if washed away, diminishes the rest of us, as John Donne put it. This is the mantra of our society: no man is an island.

Opinion bloggers in Melbourne and Sydney have been waxing philosophical about Natalie Jean Wood’s unlinking of herself from the rest of us. Maybe, they muse, she was better off being spared from the forced bonhomie and Hi-how-are-you-today robotic chatter from supermarket check-out cashiers and the assorted insincere Have-a-nice-day greetings from passing strangers. Maybe she found greater comfort in solitude than in cell phone conversation. Maybe the other people who crossed her life lines had all gone away and those left were not interesting enough to link with. Maybe.

I am thinking maybe the Pinoy (Asian?) philosophy of family first, last and always, provides the hedge that protects us from the loneliness of Western individualism. Gee, that does sound a bit pompous. What I’m trying to say is that to a people who daily wake up to the sound of the next door family’s TV Balita blaring over breakfast and endures elbow to elbow siksikan in jeep, LRT, sidewalk, office and mall, privacy is a distant concept. You can hardly ever keep a household secret in Manila, let alone such a distressing event as a death in the family.

People whose lives constantly intersect with other lives do not go gentle into that good night. We will miss them too much to allow them to go away forgotten and alone.

Melbourne, Australia

22 July 2011

Photo: “Old Woman” by Andrey Pivovarov, c/o Flickr. Some Rights Reserved

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