I just read in the Toronto Star that an elderly man who was missing for four and half years was finally found. Just think– missing for four years! His family must have been absolutely thrilled to find him.
Except that, well, he wasn’t feeling very well when they found him. In fact, he was sicker than a dog. He was so sick, there wasn’t much of a pulse. A long time between beats. They’re still waiting for one.
When he went missing, they must have hunted high and low for, well, at least fifteen minutes. Actually, there was no “they”. Nobody looked for him, because if anyone had looked for him, they would have found him right where he could almost always be found. He died in his own home.
In his bedroom.
No one noticed. For four years. No one missed him. No one wondered why he didn’t answer the phone anymore. No one checked to see why they didn’t get their usual Christmas card or anniversary phone call. No one, so it appears, even wondered why he hadn’t paid his heating bills.
I guess he must have lived in some isolated cabin somewhere, deep in the woods, far from any cell phone service.
Somewhere about two blocks from his wife and daughter. In the same town. Just down the street.
The body was not– how shall we put this delicately?– “pristine”. In fact, the body wasn’t there at all, which leads you to wonder what the police meant when they said they found “a body”. What they found were pieces of bones and stuff. Actually, the stuff was all gone. But they did find the bones. And the skeletons of a few cats. I don’t know if they used carbon dating or what, but it has been established that the cats died after the man did, of starvation, but not, as it were, before exhausting all the protein available in the house. Bad kitty.
Of course, some things are better left unspoken. And I’m sure the RCMP forensics laboratory has better things to do with their time, but I really think we ought to investigate the shady activities of those cats. Consider this: a few years ago, a man in London, Ontario, was given a fine for trying to drown some puppies in a creek. Now, if we are going to regard humans killing animals as criminal activity, why shouldn’t the reverse be true as well? And seeing as there is fairly compelling evidence here that those cats may have exceeded the bounds of feline decency, I think there ought at least to be an investigation. No one is advocating the death penalty here– but I think that at least a hefty fine is in order, if only as a deterrence.
Mostly, I am moved by the fact that a man can lay dead in his home for four years. He was a baby once, crying for his mama’s tit, gurgling and giggling at his grandpa’s faces. He was a toddler, exploring and playing and stretching and dreaming of noises and flashes, and a young boy on a tire swing seeking adventure, and a youth impatiently wishing he could be grown up, and a man going off to war because it seemed honorable, and an apprentice learning his craft, hoping to be a success. He met a girl, was charmed, and he courted and maybe even loved, and in the first flush of marriage was possibly an attentive, caring husband whose arrival home from work everyday brought laughter and joy into the house. He had children whom he bounced on his knee and sang little nonsense songs to. Maybe he changed jobs, moved to different places, tried to learn new trades, to provide for his family, to pay for the rare pleasure of a trip to the lake and an ice cream cone for everyone. He bought his first car, got cheated, smashed his fist on the hood in anger and learned painful lessons of commerce. He must have had friends, and relatives, with some of whom he was not on speaking terms. He probably had some disappointments, some bitter defeats. Perhaps he started drinking, and grew sullen and unpleasant. His friends died, moved away, disappeared, argued with him, and stopped coming to visit, and stopped inviting him to join them for a drink or two and checkers down at the Legion. His own former wife and daughter lived two blocks away and never came to see him, not once, in four years, not at Christmas, not on his birthday. He must have spent a long time in his room, watching the world go by on a blue glass tube, hearing the noises of the outside world, and believing that his life had completely unwound itself and the only thing to wait for was hiding for him, behind the grimace of a cat.