Ask not for whom the bell tolls ; it tolls for thee .... A heads up

[JimmyHAD]

Sammie was my upstairs neighbor the past 6 & 1/2 years. He was quiet enough that I rarely heard him moving around, thanks to his decorum, and to the concrete floors. He retired about the same time I did 3 years ago, and it was rare for me to see him.

He was a hermit and when his now deceased brother would come to the door yelling his name and banging on the door Sam would ignore him. The guy would go down and throw pebbles at the window until Sam finally acknowledged him, and invited him up.

Sam didn't answer his telephone either. His message box was always full. He never used the air conditioning, even in the heat of summer in FL. Said he didn't like it. His 73 Mercedes broke down finally a few years ago, and Sam left it parked. He would walk a couple of miles to the store and back.

This was how I got to know him. On the occasions when I was sitting on my porch, or out in front of the apt and Sam came walking up. He would strike up a conversation and usually it would be about his time in the army in Viet Nam, or Germany. The arguments he got into with his superior non-coms and officers, or supervisors at work, and those who rode the bus he drove when he was still working. More or less the same thing every time for years.

I finally got Sam to give me an email address in case I needed to contact him for any sort of emergency, like a water leak from upstairs, or whatever. He would answer email in a timely manner. We developed a rapport and he liked to talk with me, though he said no one wanted to talk with him. I could tell he was lonely, and it was not unusual that our paths wouldn't cross for weeks at a time.

My downstairs neighbor noticed an odor. Since I smoke tobacco pipes pretty much one after another my sense of smell is not as acute as hers. She called the association and the president came over. He and I went to Sam's bedroom window and I yelled his name, then we noticed there were flies all over the inside of the window.

After his body was removed I was speaking with the first LEO on the scene. He said it looked to him as if Sam had been on his way from the bedroom to the kitchen and suffered cardiac arrest in the living room. I hope that is what happened, I was pondering whether he died quickly, or might have had a stroke and laid there for days unable to communicate and suffering a slow death. The officer said it appeared, from the level of decomposition, that Sam had laid there for 3 weeks to a month.

The owner of the apt lives out of state and trusted me with a key to the premises from the association until he could come down the following week. So I let the bio hazard crew in to clean up the rug and sheet rock saturated with bodily fluids. Fortunately for me, living downstairs, we have concrete floors. The next of kin, a surviving brother came over, and Sam's 40 year old son, who he hadn't seen since he was a little boy, came in from out of state.

I asked the brother if they were close and he said Sam wasn't close with anyone. He didn't even go to the funeral, this past November, when they buried the brother that used to come see him once in awhile, and never attended any family functions. The son asked me, "What was he like ?" A sad story.

I hadn't been in Sam's apt until the bio hazard crew. He was a hoarder and in the two bedroom apt the larger of the two was stacked with boxes one on top of the other, from the far corner, to the door, with not even a corridor for access. The other bedroom and living room were not that bad, but still filled with clutter. The brother and the son took what they wanted out of all of this, then at the owner's request I got a signed and notarized document that he (the owner of the apt) could dispose of the contents of the apt as he saw fit.

I watched as all of Sam's stuff was carried down to either be trucked to Goodwill, a small portion supposedly to be put on ebay by a friend of the owner who lives down here, and the rest thrown into a dumpster that the owner had dropped off by a trash company. It took a couple of days for the couple of guys the owner had hired outside of Home Depot to dump all the stuff that Sammie had accumulated in his 67 years.

I assume a bunch of that stuff meant a lot to Sam. It struck me that when my day comes to meet my demise all of this 'stuff', which means so much to me is just another man's trash. Sure, some of it is worth $, but at that point it won't matter to me. Still, as I noted in another thread, I'm going to make arrangements so that my church will get the valuables, and be able to reap whatever profit for their use.

I am, unlike my late hermit friend, sociable, so I have friends I routinely talk with daily, and if I didn't show up at church on a Sunday the pastor would be checking on me. So if I drop dead they'll find me pretty much within a day or so. Part of my purpose in posting this is to vent, but equally my purpose is a heads up to anyone who is in the same bag as Sammie.

Make a friend, or if you know someone who fits that hermit profile, check on them at least once a week. Last but not least enjoy your stuff, but remember you ain't taking any of it with you, and if what happens to it after you're gone means anything to you, make the necessary provisions to allot it to those you'd want it to go to.