Chicago999444 had a great comment on the lady being dead for six years post. It deserves its own post.
There was a case very much like this in MA about 10 years back- a woman’s bones were found in her kitchen, and neighbors had not seen her for 4 years. She had apparently died in her kitchen, and since the remains were reduced to bones, it was impossible to determine the cause.
There are millions of reclusive people like this in this country, with no known relatives or friends, who are unknown even on streets on which they’ve lived for decades. But, then, maybe that’s because the neighborhood has turned over a dozen times in 40 years, and there’s no one there who has been there for more than a couple of years. This is a very common situation in Corporate Transferee Ghetto suburbs like Naperville, IL, where a client of mine came home from vacation to find that his entire house had been moved out by a burglar in his absence. Only a sock and a hairpin remained. Why had not the neighbors noticed a moving van parked in front of his place? Because no one would notice a moving van in a suburb where no one knew anyone and where people moved in and out nearly every month.
Our excessive mobility has not only sundered communities, but is most likely a much bigger factor in breaking up marriages and families, than any other social trend of the past 65 years. For one thing, before WW2, you were much more likely to marry someone who you had known your entire life, the proverbial girl or boy next door, and the families of the couple probably knew each other for at least a couple of generations back. These days, you are much more likely to mate with someone who grew up 1000 miles away, in a totally different milieu, and who is many years older or younger than you.
There is much less basis for trust, and less attachment. Meanwhile, your extended family has probably scattered hither and yon over the past 50 years. Families that could, as little as 30 years ago, trace their families back 6 generations in their cities and even their neighborhoods, live in places 1000 miles from their nearest relatives, marry someone from far away, and have kids who have no idea of their cousins. Never mind old friends, and old friends of your parents and grandparents, or neighborly associations, or local businesses owned for the same family for 4 generations.
Since WW2, more and more people have grown up with no particular attachment or loyalty to any particular place or group of people, and take transience for granted. Thus, they do not even try to form associations with neighbors, and often go to great effort to avoid them. Additionally, most of us were raised in a “mind your own business” ethic- in the neighborhoods in which I have lived in St Louis and Chicago alike, it is almost considered bad form to be too “forward” in trying to get to know your neighbors.
You have to be around for a long time, at least 5 years, to feel at ease casually dropping in on someone just to see how she’s doing, or to see if the old guy upstairs needs help. And some people have much more of a knack for this than others, while others are very shy and reticent. The shy ones would have no problem in a community where their family had resided since, oh, 1875, but in some bedroom suburb sitting in a place that was a cornfield in 1975, or some 60 story downtown high rise where half the building turns over every year, a person like this will get lost in the shuffle.
The effect the shredding of our communities has on our families and marriages has never been properly studied, but I believe that it is probably a much more important factor than any of the usual bogeymen (or bogeywomen!!) that social critics usually trot out, such as feminism or “loose morals”.
An old friend of mine has stayed with her husband of 40 years despite the complete lack of any romance between them for more than 30 years, simply because of old family loyalties that make the failure of their male-female relationship seem trivial. She may not be interested in him, but she and he are still committed to each other and would not think of divorce because they grew up together in the same small community, and their parents and grandparents grew up together their and were lifelong friends. They know each others siblings and cousins almost as well as they know each other.
They understand each other in a way that would be impossible with someone who, after a couple of decades or more, still remains partly a stranger to you because you and he come from different backgrounds, grew up 2000 miles away from each other, and in a different time and, often, were raised in a different religion or ethic; and they also have a powerful incentive to stay together and look out for each other, in that two large stem families- a whole universe of siblings and cousins and nieces and nephews, would be affected by a split between them. Most of all though, while it may no longer be romantic at all, the relationship is cozy and reliable.
This is also how people are in the Asian community here in Chicago- many of these people go back together countless generations in the old country, and half the clan has resettled here in Chicago, where they’ve all picked up exactly where they left off in their village in China. People from the same village in China will all move into the same apartment building or buy into the same townhouse complex here,and the youngsters marry people from families well known to their own natal families, often for 50 years or longer.
Marriages are much more than just a romance between 2 people- they are alliances between clans. And nobody, even people who live alone, is unknown to his or her neighbors. Everyone is known to at least a dozen other people, and people get out and “shop” in the neighborhood just to see each other. The bakeries and tea rooms are always packed with groups of old men sitting around playing cards, and there are always groups of old women hanging out together in the little grocery stores.
Americans cherish their mobility, and staying in your old neighborhood or city has almost come to be seen as the mark of a loser. You’re supposed to be moving ever upward and onward, to a better house, a better neighborhood, a better city. We have seen this as a major social advance, never counting the cost, which is ruined cities, abandoned small towns,increasing numbers of blighted suburbs, and tens of millions of lonely, disconnected, “alienated” people.
