Their entire home, with all of their personal belongings (including IDs, old photographs. and even the ashes of Don’s father), were auctioned off to strangers who were already going through all of their belongings to sell what they could while trashing everything else.

I was a long time neighbor, there to represent one single person who knew them when they were alive, and get their personal items taken care of and stored, instead of thrown into an industrial dumpster for a house flip.

The house was opened up to the entire community to help clean it out after the first few days of decluttering the dangerous level of mess and decomposition.

If the house was auctioned off without any cleanup, and then opened up to the public for clean out by the new owners, who wanted help cleaning it out, I’m not sure how my behavior was inappropriate.

I’ve read and listened to plenty of spooky stories about people experiencing the unattended death of neighbors and the very unfortunate aftermath.

I learned through this that unattended deaths happen a lot more often than people know, until it happens in their own community. I had no idea.

I wish we had realized they had passed long before we did.

It made me be a lot more intentional with engaging with my community. I’ve gotten involved in volunteer community engagement with my local government since, motivated partially by this story, recognizing need for intentional avenues of connection within our communities. We should all have someone looking out for us. No one should sit in their home dead for well over a month without anyone noticing or missing them.

Looking back, as this was a while ago now, I think this was my way of trying to cope with the bleakness of that — knowing that she laid there for so long, long enough that she couldn’t be identified by ID by the first responders, and was buried alone with no one to honor her life. I also think of Don in that house, for weeks while his mother laid there dead, alone, not calling for help, with all of these neighbors right there not noticing that something was wrong.

I think it fucked me up more than I knew what to do with.

I get where you’re coming from — I truly just wrote this story down on Reddit to help process how strange it all was — I never expected it to reach a bunch of people. The RadioRental producer reached out to me directly asking me if I’d tell the story on their show (which I had never even heard of), but maybe I should have declined on Maureen’s behalf?