Many years ago, probably over a decade, my mother read a news story

[conuly]

about some man who had left his dead mother in the living room for five years. At least five years, it may have been more.

Mommy was actually really sympathetic to this man. It doesn't seem he was doing anything fraudulent like collecting her pension, so it made sense that when he came home and found his mother dead he might've been really overwhelmed and decided to put it off until the morning. And in the morning it was the same, so he figured he'd call somebody later that day, and then at some point the acceptable window for delays closed and now he had the twin problems first of having to call people to deal with his mother's body but also explaining to them why he hadn't called right away.

And so she just sat there in the living room for several years.

Although she very much understood how this happened, you can expect that my mother didn't want this to happen to her, and many times she insisted we make the specific promise that, no matter what, we don't just put off handling her death because it's just overwhelming.

And we haven't, btw, and the other day I was talking to Jenn about this and that and she mentioned that next time around, hopefully a long time in the future, when one of us dies it should go a bit smoothly because the other one has already done all this once. To which I say that if it's her, and she has any advance warning at all, she'll probably have already set up a few scheduled deliveries of gift baskets for the rest of us. She likes to be prepared.

Now that I think of it, I'm actually kind of brilliant. You cannot tell me that's not my best idea ever.

Comments

[maju]

some man who had left his dead mother in the living room for five years. But what about the smell? I know it would wear off eventually, but not for at least several days.

[conuly]

I guess he just closed the door?

This is not the only time I've heard of somebody having a dead family member in the house for many years. Most recently, I read about this woman who was a. a hoarder and b. estranged from her son, and after she died (or moved into a nursing home, idk) they cleared out the upstairs of her house, which she hadn't been able to get to for ages due to both mobility issues and the aforementioned hoarding, and they found her son's body on a bed where apparently he'd died in his sleep.

There's lots of articles about people living with their parents' bodies, though most of them do involve pension and social security fraud.

[maju]

Wow, gruesome.

[conuly]

It's the hoarding part that worried my mother. She actually got LOTS better about it over the past several years, to the point where she basically wasn't one at all, but for a while there after my father's death she really was and the house was in awful crowded shape too. So that's why she worried.