Original in Spanish: Joyce Vincent
Joyce Vincent’s landlord was rather annoyed because she hadn’t paid rent for about 6 months. He got a court order to kick her out and, once again, nobody answered the door.
After breaking the door down they found a skeleton in front of a switched-on TV, unopened presents and piles of letters behind the door. We know the skeleton was Joyce because they used her teeth to identify her. Thirty-eight years old I think she was, or thereabouts.
Which inevitably led me to piles of questions:
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Didn’t the neighbours smell her? Well yes, they did, but it turns out the piles of rubbish from a nearby container also smelled, so it didn’t strike them as odd. I don’t want to imagine what that building normally smells like.
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Did nobody find it strange to always hear the TV without anyone ever answering? Apparently same as with the rubbish smell: business as usual.
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What did she die of? Some say asthma, others something stomach-related. The point is nobody killed her. She just died and nobody missed her enough to come looking.
Turns out she was born into a difficult family. As a little girl every imaginable cruelty happened to her. She had the steel ovaries to get herself an education but kept changing jobs, adapting to what she could. The house and the bills were paid by an aid for victims of domestic violence in London; when the aid expired her bank account ran dry and that is how someone finally came looking for her.
Damn it, really.
And also, really: who were the presents for?
Because if the answer is the obvious one, this is even sadder than it seemed. Hair-raising.
How lucky we are.
EDIT: Adding a hard-to-translate word. KODOKUSHI (or lonely death) refers to a Japanese phenomenon of people who die alone and remain undiscovered for a long period of time.
Related: Kodokushi
(Facebook, 2022-02-25)