The following narrative is not for the weak of stomach! Sorry, but I've got to get this out of my system. Read on at your own risk...

Dying alone stinks... in more ways than the obvious one. Case in point: Bruce, my neighbor in the apartment building where I live (and where he doesn't, anymore). The coroner took his body away last night; the policeman said he'd been dead for about four days. I suspect it might have been more, but I can't be sure. The fact that nobody will ever really know his time of death for sure is another thing that stinks.

When I moved into the building almost two years ago, Bruce was already living there, downstairs and across the hall. The hallway is small - it connects only four units within a larger building - and it was often filled with foul odors from Bruce's apartment (cigarette smoke, burning food, overripe food, waste odors from his cats). So I didn't really notice anything different, at first, and can't pinpoint the moment when I started smelling something odd. I was only annoyed at what I thought was the smell of a litter box that wasn't being scooped. But then (when?), I began to suspect that someone's toilet had backed up, but I still couldn't pinpoint which apartment was emitting the sewer-y odor.

Otherwise, things seemed fairly normal in the hallway: Bruce's TV was on constantly, his air conditioner was running non-stop, and Bruce was never seen outside. Nothing unusual; I never got to know Bruce but I understood him to be on some sort of disability, since he never went to work. I guessed him to be in his 50s; he was very overweight, a heavy drinker and smoker, and alone in the apartment after his girlfriend and her adult son moved out last summer. At first, after the breakup, I'd see him outside with two cats he said she'd left with him for a while but would pick up later on. After a few months I didn't see the cats - or him - anymore. Once in a while his Jeep would be parked at a different angle in its space, the only indicator that he ever ventured out.

The night before last, the temperature went down into the mid-40s Fahrenheit, and I noticed that Bruce's air conditioner was still running. I thought he might just have been using it as an exhaust fan... except that I didn't smell the usual cigarette-smoke odor. I didn't smell anything else from his air-conditioning vent, either, but the stink in the hallway was getting noticeably worse. I started sniffing at doorjambs to try to track it down, to no avail.

By noon yesterday, when I came home from work for lunch, the stench was enough to take away my appetite. This time Bruce's doorjamb definitely smelled worse than the rest of the hallway. Still, I hesitated to knock on his door, not wanting to confront him if he was there and drunk and liable to become unreasonably angry. But when I took into consideration the lack of cigarette odor and the fact that the TV volume was lower than usual and hadn't changed for a couple of days, I figured that either he was away with someone and left his car, and left the TV and air on for indoor cats he might still have, or... So I left a telephone message for the landlord, saying I was concerned and asking him to check out the situation.

I went out for the evening (and to eat dinner somewhere nicer-smelling), and as I drove back I saw that lights had been turned on in windows of Bruce's apartment that had been dark before. Great, I thought, Bruce is back from wherever he went and now I'm going to be really embarrassed when the landlord tells him about the message I left. But then I turned into the parking lot and saw the police car, and the coroner's vehicle, and the gurney next to the opened hallway door, and Bruce's apartment door standing open just inside.

Of course the stench escaping from his apartment was twenty times worse than when the door was closed, and I could see lots of mouldering food and trash in the kitchen. How long it had been there before Bruce died is anyone's guess. I could hear my landlord talking with the policeman further inside, and wondered how they could stand to breathe in there. I went upstairs, out of the way of the cop and coroner, and came down again to speak to the landlord after Bruce's body was taken out and put into the coroner's SUV (yep, SUV!).

The landlord thanked me several times over for calling him. He said he'd entered the apartment and found Bruce in the bathroom, on the john. He'd died like Elvis. Probably a heart attack, according to the cop. The landlord was obviously shaken; he's a youngish guy and I suspect it might have been his first time dealing with a death in one of his buildings. He said he didn't know Bruce well but was still upset because he'd talked to Bruce a few times, and had listened to Bruce talk out his sorrow when he'd notified the landlord that his girlfriend wasn't on the lease anymore. The landlord said that the "ambulance guys" were laughing and cracking jokes over Bruce's body (there's that black humor again) while he asked in vain for some respect for the dead. I have to imagine that EMTs see so many bodies mangled horribly in accidents that a situation like last night's is akin to comic relief... but I didn't say that to the landlord just then!

I did say that this is the third time an apartment-neighbor of mine has died at home, down the hall from me, though this is the first time I played a part in the discovery of the body. My co-workers tell me that I should feel good for having made the call so that the body could be laid to rest at last, but I don't feel so good about taking so long to call. I don't feel good about the fact that it took a near-stranger to make that call, that there was no one in his life who was missing him. The landlord said he didn't even have a next-of-kin on his lease application; now the landlord has to go through Bruce's stuff to try to find someone to notify of the death.

And I don't feel good about not "meddling" in Bruce's life, about not seeing the danger signs that said he was headed for this kind of an end, about not at least calling the landlord to alert him to the situation before Bruce died.

Dying the way Bruce did is a sad, sorry way to leave the world, and too much like the sad, sorry way Bruce had lived in it. If anybody has read this far, I thank you for listening to me ramble on about this. I'd like to say just one more thing, to those who are enduring the pain of watching a loved one suffering through some terminal illness: cherish the chance you have to say farewell, to tell your loved one that he or she will be missed, to show your loved one that he or she will pass away in the continuing presence of your love, and so will never die alone.

Sharon