Yes, be proactive. Take a plate of cookies to your nearest neighbor. Explain you don’t necessarily need to burden them with your presence or expect invites but could they keep a weather eye out if the porch light is on all day? Or the newspapers are on the driveway too long. Something.
Everyone, even though they don’t think so, are usually predictable. And neighbors watch.
Age isn’t entirely the point here - someone in their 20’s living alone could meet a similar fate. Granted, older folks are more likely to die on any given day for a number of reasons, but regular check-ins might be a good idea at any age.
Coworker died at home last fall. He lived alone, and even though he normally attended church on Sundays, his family members just thought he was sick and didn’t feel like talking, which is why he didn’t answer his phone. Wasn’t the first time.
He didn’t show up to work on Monday. When he didn’t show up to work on Tuesday morning, and hadn’t responded to attempts to contact him, his manager called HR and they called the police to do a welfare check.
He was 60. He had family nearby. He attended church regularly. It still took more than 2 days for someone to discover that he was dead.
I got a knock on the door about six months ago from a police officer.
Turns out that our next-door neighbor in our apartment complex had died several days before and they were seeing if we had noticed anything strange. I don’t think we had ever talked to him before except to nod as we passed in the hallway.
A few years ago, an old lady who lived alone died in my neighborhood. No one noticed for weeks, maybe months. I noticed that the lawn wasn’t mown. But hey, i haven’t mown my lawn this year, and there are three of us, alive and well in the house.
I had never met her. She wasn’t someone who walked her dog or did similar outdoor stuff.
In my 25 years of finding corpses who died both naturally and unnaturally I never found one that defecated. You need working muscles to poop. It’s possible if you were just about to go but it’s not common.
This matches my 42 years of nursing experience. Theoretically possible, but uncommon. So, @Beckdawrek, not something you need to worry about.
For a small fee, the Dope could offer daily messaging to its members and to alert authorities if check-in is delayed past a certain point.
Dogs, fish etc. gotta be fed.
My folks live in a pretty nice CCRC (retirement community) where they are currently self sufficient in their own condo.
But if they haven’t told the management they’re out of town and they don’t open the fridge by 11am, some staffer will knock on the door to check on them. It has some sort of sensor that reports status centrally.
My experience is limited to one human who died a natural death, and lots of decapitated mice. Oh, and a couple of cats, most of whom died of illness, but one was killed by a dog. No poop. It’s possible some of the mice peed, if they happened to have a very full bladder at the moment of death.
I’m not sure where the meme comes from, but it’s not common, and certainly not the norm.
This could be my next-door neighbor. We’ve both lived in our houses for forty years. He’s in his late 70s, divorced, lives alone, and gets very infrequent visits from his only child. (They may communicate by phone or IM, however.) As he’s gotten older, he gets out less and less, and now it’s to the point where we see him usually only on Saturdays when he buys groceries or mows his lawn. His mail is dropped through a slot on his storm door. If he passed away on a Sunday, nobody would notice for at least a week, and probably longer.
We do worry about him and try to keep tabs on him, but short of knocking on his door to make sure he’s alive, there’s not much we can do.
I think a lot more of the single or retired crowd are that way (few and loose connections) than the assumed “normal” of lots of scheduled social interaction or in-home friend visits that would quickly discover somebody dead or dying.
I do lots of stuff out in public every day. I can spend the entire day in my apartment, but it’s rare. There is zero pattern to what I do or who I encounter when I’m out. No regular meetings to attend, no “we all get together every X-day at Y o’clock to do Z”. People all over town recognize my face and know my first name. Substantially none of whom would give it a second thought if they never saw me again.
I do have various friends I text, phone, or email with from time to time. Some almost daily, others maybe monthly. The vast majority of them don’t know each other so even if they each separately became suspicious something bad has happened, they’d have no way to corroborate that none of them had heard from me since date X.
That’s how lots and lots of people live.
In my personal case, I have housekeepers that come in once a week on a fixed schedule. So they’ll find my body in no more than 7 days. If I died at home rather than in a park or at a secluded beach, or washed out to sea. When they come to my place the second time and it’s exactly as they left it, so up to 14 days after my disappearance, that’s the first time anyone would have specific reason to wonder. Whether they’d unthinkingly assume I was traveling is another obstacle to anyone official being notified that I’ve disappeared.
Mario Puzo believed it apparently. Poop happened very forcefully to both Carlo and Luca Brasi. Maybe that’s where the doubtful idea comes from.
There’s also the phrase “scared shitless”. Meaning someone who’s really afraid will pee or if it’s really scary, poop. The internet has plenty of pix of people getting off roller coasters having peed themselves.
But that takes some time, and poop more than pee. Somebody about to die in a bad car crash probably won’t have time to poop.
Conversely, somebody who fell and can’t get up, might take 2 or 4 days to expire lying there. Somewhere in the early time before they’re too weakened to bother, they might well poop just to relieve the internal pressure. Later when found, they’re dead and there’s poop. So a crappy amateur detective might assume the poop was post-mortem. Probably not.
Y’know, both Carlo and Luca were garroted in “The Godfather”, and growing up, I heard lots of accounts of those executed by hanging crapping themselves upon the drop. Is strangulation a factor?
ISWYDT
Either that or maybe certain types of damage to the spinal cord. I’m told that male mice ejaculate when decapitated, but my mice were all female.
Boy, this thread has gone far afield(mice).
I used to. I tried earlier this year but most of the places have enough volunteers and I’m told they’ll call me if they need me.
That is extremely kind of you! Thank you, but I do have someone from the county calling me every evening.