A Neighbor without a Name

Our neighbor died today.

I came home mid morning, from a trip to the city landfill to discover ambulance and police vehicles along our street. It did not take long to discover that they had come to our neighbor's house. The grim reality became apparent to us that he had died, alone in his home and his body had been discovered this morning.

The events of today are haunting to me: coming to discover ambulance and police at the residence; the arrival of a medical examiner to officially document the death; the presence of a dead body in the home and the subsequent removal of the body wrapped in a blanket, on a gurney; the quietness of all involved as they move about to do their jobs, and the silence and emptiness of a home.

To make things more troublesome is the reality that in the eight years we have lived next to this man, I never knew his name. We had talked many times between yards, over the years, but conversations were never personal in nature; they were instead a bland exchange of pleasantries about the neighborhood and our respective houses. He was a nice enough man; judging from his accent, of some sort of European background.

It's unsettling to suddenly have all sorts of questions about him now that it is too late to ask them.

I could wax eloquent about lessons learned from being too busy, but I won't.

Perhaps the colder reality is that I simply didn't really want to know him. We didn't share enough in common on a surface level to lead beyond that, and besides, I remain essentially a fairly shy person who often struggles to be comfortable meeting new people....

still, it is unsettling to not even know his name.

Perhaps the final irony of today is that two days ago, on Saturday, I finally got around to knocking down the last part of the old, rotten wooden fence that is between our properties. He and I had talked about the fence a number of times, in a friendly way.

In the end, I doubt he even knew that I'd ripped the fence down...

perhaps I should have gotten around to doing it sooner...