Dying Alone Is More Common Than We Think
Kodokushi or lonely death refers to a Japanese phenomenon of people dying alone and remaining undiscovered for a long period of time. The phenomenon was first described in the 1980s. It was attributed to Japan’s increasingly elderly population.
Dying alone has become so common in Japan that an entire industry of specialized cleaning crews has sprung up to deal with the aftermath of these solitary deaths.
Sociologists Ashton Verdery and Rachel Margolis predict that in the future more of us will die alone than ever before.
It seems unbelievable and sad to me especially in this age of digital connectivity. Isn’t everyone just a text away?
Wouldn’t family members notice something amiss if there was no news from their loved one? Wouldn’t a nosy neighbor or a coworker spy or check on them?
Then my only brother died a lonely death.
Millions of miles away from Japan, in Nevada, he lay dead inside his apartment unknown to the busy world bustling outside. It would be a week before the apartment manager found him and 2 weeks before I would come to know.
My mother and I had been trying to reach my brother a couple of times during the week prior to Christmas and after, but he never answered. That didn’t ring any alarm bells for us as he never promptly answered our calls. We also assumed he was very busy with work, with it being the holiday season.
I also got caught in the entrapments of the holiday season- decorating the Christmas tree, baking cookies, buying gifts, calling guests over and taking a mini-vacation.
All the while I didn’t know that the grim reaper had already paid me a visit and stolen life from my family.
As more days passed without any contact from him, we started getting a bad feeling. I finally was able to reach his workplace. They told me he hadn’t shown up to work for 2 weeks, calling in sick on the last day. They were unable to reach him after that day. They assumed he had taken days off to visit me for Christmas.
More panic. Alarm bells were now blaring on high. My brother lived 12 hours away. So we called his apartment manager and requested them to check on him.
She put us on hold for the longest time. More panic. She was probably scrambling with what to tell us. She finally gave us a phone number to call and told us the case number was — XXXXXXX.
“What is the case number for?” I asked, still assuming maybe it was just a hospital record number. Maybe he was recovering in the hospital.
“That’s the Coroner’s case number.” the manager said and the line went dead. My brain heard those words, understood what it meant but couldn’t process it, so I refused to grieve.
It was like someone had just told me that 1+1 equaled 3 and I had to accept it. I couldn't wrap my mind around that.
The coroners said they didn’t suspect any foul play and it was likely he died from natural causes. And just like that my brother turned into a coroner case#. He was 46.
What really happens when a person dies alone?
After a body is discovered, coroners are called in. They usually keep bodies until they are positively identified through dental records/ fingerprints or DNA. Once that’s done they try to locate next of kin to release the body to. Sometimes the next of kin do not want to claim the body or cannot afford to pay for funeral expenses.
According to the Atlantic, medical examiners around the country are being overrun with bodies that no one comes to pick up, a trend that many coroners attribute to the nation’s opioid epidemic. The unclaimed population also is greatly comprised of the poor and homeless.
Unclaimed bodies become the ward of the state. Depending on county procedures and funding they are cremated after waiting for a certain length of time. The cremains are stored for a few more years.
If by that point no family has reached out, the cremains are buried alongside more than a thousand others unclaimed souls.
I was shaken by the fact that my brother died alone and I was unaware. I had celebrated Christmas while he lay sealed away from the world in an icy morgue. In his last moments, there was no one to help or comfort him. My mother is tormented with that knowledge too.
Each human should die in the sight of a loving face. Mother Teresa.
Strong social relationships boost a person’s chances of staying alive by 50 percent, according to a comprehensive 2010 review of 148 studies that followed 309,000 people for an average of 7.5 years.
My brother wasn’t married or in any relationship. His close friends lived in other states. Apart from me and a few cousins, he had no other family members in America.
Growing up, he was the friendly extrovert while I was the painfully shy introvert. He could talk with ease to a new stranger, a baby, a cat, a teapot, an elderly person and forge a connection while I sweated bullets and sat tongue-tied to talk to even my peers.
He was my first writing idol. The way he could so deftly write a joke in a card and leave the fingerprint of his personality in just 4 lines of greeting always left me awestruck.
As he grew into young adulthood he faced problems which retracted him into a shell. He kept up the smiling facade in front of others but we knew he was hurting inside. He stayed busy with work and kept more to himself.
If only I had checked on him more. The ‘if only’s will haunt us forever.
Grief is not a monochromatic feeling of sadness. It is a miscellany of different emotions -guilt, pain, anger, confusion all blended on high. The pain felt weirdly good. It was the only way I could partake in his cup of suffering.
They say-
Energy can neither be created nor destroyed. It can only be converted from one form to another.
So, I searched for my brother’s new frequency in every flickering light bulb, in troubled dreams, in the guitar beats of the Bon Jovi song he loved to hear, in the flavors of the curry he liked to eat.
But he was nowhere to be found. He was unreachable. It’s like he had disappeared into thin air. All we had left now were his pictures.
Death is indeed the final FINAL.
1+1=3 is the harsh reality my family has to accept this new year. I will continue to search for his vibrations in some alternate realm of this world.
Till then my only comfort is from the fact that he will never be alone again. RIP dear brother, till we meet again.
