To The Woman Who Died Alone In Her Apartment

• Lori Palminteri
• Uncategorized
• February 11, 2017

To The Woman Who Died Alone In Her Apartment,

I was told you had been dead for days.  I was trying to reach you.  Not to see how you were doing — though in my defense, I had no idea if you were old or sick.  I knew nothing about you.  Not your favorite season, or if you liked to attend movies, or what your favorite type of food was.  I knew nothing except your name, where you lived, and that you had not been paying your maintenance.

This is because I work part time for the property management company that handles your building.  My job is mostly a tedious chore that involves entering checks.  It was not my idea to call you.  It’s never my decision to make a phone call.  Answering or making calls gives me anxiety.  When I was first started working at this job as an administrative assistant, I had stomach cramps all the time from the mere shrill of the phone ringing, knowing I had to answer the phone and talk to a human on the other end, who might yell at me for mumbling.

I especially hate calling regarding people falling into arrears.  Usually, because I have to deal with one of two types of people: Nasty shitheads who are difficult to talk to while restraining my tongue from telling them they are “selfish fuckheads that should get hit by a cabbie and die” or someone I genuinely feel bad for.  I don’t care for feeling either of these emotions.

But my boss implored me to call you.  I must call you, he said.  I must talk to you.  I must find out why you had repeatedly missed payments, and more importantly, kindly but firmly relay the message that a payment must be made soonest.  In my bosses defense, it is my job.  But the part of the job I lament the most.

With a passive aggressive tone, I both emailed and called you.  I got no response.  I relayed this message of negligence to my boss who told me to try again.  I put off trying again for a few hours.  Making calls drains me.  But then I did.  Still, no response on your end.  Which would make a lot of sense the following day.

The next morning, I was informed that you had been found dead on your couch (a state you’d been in for days) with your dog by your side.  My boss, a real dog lover and perhaps a bit of an optimist, said, “well, you can’t ask for a better way to go.”

My co-worker was more worried about your dog, fretting over how hungry the dog must be.  “He’s fine,” I comforted her, “the dog wasn’t starving yet if it hadn’t started eating the body.”

I’m sorry if that comment seems especially harsh, as some of my co-workers found it to be.  But I wasn’t trying to crack a joke (as I often do), I was stating a fact and I’m generally insensitive.  That’s just me.

In fact, I was quite glad you had a dog and not a cat.  Cats almost immediately start eating their dead owners.  Starting with the face.  My buddy who’s a police officer once showed me a picture of a dead woman who’s cat ate her face.  I deeply regret requesting to see this picture, as it is now seared into my memory, a real horror movie scene.

It seems to be a horrible nightmare to most to die alone.  You had your dog by your side, and a lot of people would argue you were not alone, but I never understood the homo sapians love for canis lupus familiaris.  Maybe this is because I never had a dog growing up.  One of my best friends blamed my lack of having a dog for my general cold-heartedness, which I don’t think is fair or accurate.

Some years ago, I worked in a nursing home, and I can tell you, for certain, there are worse ways to die than to die alone.  “You don’t want to die alone,” is something people say to me frequently, even though I am only 27.  The years have proven I am either not capable and/or interested in relationships.  “Aren’t you afraid of dying alone?”  That’s what people say all the time.  Like a threat.  “There’s nothing worse than dying alone.”

Au contraire!  It would be much worse to die, say, getting eaten by a bear.  Or an alligator.  Getting eaten by a shark.  Or the bite of a poisonous spider.  Certainly it would be worse being torn limb by limb from a pack of wolves.  Generally, getting eaten would be worse than dying alone (hence, my aversion to owning cats.  They will eat you.).

I think I’d prefer it to die alone.  I don’t want people looking at me while I’m dying.  That creeps me out.  I don’t even like the thought of people looking at me while I’m sleeping.  Furthermore, I don’t like looking at people while they’re sleeping.  Except my nephew.  He’s two.  His adorable face I could watch sleep for so long, just watching his little body rise with each breath.  Sometimes I like to stroke his head, which I do softly, so to not wake him.

I wondered if you knew you were going to die, and so when you got my statements, you just said, “fuck it.”  I could not condemn you if this were the case.  It pains me to know that your family is going to have to listen to your messages, and they’re going to have to listen to me being a bitch about needing money from you.  My hope is that I was mumbling (which I often do, and am berated for on the daily), and no one can understand the message, and they’re convinced I was on drugs.  If it appears I’m making light of your demise (be it timely or untimely, I have very little information about you and your life) it’s probably because I am, by nature, someone who can only process any emotion by removing it from myself and jesting about it.  I am a stand- up comedian.  This is not so much an excuse as it is a side effect of my genuinely crass personality.

I expect to get a return letter (joking!).  Like an SNL sketch, I don’t know how to end this (another joke!  I’m killing it! (bad word choice?)).  I could say a prayer, but I believe in nothing but the peaceful nothingness that comes in the big sleep.  My prayer would not be for your death, but for your life, and that even if it wasn’t abundantly filled with peace and happiness, there were at least glimmers of such pleasance.

While I am still young, and at the start of a potentially great career (as a writer and a comedian, not as an accounts receivable person who dreads the sound of the phone ringing), I don’t feel my age.  I don’t feel young nor old, just ever confused and caught up in how sometimes time moves too fast or too slow, without ever changing speed at all.  I am forever haunted not by the thought of death, but by all those faces in the nursing home, worn from regret, who died having wasted their lives.  I’m not afraid to grow old or to die young.  I’m afraid of not living or not being true or not creating or losing the ability to make myself and others laugh along the way and I am deeply, deeply afraid of being eaten.

There’s an old interview of an aged Charles Bukowski, and he seems just about ready for life to cease.  How beautiful.  How rare.  Bukowski said, “we’re all going to die, all of us, what a circus!  That alone should make us love each other but it doesn’t.  We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.”

Please disregard my former calls and emails.

Rest in Peace,

The Girl Who’d Rather Be Alone Than Answer The Phone