Quiet Relationships

Police in Japan have discovered the body of a dead man in his house. Living in the same house were his children, three of them, and the death came to them as a surprise. The catch is....and there is a mammoth hitch to this, that his kids are 70 years old, or older, and the man had been dead at least ten years:

"Kanaoka's three elderly children, all in their 70s or older, told police they thought their father was still alive but that one of them recently had consulted a relative about the possibility that he might be dead, the spokesman said."

Daddy Dearest

I have heard of those families that never communicate. I have heard of families that will not eat together, talk together or even use each other's names. Seriously, how long could anyone have a person in the same house that NEVER left their room without someone checking to see if they are alright? A day? Two days? A month? How about a decade? For ten years the man never asked for more toilet paper, food, something to read or washed his clothes. For ten years he never told them to be quiet or had a phone bill. Their neighbors were evidently as clueless as they were, or perhaps in his whole life he never made a friend he could keep. Just exactly what were the clues that made them think he was alive? The rustling noises they heard at night were either his restless ghost walking around pissed off because nobody ever talked to him, or it was the local dogs stealing in for the occasional bone. There may have been more scavengers than that if a window was open or they owned cats.

Did they decide that dear old Dad just had a need for some alone time and, after a few days, also had a body odor problem? During my brief stint as a funeral home flunky, I had the rare privilege of visiting a house where an undisturbed corpse had layed for several days. The smell is not just distinctive, it is overpowering. It is stifling, and if the conditions are right it is the same as a gas chamber at a prison. We used a scoop of Vick's Mentholadum in each nostril and still the odor was more than a person could take for very long. Still, after a year there would not be much smell left. There would be a musty odor and, still, NO activity. The possibility that he might just be dead and not taking a really really long nap had apparently occurred to one of these little Einsteins, but how convinced were they that he was somehow still alive? The article goes on:

"Hyogo prefecture had registered Kanaoka as its oldest living resident, public broadcaster NHK said."

Was he still drawing a pension check of some kind? May I be that cynical? In this case I hope so. I would like to think that there was some kind of motive for this, even if it was crooked. It would lift my faith in humanity to know that they may have been practicing a little fraud for self-interest rather than being, perhaps, the stupidest people on the face of mother Earth.