'Dead in bed for a month': Who would swiftly notice if you went missing?

By  Daisy Okoti

Research & Impact Editor

Nation Media Group

What you need to know:

• A woman found dead in her apartment after a month prompts uncomfortable questions about friendship, loneliness and how easily busy lives can make us lose touch.
• A friend’s forgotten connection with a childhood companion who lost her business reveals how routines and busy lives can quietly erode even longstanding friendships.

Last week, the Nation and NTV reported the story of a young woman who had been dead in her apartment for about a month before anyone noticed. During this time, none of the people in her inner circle—family or close friends—had suspected that something could be seriously wrong with her. Were it not for a cleaner who perceived the foul smell and alerted the apartment owners who alerted the police, she would still be lying dead in bed!

Throughout last week, I listened to many perspectives on how horrible it was that no family member or friend had reached out to her for a whole month. I was also tempted to go all sanctimonious and blame everyone around her. However, the temptation to judge was completely diluted when I remembered something that happened a couple of weeks ago.

This friend asked me to deliver something to another friend of hers. From her explanation, her friend’s shop was near my office, so I could act as a courier at no charge. After handing me the item, she told me to wait as she called her friend to let her know to expect me.

It turned out that this woman’s business had gone under late the previous year. She had closed everything down and, in fact, relocated to the village. My friend had an expression of shock on her face as she put the phone down.

“We need to do better in life! This woman is one of my closest lifelong friends. I cannot believe that I have not been in touch with her since mid-last year!” my friend said.

As I gave the item back to her, she could not stop beating herself up! The gift she had wanted me to deliver to her was meant to be a surprise. It was something the friend had loved since their childhood and she was excited to have got it for her during her most recent trip abroad.

“Can you imagine if something worse had happened to her! God forbid, but had she died, I would have found out today, more than a year later! This is someone I grew up with. Our childhoods are painted in the same colours. I cannot believe I neglected her this much!” she said.

No shoulder to lean on

According to my friend, she had become so used to her friend owning that shop and always being there for a quick catch-up whenever she passed by that it had never occurred to her that the shop could ever close.

What particularly hurt my friend was that her childhood friend had gone through something as life-changing as losing a business and she had not been there to support her or offer a shoulder to lean on. She planned a trip to the village that weekend to see her friend. It was embarrassing that her presence was coming more than a year later. But we both agreed that it was better late than never.

The woman who was found dead in her apartment is symptomatic of the inherent risks in the way we live today. I keep thinking about my friend’s childhood friend. For more than a year, my friend assumed she knew where to find her. She did not know that the shop had closed, that her friend had gone through the painful experience of losing a business she had built over most of her adult life, or that she had moved back to the village. None of this was because she had stopped loving her. Life had simply moved on and somewhere along the way, checking in had stopped.

And perhaps that is the more uncomfortable truth about how we lose touch with people. It does not always happen because we stop loving them. Sometimes life simply gets busy, routines change and checking in keeps getting postponed.

That is what unsettles me about the young woman who was found dead in her apartment. We may never know what kept the people around her from noticing her absence. But her story has made me ask more reflective questions about my own friendships: Who would notice if I suddenly went quiet? And whose silence would I notice?