Lone wolves: Solitary life many of us live nowadays

A few weeks ago, I read one of the most heart-wrenching stories I have come across in a long time. It was about a university student, I don’t recall from which university, who was found dead in the house she had rented off campus. According to police, it seemed as if she had been dead for a week.

The young woman, I read, had been reported missing a few days before she was discovered on her bed, lifeless. Reacting to that story, there are those who pointed out that when a person is reported missing, the first logical place to check is where that person lives, especially if the said person lived alone, so why wasn’t she discovered earlier?

For the sake of my subject today, however, that fact is besides the point, so I won’t dwell on it. I read that story and I thought to myself that there cannot be anything as sad as dying in your house, a place you have lived for months, even years, only to be discovered a week later. And only because neighbours noticed a swarm of flies hovering just outside your door.

So many questions buzzed in my mind, but of course, I could only speculate. For instance, didn’t that poor girl have a relative or friend that she talked to regularly who would have been worried enough to knock on her door when she failed to answer her phone for two days? What about her parents and siblings? Did she often go for more than a week without talking to them, hence the whopping one week it took to discover her body? 

Didn’t she have a classmate close enough who wondered why she had missed classes for a week? Someone who knew where she lived? Aren’t young people supposed to be quite social by nature? If so, why didn’t any of her friends go looking for her? And what was her relationship with her neighbours like? 

Solitary life

The one that talked to the press said she used to keep to herself, which might explain why none of them was alarmed at her being AWOL for a week. But even so… 

That heart-rending story brought to the fore the kind of solitary life many of us live nowadays, a secluded life that the modern world has bestowed on us, and which we have embraced wholeheartedly. 

Embracing modernity blindly, I feel, robbed us of the sense of community that once upon a time characterised our lives, a characteristic that made our lives more meaningful, more worthwhile, one that made us more human, so to speak.

Now, we lock ourselves behind the stone walls of our homes and only emerge to go to work or run errands.
We barely know our neighbours, we don’t even want to, and so we roll up our car windows when we see them approaching, determined not to have a conversation. 

That is not all, we keep a tight circle of friends and relatives who we rarely entertain or visit, content to star in our closed comfortable lives with our nuclear families. 

I have a question, if you lived alone, and died alone in your house today, how long would it take for you to be discovered dead?

The writer is editor, Society & Magazines, Daily Nation. Email: cnjunge@ ke.nationmedia.com