One Brick Short

I’m a busy guy. I do this a couple of nights a week and I do that damn near every weekend trying to make a buck to stretch between ever-widening ends.

We’re all busy. We’re busy taking care of business and taking care of ourselves, just like our parents taught us. What we’re not doing, however, is taking care of each other.

Consider the people in Sandy Run, S.C. and 72-year-old Mary Sue Merchant, the late 72-year-old Mary Sue Merchant. According to the Associated Press, Mrs. Merchant died of natural causes in a tightly locked house on 25 acres in the small community with only a dog for company.

The dog, no doubt, was company enough. Dogs are far more loving and caring than people, but now her small town is reflecting on why no one noticed her death for 18 months. The power company shut off her power and the county foreclosed and sold her property for back taxes even as her body lay inside, decomposing, and the lonely dog died of thirst in the same room.

“We didn’t know this lady existed,“ Sheriff Thomas Summers told the AP.
“We’ve lost the community,“ said the Rev. Neil Flowers, who plans to talk about Mrs. Merchant—a little too late—on Sunday at Beulah United Methodist Church, a few miles from where Mrs. Merchant died. “We do our own thing. We lead busy lives. We go and go and go ... and stay within our comfort zone.“
That’s the truth. Our lives are busy enough. We’re not even chasing the almighty dollar anymore, we’re chasing any dollar we can find just to pay the rising cost of gas and meat and clothing and everything else while our salaries are cut, slashed, furloughed or laid off. Still, to be so busy that we allow someone to die alone and have the county sell the property without checking on the rotting body, is beyond tragic.

Her husband, David Merchant, died in October 1985 at age 53, according to the AP. Afterward, Mrs. Merchant lost touch with her own older sister and a sister-in-law who tried to call—once—and found the phone disconnected and assumed Merchant had gotten a cell phone.

“It’s a sad tragedy this lady had absolutely nobody who cared enough to check on her— very sad,“ the sheriff said.
It wasn’t that they didn’t care. It was that they didn’t think about her because they were too busy. What, a good friend of mine would ask, is the difference?

The sheriff’s deputies check on about 200 senior citizens monthly in this county of less than 15,000, the sheriff said, “but we have to know they’re there.“
No one knew she was there. Mrs. Merchant didn’t attend church. Her only prescribed medicine was for glaucoma, so she wasn’t on any medical checklist. She had no family. She didn’t know her neighbors and they didn’t know her.

Mrs. Merchant had a post office box, so no mail piled up for neighbors or a carrier to notice. Her electricity was cut off in February 2008 after three months of unpaid bills.

When Mrs. Merchant didn’t pay her $234 property tax bill in January 2008, the county mailed delinquency notices to her post office box, which came back as undeliverable. The property, worth about $160,000 according to county records, was sold Dec. 1, 2008, for $20,000, said county administrator Lee Prickett.

No one from the county walked the property before selling it because that would be trespassing. Authorities say someone noticed that Merchant’s car never moved and finally asked deputies to check.

An autopsy Friday determined she died of natural causes, though specifics are unknown due to the condition of the remains. How long the mixed-breed dog lived without its owner is unknown; there was plenty of dog food in the house, but no water.

Let’s think about it. Imagine lying with no human contact for months and going unnoticed for more than a year. Think of a little dog simply sitting beside your dead body until it wastes to death.

Now think of friends and family you haven’t contacted in years. Think if you suddenly discovered your best college buddy had been dead for two years, or your aunt or you brother.

Now do something. Call each other. Talk to each other. Walk your dog and talk to the neighbors. Say hi. Offer a little help. Get to know one another. The harder the economy gets and the harder we work to help ourselves, the more we may wind up needing each other.

It won’t be easy. It will require change.

I’ll start today.