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发表于 2012-2-24 20:41:51
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VOX POPULI: Sad reflections on misery of isolated deaths of families
There is something comforting about the Japanese expression “hitotsu-yane no shita,” which translates literally as “under the same roof.” It evokes images of an average family living humbly, but basically happily. Obviously, this is not always the case in real life.
The remains of a 45-year-old woman and presumably her 4-year-old son were discovered in an apartment in the western Tokyo city of Tachikawa. The woman was lying on the floor. The cause of her death was subarachnoid hemorrhage. The boy, who was mentally disabled and could not eat on his own, is believed to have starved to death after his mother’s sudden death. A “bento” lunch box remained uneaten in the apartment.
There has been a series of cases of families found dead in their homes long after their death. In the city of Saitama, it was a couple in their 60s and their son in his 30s. They had long fallen delinquent in their apartment rent and water bill payments, and their electricity and gas had been shut off. They reportedly had no community ties, nor did they apply for assistance from the local welfare office. A few one-yen coins were all the money they had left.
In Sapporo, it was a 42-year-old woman and her 40-year-old disabled sister; in Kushiro, also in Hokkaido, a 72-year-old woman and her 84-year-old husband who had senile dementia.
All of these cases involved disadvantaged individuals--those by disabilities or old age--who had to be cared for by their families or other people. My heart goes out to them.
Since these people must have weakened slowly as they died, it is unlikely that they died at the same time as the others found with them. I cannot even begin to imagine the dismay and anguish of the bereaved party who was left in the same house. In the Sapporo case, it was the disabled younger sister who died last. From mobile phone records, it appears that she repeatedly punched keys on the phone.
Tragedies such as these are usually preceded by long periods of nonpayment of utility bills and mail remaining uncollected. If these feeble “cries for help” could somehow be communicated to administrative authorities without being blocked for reasons of privacy, I think many people would be saved.
It is too cruel that there are only the ceiling and the walls of a room to witness the end of someone’s struggle to live. For all the recent talk about “human ties,” our society is still far from becoming truly “neighborly.”
--The Asahi Shimbun, Feb. 24 |
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