How private can a neighbor choose to be?
She was a nice lady who lived alone and always kept to herself.
She mowed her lawn regularly, shoveled snow when necessary, never played loud music, never caused any trouble.
Her neighbors knew almost nothing about her. Family? Career? Birthplace? Education? She never spoke of any of that — or spoke much at all.
She exchanged hellos with her neighbors when they passed on the sidewalk, and she always wished Merry Christmas to the kids on the block.
But beyond that, she was silent. Not exactly secretive. But not eager or willing to blossom into connection.
The woman grew older — who doesn’t? — but her routines never flagged or varied. Neighbors began to wonder.
Does she have a family member who checks on her? Does she need help with kitchen chores or car repair?
But privacy is a wall that’s as high as a person makes it. This woman’s wall stayed high, year after year.
Then one morning last spring, an ambulance pulled into her driveway. Two uniformed techs stepped out and knocked on the door. They got no response.
Over the next two hours, a cascade of officials arrived. Police who picked the front door lock. More medical personnel.
Finally, the morgue wagon.
A woman who had wanted to be alone, and who had succeeded at being alone, had died — alone.
Her story comes to me via several neighbors, who remain upset about what happened to the woman. They wonder how they might have prevented her death (or at least forestalled it).
Sure, the neighbors say, she had a right to privacy, even when she had obviously passed her 70th birthday and vulnerability begins to be spelled with a capital V.
But how much privacy is too much? Was this woman wrong not to seek help from neighbors?
Would she still be alive if she had invested in one of those devices that alerts someone else if she falls?
Would it have been such a huge invasion of her privacy if she had allowed a neighbor to look in on her once in a while?
And even though she is now dead, her legacy is causing ripples.
Like all homes, hers rang up property taxes. The woman had always paid hers by writing a check.
But evidently she had been too sick — or too forgetful, or both — to write tax checks over her last several years. Officialdom had sent her many reminder letters, but she never responded.
So, after much wrangling — more cars with official markings pulling into her driveway — the county confiscated her house for failure to pay back taxes.
That has led to exactly what the woman would have dreaded. Her lawn became overgrown. The house’s paint began to chip and fray. The concrete in her driveway cracked from a water leak.
She had become the neighbor from hell.
There’s a lesson here, and it needs to be heeded by every lives-alone older person who thinks it’s too messy, too fraught, too emotional, too difficult, to open a small peephole into one’s private life.
Privacy is sacrosanct. If you want to live by yourself, no one will stop you.
But others have lives to live, too. You are not a hermit living in a cabin somewhere. You are part of a grid. You are roped into that thing we call society.
You may not share potlucks or Monday Night Football with your neighbors. But neighbors are still there. And neighbors might have been a lifeline for this woman. A timely call to 911 (or a friendly discussion of her tax bills) might have prevented trouble.
As it is, her neighbors are determined not to see a repeat. They have knocked on doors in their immediate neighborhood to let elderly residents know that help is just down the block. They want to be there for solo older people.
But the door has to be cracked open by the older people themselves.
Otherwise, privacy takes on a new meaning. It becomes reclusiveness. It becomes dangerous. It can become a death sentence.
Bob Levey is a national award-winning columnist.
