4.
NO ONE REALLY BOWLS ALONE.
The provocative phrase, from Robert Putnam’s sweeping account of the decline of civic participation in the United States, is a metaphor, not a finding (as he acknowledged). Putnam used it with great effect to dramatize the fact that participation in bowling leagues had fallen during the second half of the twentieth century, as had participation in a number of historically significant civic associations and membership groups, from the Boy Scouts to the Elks clubs and the League of Women Voters. The truth is, Americans continue bowling together, but with friends (and friends of friends) in their social network, not in formal teams or organized groups.
The distinction is important. When Bowling Alone was published in 2000, pundits and policy makers worried that families were watching TV together in their living rooms rather than interacting with each other in the public sphere. Today, our most pressing social concerns are different—and not just because we’re nostalgic about the days when family members watched TV together rather than on their own miniscreens! In the first years of the twenty-first century we’ve witnessed the rise of new forms of interpersonal engagement and civic participation, from MoveOn to MySpace, e-government programs to microlending initiatives such as Kiva. We are, as headlines tell us: “Addicted to Social Media,” “Trapped in a World Wide Web,” “Caught in the Net.” Our most burning questions about the nature of contemporary society are not about isolation, but the problem of being hyperconnected, or of living with what the technology guru Linda Stone calls “continuous partial attention,” because we are so deeply embedded in the personal, professional, and social activities we perform online.
All of this should affect the way we understand how and why we live alone today. Whether or not we go solo, most of us are immersed in one or more social worlds, and today a growing number of critics have begun to worry that we are in too deep. We are experiencing “the end of solitude,” writes the essayist William Deresiewicz, who claims that in contemporary culture “we live exclusively in relation to others” and that too many of us find it “impossible to be alone.” The sociologist Dalton Conley goes further, arguing that we are witnessing the death of the individual and the birth of “intraviduals”: busy professionals whose lives are dedicated to “managing the myriad data streams, impulses, desires, and even consciousness that we experience in our heads as we navigate multiple worlds.”1
Arguments like these are intriguing but not quite persuasive. Granted, there’s good reason to worry about the cognitive development of young people who spend their days steeping in text messages, TV, and the Internet; about the rise of knowledge-based service-sector jobs that require professionals to spend their days and nights e-mailing and doing relationship management with clients or colleagues; about the psychological well-being of “crack-berry” junkies who cannot focus on the world beyond their smart phone. But does this really signal the end of solitude or individualism? After all, the “network society” emerged only after massive numbers of young adults began living alone for the first time in history and unprecedented numbers of children started growing up in rooms of their own. It’s hard not to see a relationship between the demand for constant connection, whether online or on the job, and the enormous increase in the amount of time we spend on our own. And it’s important to note that not everyone—indeed, most of us—aren’t always elsewhere, seeking out contact or a new Facebook friend.
In fact, we interviewed a number of people who said living alone was a way to buffer themselves against the intense pressures of social and, especially, vocational life. To be sure, this strategy for protecting the self means something different for affluent and middle-class people than it does for the poor, the mentally ill, or the physically frail. For successful professionals, living alone as a form of self-protection typically means establishing one’s home as a sanctuary in the city, one that facilitates the very pursuit of solitude and self-discovery that Deresiewicz and Conley fear we’ve abandoned. It doesn’t always work this way, however. Some of the affluent and middle-class people we interviewed acknowledged that they’d sought out a place of their own to avoid toxic relationships, or to escape from a community that took more than it gave. The disadvantaged men we interviewed were even more likely to report motivations like this. For them, living alone can easily lead to a dangerous extreme, resulting not only in domestic autonomy but also in reclusiveness, hoarding, and other antisocial behaviors that turn one’s safe house into a tomb. Even more judicious forms of social withdrawal may lead to a kind of miserable security, as in the case of many of the ex-convicts, substance abusers, and unemployed men who take refuge in single-room occupancy hotels (SROs) and cheap efficiency apartments to avoid friends and family whose company brings more trouble than it’s worth.
Living alone is a way to protect the self, yet it also risks imperiling it, and it’s no surprise that people in good physical, emotional, and financial health are better able to find the right balance than those who are sick or poor. For those with financial security, a busy schedule, and a dense social network, living alone can be productive because it offers access to privacy, restoration, and personal development. But for the vulnerable it more often leads to what Berkeley sociologist Sandra Smith calls “defensive individualism,” a dangerous state that fosters distrust toward other people and institutions, and ultimately toward the self as well.2
MOST PEOPLE WHO LIVE ALONE are financially secure, not poor, and those who purposely use their domestic space as an oasis from their busy, stressful work lives report that it is a regenerative, not an isolating experience. Phil is a successful journalist in his late forties, and he says that working and living in Manhattan requires giving so much of himself that at the end of the day he needs to shut things out. “I wouldn’t say I’m a solitary person,” he explains. “But I like privacy. I need time to recharge.”
Unmistakably outgoing, with a warm smile and a kind demeanor, Phil has spent most of the past two decades living independently, and he’s learned how to organize his home so that it accommodates the particular kind of solitude he seeks. “I like having control of my own space, making it like my childhood room at large, but calm, like how it feels in church. I not only live alone. I’ve mostly lived without a television, without a pet.” Phil sees domestic tranquillity as a means of deepening his self-knowledge and, in turn, enhancing his creativity. He believes that the time he spends alone helps him to be a better writer, a better thinker, and a more engaging person. Like the late psychologist Anthony Storr, Phil argues that solitude can bring us closer to ourselves, and he can rattle off a long list of great artists and authors who spent most of their lives in a place of their own.3
Although his life has never been busier, living alone gives Phil ample time to confront his feelings, and he says that now, instead of getting bogged down by questions about how he got here, he uses his hours at home to think about where he’s heading and whether he’s living the way he wants. As he approaches fifty, he realizes that if he stays single there will be new challenges ahead. “The frailty of aging and the growing awareness of one’s own fatality start to factor in. You think, you know, what’s gonna happen?” What’s scary, Phil says, is the prospect of dying without loved ones nearby. “The big thing that changes with age in terms of living alone is that the words ‘dying’ and ‘alone’ start to become associated with each other,” he explains. “Nobody worries about dying married.”
AMY, who works for a food magazine, is too busy to worry about what will happen to her as she ages. She’s a youthful thirty-eight, with long brown hair and sharply defined features. Like Phil, she says that her job requires “a lot of social interaction. I’m dealing with creative people. There are divas, and egos that you have to manage. I have to cuddle, cajole, threaten, be passive-aggressive.” Added to her formal work responsibilities, this relationship management takes a toll on her, especially during the busy periods. “Two weeks out of every month we’re working twelve-, fourteen-, sixteen-hour days. I can’t plan anything.” Usually, she doesn’t want to. “Work is very social,” she reports, “and I like the peace of coming home and not having to interact anymore, having a chance to decompress.”
At the beginning of our interview she tells me that she moved into a place of her own once she could afford it, but once she gets more comfortable she reveals another layer of her story. She has moved from a shared apartment into a place of her own twice during the past ten years, and while having money to pay the rent was necessary, in both cases she made the change to escape domestic relationships that were dragging her down. The first time was in Los Angeles, where she had been living with her brother after graduating from college and cycling through a series of bad roommates. “I just couldn’t live with him anymore,” Amy explains. “He was driving me nuts and I had to get away.” Getting her own place proved liberating. Not only did it make her feel like a real adult, it also restored her sense of autonomy and self-control.
The second time was more painful. She was in New York, where she had moved in with her boyfriend and begun to imagine their life together. “It was far more intimate and intense than living with roommates,” Amy reports. But she poured herself into it because she was in love, and she knew they could make things work. Only they couldn’t. As she later learned, her boyfriend was secretly dating a woman in her early twenties. “He was a jerk,” Amy says, with well-earned hostility. “I found out that he had been cheating on me since the first month we moved in together. He had been lying to me the whole time, and I didn’t know.” Scarred from the experience, Amy ruled out any kind of shared housing situation and has vowed that she will live alone, safely removed from a potentially harmful roommate or partner, until she finds someone who earns her trust and affection. She’s not shy about looking, but she does so slowly and cautiously, ever mindful of what she has to lose.
AMY MAY BE CAUTIOUS, but, as a relatively comfortable and secure young professional, she is far less self-protective than the many disadvantaged city dwellers who choose to live alone to avoid friends and family who have previously contributed to their problems and may still threaten to put them in harm’s way. Within a few miles of Amy’s spacious apartment, there are thousands of solitary men clustered in New York City’s remaining stock of single-room occupancy dwellings and studios. These men are struggling to shake off a heavy load of burdens: substance abuse, a criminal record, poverty, unemployment, and disease are common, and often overlapping.
The ranks of men in this situation have grown steadily since the 1970s, due not only to the collapse of the industrial labor market and the fact that employers in the service sector are reluctant to hire them, but also to the rise of women in the paid workforce, the vast expansion of the penal system, and the retrenchment of social services for the poor.4 In 2006 the New York Times reported, “About 18 percent of men ages forty to forty-four with less than four years of college have never married, according to census estimates. That is up from about 6 percent a quarter century ago. Among similar men ages thirty-five to thirty-nine, the portion jumped to 22 percent from 8 percent in that time.” The economic crisis of the late 2000s made things even worse, and in 2010, as a Pew Research Center study of the “New Economics of Marriage” showed, single men without a college degree had even less income and fewer prospects than they did in 1970—making them more “unmarriageable” than they were then.5
Many of these men see living alone as a necessary evil, since it gives them the time and space to regain their footing, but it deprives them of much needed care and social support. Greg, who’s unemployed, is in his early fifties and suffers from severe heart disease. During the past ten years he’s lived alone, mostly in shelters and SROs around Manhattan. When he recounts his life story, it’s clear that, for men in his situation, close ties with friends and family members can be helpful or harmful, depending on the circumstance.6 Communities, in this way, are a lot like marriages: When they’re good, they’re very good, but when they’re bad, they’re dangerous.
Not long ago Greg was hospitalized after a heart attack, and he worries about a recurrence. “I think about that sometimes, me being in a house alone. It could be a disadvantage. It might be good if I have somebody around me.” But who? Greg used to be a drug addict, and for roughly twenty years he lived between jail cells, abandoned buildings, and the streets. “I went in and out of jail, in and out of jail, in and out of jail, until around ’97 or ’98. I hadn’t had a job in over twenty years because I stayed on drugs a long time.” Greg had two children with a common-law wife. He says the state wouldn’t let them stay together because they couldn’t afford an apartment together, and he’s never spent a night with the kids. Their mother died recently, and these days he rarely sees his other family members. Eventually, Greg would like to spend more time with his children, and maybe with other family, too. Although he has been off drugs for nearly a decade, he knows that day is a long time off.
For now, Greg has devised an alternative strategy for soliciting care and attention after a heart attack. “No matter where I’m at, nobody with me or nothing like that, if it did come down on me, I make sure I get out in the hallway. I’ll get to my door real quick. You don’t last that long after it hits you because it cuts your wind. You can’t breathe, so you’re gonna pass out. If I got in the hallway and fell, somebody coming down the next floor probably see me. It might take a little time, though—might be too late ’cause wasn’t nobody on my floor. But if I got out in the hallway somewhere down the line, somebody coming in gonna see me.”
The shelters and SROs where Greg has lived pack a lot of people into small spaces, and there’s considerable human traffic in the common areas and hallways. Greg could try to develop some relationships in the buildings and use them for social support, but he’s wary of his coresidents. He’s even more cautious around his older friends: “I had a lot of headaches in my days by knowing people, the type of friends that I’ve had. You know, it’s like, ‘Oh man, let me have this, let me have that.’ And, you know, when you got a friend, if he got a problem, you got a problem, because they gonna bring it to you. Back in those years, we just thick and thin, everything was us together. We do our drugs together, go to homes, abandoned buildings together.”
Occasionally Greg gets lonely and longs for good company, but he fears that spending time with the people in his network will lead him down the wrong path. “Most of those guys, I hardly see them anymore. I kind of avoid things like that nowadays. I guess it’s kind of on me. I don’t be trying to make friends to talk to. ‘Hi’ and ‘Bye.’ ‘How you doing?’ Almost every day I go outside, but, you know, most of the time I just go to the park, read my book. I’m not real conversational here lately. I’ve been so much into myself.”
Tim, who’s in his fifties, has also decided that he’s better off keeping to himself in a small room rather than trying to live with a partner or roommates. “Whenever I lived with roommates, well, those people were always on drugs and stuff. I like being alone right now because I can’t blame anybody except myself if I fuck up. It’s like, I’m not antisocial, but I have a hard enough time with my own problems without other people’s problems.”
Recently, Tim moved into an SRO with a staff offering social services and decent security, because he wanted a place that felt safer and more anonymous than his previous building. “There’s other hotels like this, with people doing drugs and stuff, saying, ‘Hey, you wanna get high or anything?’ But here, there’s no pressure to do anything. You can just go to your room every day, you know, come home and close your door and nobody’s here to bother you. There’s nobody knocking at your door.”
POOR MEN WHO LIVE IN SROs and low-cost efficiency apartments build interpersonal barriers to defend themselves from the potentially corrupting social influence of their peers. Others, particularly those who have fallen down the class ladder and hope to climb up again, distance themselves from coresidents to evade the stigma of poverty and failure. Some of them avoid family, former partners, and old friends because they’re ashamed of their status, or because they believe they’ve been abandoned by those who are fed up with or ashamed of them.
Although poor men who live alone often express an abstract interest in finding a partner or reconnecting with another community, in practice the obstacles to doing either are so daunting that maintaining independence takes precedence. The result is a vicious circle: Self-imposed social isolation removes impoverished singles from job networks and potential sources of support, increases stress, and compromises health, placing them at risk for even greater detachment and suffering.
A striking number of the SRO and shelter residents we interviewed reported that they had kept to themselves because they were overwhelmed by the illnesses and deaths among people close to them. For men who, like Greg, come from poor or unhealthy environments, staying close to old friends and family members carries a risk of being exposed to trauma as well as trouble. Rick, who’s fifty and gay, was at a loss when asked about his close relationships: “Everybody’s dead. Everybody. It was like a swipe. I lost, like, eight to nine people within a period of, like, five or six years. Along with family members. I was close to my older brother, very close. And he was talking to me about my friend [Rick’s recently deceased partner] and helping me and everything. And last October, I was getting ready to meet him for lunch and I was leaving here and the phone rang and he was getting dressed to meet me and died, so . . . So, you see. There was just a pattern to everything.”
Rick’s response was to hunker down in his room. He keeps his television on around the clock, using it as a diversion when he’s awake and as background noise when he sleeps, turning it off only when he leaves the room. It’s not an exciting life, he says, but it protects him from future pain. “Right now I have absolutely no friends. And I guess it’s my choice to be just on my own. I used to be a very outgoing person, and now I’m not really a people person. I just come in my place, go in and out—that’s it.”
Miguel has recently been through a similarly brutal stretch, and he’s responded by retreating into solitude. He says that his goal is to achieve greater autonomy, so he won’t need to depend on others who, he fears, will disappoint him or disappear: “I can’t really say right now that I have a close friend, or that I’m even looking to get a close friend. This particular experience that I’m involved with now is giving me a chance to grow more as a man, to allow the man in me to mature more, in the total sense, and to become self-sufficient and of self-worth in my own right. What I need to do is to learn to become my own close friend and best friend, and to love myself, and feel self-worth and validation.”
WHILE SOME MEN IN THE SROs stay close to their buildings to avoid friends and family, others worry more about the company inside. Nick, who’s in his mid-thirties, reports that “most of my old friends are either dead or incarcerated.” He contracted HIV from a blood transfusion when he was a teenager, spent years fighting a drug addiction, got married, had a child, got a GED, then a divorce, and soon after his life fell apart. He’s been unemployed for six years, living off disability insurance and spending most of his nights in SROs that were “heavily drug-infested, mouse-ridden, cockroach-ridden” places where there were “blatant sales, prostitution, and junkies from every drug that you could think of, dopeheads to crackheads to alcoholics.” Nick says that “when you’ve lived in a place where everything is rotten, you seem to be rotten.” He had friends in the building, and he was reluctant to leave them because he liked to party. But when things got bad, he’d try to avoid them. “I became very, very, very reclusive. If I didn’t have to go out, I didn’t go out.” His friends didn’t appreciate this treatment, however, and Nick’s life got even rougher. “You got people knocking on your door at three in the morning, you know. It was nuts. I was getting into fights, verbally and physically.” Nick became desperate to distance himself from his neighbors and started looking for a safer, cleaner place to live. Eventually he found one, and when he moved he brought along an important lesson: Keep to yourself.
His new SRO has a comfortable common area, and residents gather there daily to pass the time, talking, reading the paper, and watching TV. Occasionally the staff offers a meal, or a movie, or classes for the residents. Nick avoids all of this. “I don’t partake in the social life of this building. I kind of stick to myself. I really don’t like people to know my business.” He’s cautious about the men in his situation, because they remind him of the man he used to be, as well as the people he’s been trying to avoid. “Everybody wants to know something, and once they do they think they’ve got your number,” he says. They start issuing invitations. They harass you. They pull you down. Like Rick and several other SRO residents, Nick spends a great deal of time locked in his room with the television on. “The less I have to interact, the better it is for me,” Nick says. “I don’t even know one person’s name in this whole building.”
Nick hopes that the new, nicer SRO will help him with the transition out of poverty, joblessness, and addiction. He wants his stay to be temporary, though he admits that, if he comes to like it there, it might beat his other options. His ex-wife is remarried and he doesn’t see her anymore. But he has family in Brooklyn, and he’d like to spend more time with his children. Nick also misses the warmth of a companion sleeping beside him, and he could imagine living with a partner after he cleans up. “For right now,” he says, “I’m not going nowhere. Hopefully, once I can start to get back on my feet a little better—you know, as my health continues, hopefully I’ll go back to work. And possibly one day, you know, move out of here, or, you know, stay here. For now, I’m here. I’m in a good place, so I’m not gonna screw that up.”
For some men in the building, however, it’s hard to appreciate being in a good place when other residents are in such noticeably bad shape. Downwardly mobile residents, men who once had stable jobs and a decent income, are often embarrassed to have landed in the stigmatized world of SROs, and they distance themselves from their neighbors as a way of maintaining self-esteem. John, for instance, wound up in his SRO because he couldn’t find any other housing that he could afford with his disability check. He’s been in his current place for four years, during which he’s made only one friend. “The majority of people I try to keep away from,” he says. The substance abusers and mentally ill residents who congregate in public spaces “give you a clue there’s something wrong here, know what I mean? I’m not gonna socialize with these people.”
Bob, who’s in his early sixties and has lived on his own for most of his life, ran a small business out of the house he owned until “the state came and condemned my whole block through the wonders of the eminent domain laws.” He had a hard time adjusting to the new building. “When I was first brought in here, I mean, I was practically in tears. I wouldn’t even sleep in here. I slept in a basement on Fifty-fifth Street for the first week. I didn’t want nothing to do with this.”
Bob eventually grew more comfortable in his building. He has gotten to know and respect the social workers, whom he sees as remarkably caring. He’s pleased about the security, and he appreciates how well the staff maintains the common spaces. But no matter how much the environment satisfies him, it’s still an SRO, not the apartment with a garden in which he once took so much pride. No matter how professional the staff is, the other tenants bear the marks of poverty, illness, and hardship, and for outsiders they can be an unsightly bunch. Knowing this, residents like Bob acknowledge that they feel some shame about their situation, and many try to save face by turning away from family and friends who might otherwise be close to them. They go solo because they don’t want anyone to see how far they have fallen, or because they fear that others want nothing to do with them.
Nick, for instance, explains that he pulled away from his children and their mother after he started living in SROs. “I wasn’t around much for them. I didn’t like where I was living. I didn’t like the way I was living, so a lot of times I wouldn’t show my face. The environment I was living in was taking a toll on me. And it’s more embarrassment, I guess you’d say, than anything. I just didn’t want people to know and see how I was.” Tim, who says that living alone can be “horrible and lonely,” has lost touch with his ex-wife and children, whom he tried to protect from his downtrodden environment. Now he’s reluctant to reach out to family or search for a new partner, because “at this time in my life, you know, I have nothing to offer anyone.” Some men believe that their family members devalued them when they moved into the world of poor single men, and complain that they’ve been abandoned. “I’m treated different since I’m alone,” Rick says. “It seems like now nobody cares.”
MARY ANN WOULD HAVE UNDERSTOOD that feeling. She lived alone for decades, and in the fall of 2007 she died that way, too. She was seventy-nine years old when she called herself an ambulance and went into a hospital near her home in Los Angeles. Her life ended there two weeks later, after a full cardiac arrest. When it happened, Mary Ann didn’t have a friend or relative at her side. In fact, the only person she’d even listed as an emergency contact was Sue, who delivered drugs for her pharmacy.
“I was really surprised when they called me and said my name was on there as the person to contact,” Sue tells me when I visit her home in a working-class neighbourhood in Huffington Park. “I went, ‘Oh really, okay . . .’” She laughs nervously, looks toward the Christmas decorations that saturate her living room, and continues. “I didn’t even know if she had a brother or family.”
Sue had last heard from Mary Ann on a phone call from the hospital. She’d left an urgent message, pleading with Sue to feed and look after her two dogs, who were chained up outside the house. “When she called, she was just crying. She said that if somebody doesn’t pick up the mail, they’ll take her dogs away. ‘They’re all I have,’ she said. She goes, ‘I promise I won’t cheat you. I’ll pay you.’ I wasn’t worried about that. It just broke my heart a little that she’d think, ‘They’re all I have.’”
I visited the hospital two weeks after Mary Ann’s death, because her body and belongings were still there. No one had planned a funeral, or even picked up her things. I wasn’t there alone. Emily Issa, a deputy investigator for the Los Angeles County Public Administrator, was letting me shadow her. Emily is one of a hundred full-time employees at the county public administrator’s office, which investigates cases in which someone dies and no one claims the body or the estate. She is sort of like a detective for people who die alone. Her job is to comb through the remains of their lives, searching for next of kin, trying to figure out what they’ve left behind and who should get it. Emily and her colleagues get about three thousand cases like this one each year.
Mary Ann was single, with no known siblings or children. But she owned her house, she had a bank account, and who knows what other valuables she left behind in her home. Now someone stands to inherit it, and Emily’s job is to find out who. She’s looking for someone who knew Mary Ann to lead her to a relative. There’s also the question of who’s going to bury her; before Emily’s finished, she’ll have to resolve that, too.
We start our search in the hospital’s patient services office. There’s a nun working there, and at first we think she might know something helpful, because when she sees Mary Ann’s name on the case file, her face lights up. But it turns out she spoke to her only a few times, and she has little to offer besides the assurance that Mary Ann got good care until the end.
The nun hands Emily a big plastic bag. Inside is everything Mary Ann brought with her to the hospital, and Emily starts digging through it, looking for clues. There’s a fluffy blue robe. A small black purse. Prescription drugs. Baby powder. Glasses. Coupons. Typical things you would find in a woman’s purse.
None of this is of much use to Emily. She needs contact information. An address book. A cell phone with some names on the speed dial. There’s nothing like that in the purse. She finds a notebook, and she flips through it in search of a personal note, maybe a list of last wishes. But every page is blank.
What she does get is a set of keys to Mary Ann’s house. The best-case scenario, Emily tells me, is that once we get there we’ll find a will or some instructions. But that happens only rarely; in her line of work, it’s like hitting the jackpot: “I’ve been out to a case where I walk in and on the nightstand next to the bed it says, ‘In case of emergency . . .’ Five minutes and I’m done.”
MARY ANN’S CASE ISN’T THAT EASY. When we get to her house, her two dogs are still chained up in the yard, so Emily calls animal control to take them away. The outside of Mary Ann’s house is a mess. The wood panels are rotting. There’s powdery gray dirt where grass once lived. An old VW minibus with flat tires sits in the dusty driveway. Mary Ann used it for storage; it looks like it hasn’t been driven for years.
The inside of the house is even worse. It’s dark and dusty, cluttered with stacks of video cassettes, empty juice cans, boxes from the Home Shopping Network—many never even opened. Emily, who seems completely unfazed by the scene, declares it “mildly pack rat.” I tell her it seems really pack rat to me, so she explains her classification: “You can still see the ground. We see plenty of cases where you can’t even walk on the ground because it’s packed with stuff. You’re climbing over everything.”
Emily is so used to places like this that she never goes on a search without gloves and tennis shoes—and a mask, in case the person died at home and wasn’t found for a while. Usually, she has to dig around. Emily doesn’t just open drawers and medicine cabinets. If she has to, she climbs to the attic. She breaks down locked doors. She once found someone’s business records in a refrigerator—in the vegetable bin.
Emily searches through Mary Ann’s living room. You can tell she had basically condensed her life into this one area. There’s an unmade makeshift daybed in front of the dusty television. Emily lifts up layers of the bed, searching for money, letters, anything that might connect her to the world outside. But there’s nothing under there, just stacks of egg crates and musty blankets.
A few feet beyond the bed, we find an entire dining room set hidden under the clutter. Emily seizes on a stack of mail and canceled checks and starts rifling through it. She still doesn’t find what she’s looking for: No business card from an attorney or an accountant. No photos of friends or relatives. Not even a personal check—just payments, to AARP, Ladies’ Home Journal, TV Guide. In fact, there’s not a single sign that there was another person in Mary Ann’s life. And I find that much stranger than the mess.
AFTER EMILY AND I have been there forty-five minutes without finding even one personal item, I ask her if this is unusual. “Not at all,” she replies. “It’s just like this. People surrounding themselves with things. Things rather than people. She almost built herself into a little cubby, like a cave here, behind all her stuff. You can tell this is where she spent most of her time.”7
Emily’s just looking for contact information, not to piece together someone’s life story. But sometimes she gets those stories anyway. She tells me about two cases that she hasn’t been able to stop thinking about. One involves a woman whose husband died in World War II. She survived another sixty years, but her personal correspondence was a record of how she’d tried to keep her mind in the 1940s. The other concerns a man who killed himself by smoking up his room with a portable barbecue grill, which he’d placed on his bed. When she arrived, Emily tells me, the whole apartment was black from the smoke, and the only white spaces were the ones she and the dead man had left with their footprints. It was disturbing not only because of the nature of the suicide, but also because of the way that the footprints connected her to the case. Emily doesn’t have time to dwell on these stories, though. There’s too much work to do at Mary Ann’s.
More than ninety minutes into the search, Emily finally finds something personal. Buried in a pile on one of the dressers is a sign of a family history: a picture book, with photographs of a little girl dancing, and some others from a studio, the kind used as head shots in Hollywood. The child is pretty, with Shirley Temple curls and deep dimples, but we don’t actually know that it’s Mary Ann, because the label says only “1933.” There’s not a name in sight.
It’s remarkable how little we find out about Mary Ann. We learn that her mother once lived with her at this address, because there’s lots of mail to her. Mary Ann was into herbal medicine and natural remedies. Her father married four times, and her mom was his third wife. She’d microchipped her dogs.
Emily tells me she doesn’t want to make a personal connection with the people she’s investigating. She doesn’t usually try to figure them out, because there are so many of them that it would be emotionally draining.
I ask Emily if she ever wonders who Mary Ann thought would clean up her stuff. “No,” she replies. “It’s never even crossed my mind. Most of the time you see these people don’t want anyone in here. People who knew them never knew this part of their lives existed.”
“She must have known that someday she would die and someone would find all these things,” I insist.
Emily speculates: “Maybe it’s because she didn’t think she had anyone to leave it to. ‘Who cares about my mess, because I have no one to leave it to anyway.’”
AFTER NEARLY TWO HOURS, the only thing we’ve found that might help Emily track down a relative is a thirty-year-old Christmas card addressed to Mary Ann and her mother. It’s from a family in Virginia, and they must be related, because in the card they ask for help with a family tree for their kids. Emily deposits it in the clear plastic bag she’ll bring back to the office. By now it is getting late in the afternoon, and Emily has to return to her office, because there’s a five p.m. deadline for bringing valuable items that belong in the estate to storage.
Emily seals the front door and we walk outside. A few neighbors are looking at us, curiously, and we approach them. She asks Luis, who owns the house next door, if Mary Ann’s family ever came by. “She had no visitors,” he says. “Just different ladies who used to come and help her.” There’s a beat of uncomfortable silence as we all think about Mary Ann. Luis breaks it: “She didn’t seem to be a very happy lady. She was lonely most of the years. She had two dogs with her, and that’s it.”
Moments later, we run into another neighbor, George, who has a different take. “She was a nice person,” he says. “All the time she talked to us. She talked with my son. Every day I come to work, sometimes I’d see her on the porch. We’d say, ‘Hi, Mary.’ ‘Hi, George.’ That’s it.”
Talking with George and Luis helps me understand something about what happens when truly isolated people die alone. In most cases, we can’t actually know whether their solitude was a source of sadness, or satisfaction. Whether they lived and died without friends or family nearby because they preferred it that way, or because something went wrong once and they couldn’t get it right. When we hear about someone like Mary Ann, we can’t help but project some of our own feelings into her story. And our reactions say as much about each one of us as they do about the deceased.
THE NEXT MORNING I meet Emily at the public administrator’s office, where she’s busy making phone calls from her cubicle. She’s tracked down the number of Terry, whose name was the one clue she found in Mary Ann’s house, on that thirty-year-old Christmas card. But when Emily gets him on the phone, there’s a problem: He’s got no idea who Mary Ann is. Terry tells Emily to call his ex-wife. She’s the one who actually wrote the card.
Moments later, Emily’s talking to her.
“Ohhh,” Emily remarks. “He’s the one who gave me the phone number for you, and he said he’d never heard of her. So you think she was his aunt. I see.”
The ex-wife was partly right. Mary Ann was a relative of Terry’s, but a distant one. Her mother was Terry’s great-aunt. But Terry had never met Mary Ann, never even spoken to her. And he knew virtually nothing about her. “We’ve been just going back and forth on this trying to find out who she was,” Terry explains. He says he felt sad when he heard about Mary Ann’s situation, but he admits it is hard to feel emotional about her death. “My only feeling toward this right now is I feel responsibility to try to resolve her situation, to kind of tidy up her life, I guess.”
One month after Mary Ann’s death, Terry and his cousins were still deciding whether they wanted the county to settle the estate or handle it themselves. Emily tells me that because Mary Ann’s assets total more than $6,000, the public administrator could arrange for her to be buried in a local cemetery.
If Mary Ann didn’t have $6,000, LA County would still take care of things. When people die alone here without the money for burial, their bodies are cremated and their ashes are stored in individual boxes for four years. After that, if no one claims them, they’re buried together in a mass grave. The burial takes place once a year, in the corner of a massive cemetery near the USC medical school in East LA.
The ceremony for all the unclaimed people from 2003 takes place just a couple weeks after Mary Ann’s death. A chaplain officiates the service. “Honored guests, on this day, December 6, 2007, we’re gathered here . . . One thousand, nine hundred eighteen brothers and sisters of humankind.” It’s a heartfelt occasion, but it’s a little empty, too. Besides the chaplain, only about ten people—all county employees—show up for the mass burial. One of them points out the tiny plaques that mark each year’s grave site. The remains of nearly two thousand people fill a hole that’s only ten feet long, eight feet wide, eight feet deep.
And I can’t help thinking: Right here, all these thousands of people who lived and died alone, they aren’t alone anymore.