Newspapers continue to go out of business. I live in a strip of 12 townhouses. I’m the only one that subscribes to the newspaper. So it’s Sunday again. And the news part of the paper is still getting thinner and grimmer.
In a Colorado Voices column, Debbie Reslock, an Evergreen writer and partner in an architectural and planning company, tells the tale of the lonesome death of Mary Sue Merchant, an ode worthy of the great poet of the Yukon, Robert Service.
Mary died alone at 72. Her dog, without food or water, laid down next to her and died shortly thereafter. She lived in Sandy Run, a small town in South Carolina. Mary laid dead in her house for 18 months before someone found her.
In Aspen, Colorado, considered one of the most beautiful places on earth, the number of suicides is somewhere around three times the national rate. And I learned on the front page of The Sunday Denver Post, that in Colorado roughly 10,000 drunken drivers are busted a second time each year, while “more than 5,000 had at least three DUI convictions” over a three year span. (Reported by Kevin Vaughan and David Olinger.)
So the figures continue to mount, the stories to get more unbelievable, while the readers vanish into the clear mountain air.
Part of the reason that I haven’t written in over two months is that, after reviewing the world, I decided I didn’t like the trash, hopelessness, and depression I had to dig through. The other problem was that on March 2, I had an accident while trying to get on an RTD (public transportation) bus on my way to work. It could easily have killed me, much as Natasha Richardson’s skiing accident killed her a few days later.
Okay. Like an acquaintance once told me, keep it to yourself. No one else is interested. And he was right. So I’ve been slowly recovering while trying to put the money together to pay the ambulance, hospital, and doctor bills as well as the $1,000 I lost in wages for the rest of March and half of April. The only difference between me and Mary is that when I die, and I accept the fact that one day I will die, I won’t have a pet to die with me. If I’m working at the time, someone might come over to check on me. Otherwise, all I know is that it won’t matter to me how long I’m ignored.
I don’t know exactly what happened. But I was standing at the bus stop and the bus kept going, then slowed down and open his doors. I turned and saw that much before I fell on the pavement. I had nine stitches around my eye and a bruised face. I know it was my fault because RTD told me it was when I called them.
It was my fault because I expected the bus to stop at the bus stop (which RTD denies is even there), I trusted the driver to be trained to handle the bus (he wasn’t), and I expected some help instead of having to lie on the sidewalk until a woman came along, saw the blood, and called an ambulance. But the RTD is not responsible for you if you’re not on the bus, if you’re on the bus, or if you are trying to get off the bus. Within a week later, a school kid was killed getting off the bus on Colfax and DIT, an old acquaintance of mine, lost her friend when a bus driver jammed on the breaks causing her hip to snap which put her into a nursing home, a way station to the morgue. DIT said that RTD didn’t take any responsibility for that either.
So I figure the damage has cost me some future time, I just don’t know how much. I do know it takes me about 10 times as long to balance my check book. And I’m having a difficult time sorting out the bills that keep coming in. So one day, to paraphrase a South Carolina sheriff, “This guy had absolutely nobody who cared enough to check on him.” And the sad part is, I’ll be only one of millions in the same predicament.
- Bob