More than a decade ago, I read a shocking newspaper article about policemen finding dried skeletal remains of an old woman slumped over her dining table in her kitchen. The coroners estimated she’d been dead for three years. The postman alerted the authorities when he found her letters just weren’t being collected. The lady had evidently passed away as she sat at her kitchen table to eat her meal. It was later discovered she was at one time a popular actress in Australia, who in her later years became something of a recluse. Her neightbours claimed they rarely saw her, and she’d always kept to herself. She used to go for morning walks regularly, but she never talked to anyone. They’d simply assumed she’d moved away when they no longer saw her.

I first found out the plight of some elderly people who lived on their own when my parents ran a small supermarket in a well-to-do suburb of Sydney many years ago. Many elderly people in the area were not mobile or robust enough to do their own grocery shopping, so they often shopped via phone, and my parents used to deliver their groceries to their home after hours. On some occasions Mum and Dad had to wait ten minutes, and once up to half an hour before the door was opened—so pained was the elderly people’s progress from their living room or bedroom to the front door. And some did not even hear the doorbell! My Dad’s job after delivering the groceries to the elderly, often was to open their jars and cans so they could eat. This was before the days of electric can openers and the like.

One evening my parents delivered one elderly gentleman’s groceries. His name was Mike. To their horror they found him bleeding from an open sore on his neck and not even aware of it. Being a practical sort of person, Mum had him sit down and promptly found herself some antiseptic and gauze (I guess she raided his bathroom cabinet), and set about cleansing the wound and dressing it. Then she noticed the jumper he was wearing looked like it hadn’t been washed in ages. The next day Mum bought a thick new sweater on a sale from a local retailer, and my parents visited Mike again in the evening. Mike sat obediently on his couch as Mum helped him to take off his grotty sweater and to put on the new one. Mum then secretly took Mike's old sweater with her, and threw it away without even asking his permission! That’s my Mum, imminently practical, no non-sense woman.

Then more recently in the last couple of years, several elderly people living on their own in Sydney died in their houses and flats, with no one finding out about it until some weeks, even months later. The terrible news made continuing headlines, and eventually started an orgarnised effort by many groups to ring elderly people living on their own once a day and to look in on them regularly, so that such tragedies do not repeat themselves over and over again. And everyone was encouraged to keep an eye on their elderly neighbours.

With that fresh reminder on my mind, I started looking carefully at my neighbours’ letter boxes when I take my son to and from his school each day, about fifteen minutes walk each way. Whenever I see letters not being collected for a while, I make a note of it with a faint sense of trepidation. If the letters are still not collected after a week, I’ve told myself I have to knock on the door. So far there has been only one false alarm. 

This brings me to talk about Georgio. Georgio lieves in an orange brick house opposite ours. He is an elderly Italian man who lives on his own. His wife had passed away some years ago. Georgio told us his late wife who only spoke Italian, and the elderly Chinese lady who lives next door and only speaks Chinese, used to be friends. Each of them spoke in their own language as they pottered around their garden, he said, and they understood each other perfectly.

These days Georgio doesn’t quite recognise us. Then once in a while he surprises us by waving at our child, and commenting happily on how fast he is growing up. His daughter who lives some suburbs away checks in on him regularly. My next door neighbour, a retired couple who are quite robust, keeps their eyes on him, too. Then there is me on the reserve. I think Georgio will be okay.