Joyce Vincent had been dead for more than two years when her body was eventually discovered in January this year. She was surrounded by unopened Christmas presents. The television was still on and so was the heating.

Housing officers came to her north London bedsit only to repossess it because the rent was thousands of pounds in arrears. A locksmith drilled the door open. A giant pile of unopened post, the earliest dated November 2003, lay on the doormat.

Vincent lay on the sitting room floor. Her body was so badly decomposed - her remains were "largely skeletal", the pathologist said - that she had to be identified by dental records. Detectives told the inquest last week that, inasmuch as it was possible to tell, there were no suspicious circumstances surrounding the death. The coroner recorded an open verdict. Vincent was 40 years old.

This is from a story in the The Times of London that I found on my friend Ursula's site. The amazing thing about this story is that this woman was 40 years old. She was in the prime of her life. She lived in an apartment building with 200 units. She had a family. She worked for a advertising firm. She must have had some friends. And yet there she rotted in her apartment for 2 years before her decomposed corpse was discovered. It's just startling.

Now, if I died alone in my apartment, I would hope that the situation would be a little different. But it certainly gets you thinking. My landlord wouldn't wait even a month if I didn't pay the rent, but she lives next door and I see her almost every day. My cats, what would they do? I have no idea. They'd probably sound the general alarm and start caterwauling after a few days of not being fed and shitting all over the place when the litter box was full. Would they lick me? Would they eat me? I don't know. They'd probably eat me. My family would start to wonder after not hearing from me and I suspect that the handful of the readers of this blog would be curious about the sudden lack of posts and if went on for more than a few weeks, they'd start to inquire. I live around the corner from work and my boss would probably try to track me down since I'm an integral part of the team and I don't have that much PTO after my trip to Canada.

So I might last three weeks at the most before my rotting hulk saw the light of day. And I would hope that the bulk of the people in the world be found much quicker. But I think in an increasingly urban world, where more and more people live dissassociated lives, Ms. Vincent's experience, if a dead person can experience anything, might be more frequent, sad to say.