ArticleThe headlines have moved on, but Gene Hackman’s lonely last days keep rattling around my head. The story is yet another sad indictment of a world that makes it too easy for us to keep other people at arm’s length — including the caregivers often left to care for their loved ones by themselves. We shouldn’t scroll past but pay attention: all our lives depend on it.
Hackman’s wife and caregiver Betsy Arakawa died on 11 February from natural causes, leaving the elderly former Hollywood great to die alone a week later, likely disoriented (he had Alzheimer’s) and starved of both food and human connection. He was discovered by a maintenance worker in late February, who then alerted police.
What’s more tragic than dying alone and going undiscovered — aside from the distinct likelihood that, in Hackman’s case, Arakawa’s “heroic” (which is to say, solitary) efforts were probably what kept him alive so long? It is the tragedy that lonely deaths aren’t uncommon, with some people’s decomposed bodies going unmissed for one, two, three, even ten years.
Ageing societies, growing loneliness, social marginalisation and the fraying of community — all kicked along by the COVID-19 pandemic — are the usual causes here. But then there’s our entwined desire not to be burdened by others, nor be a burden to them.
This unusual suspect masquerades under a more neutral label: privacy.
When craved, privacy is a delicious bubble of one and perhaps an intimate few. But it’s also a double-edged sword that cuts us off from each other.
Apparently, after the pandemic, Hackman and Arakawa retreated into their own bubble of seclusion. She was devoted to her increasingly frail husband, often wearing a mask in public to prevent him from catching a bug. She might have felt everything was on her shoulders. In recent years, neighbours who lived in the same gated community in Santa Fe, New Mexico, told reporters the couple were rarely seen. Their only trace was the bins they left out for collection.
A world separates most of us from the Hollywood elite enjoying retirement in leafy privacy. But many will overidentify here: a glimpse of the neighbour’s bins is all we see of them. I live in a townhouse complex with several families, older couples and a good handful of elderly people living alone. All the houses face each other, yet it’s possible to go months without seeing neighbours. Yes, many of us have busy schedules and maybe many of us prefer — as the saying goes — to keep to ourselves.
It’s as though we’ve silently agreed to treat each other’s privacy as ultimate. Not much is sacred these days, but when it comes to privacy, we’re all true believers: You do your thing, and I’ll do mine. Let’s leave each other be.
Modern life also enables us to avoid each other. Double incomes, virtually a must-have to service a mortgage today, or keep pace with the cost-of-living, max out time we might have spent with others in our social circle. No new house build I’ve seen has a front porch, that half-way point between the street and the home that ups the chances of a friendly beer with neighbours. Self-checkout machines lower the chance of chitchat. At my pilates class, people are glued to their phones until the instructor begins the session. To phone someone, or turn up unannounced at their place, feels a shocking breach of privacy. Since kids and dogs grease the wheels of social interaction, making conversation with a stranger in a park without either in tow risks coming off as mad or desperate.
I’m pretty sure few envisioned that the twenty-first century would be a lonely one.
In 2020, the New York Times columnist David Brooks argued that the nuclear family had been a bust. He’s really raging against the machine of modern individualism that pulverises community life. Atomised individuals and atomised nuclear families are left struggling and exhausted in tandem, isolated from each other, he argued.
One detail hounded Brooks: the richer the nation, the smaller its average household size. A high income buys privacy, as well as a coveted superpower for time-poor, overcommitted people: the ability to outsource. The more well-off we are, the less (we think) we need each other.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the theologian and pastor hanged for his part in the plot to assassinate Hitler, wrote a book on Christian community in which he outlines “the ministry of bearing”. We “must bear the burden of a brother”, he insists, because “it is only when he is a burden that another person is really a brother and not merely an object to be manipulated”. Sounds grim, yet for Bonhoeffer in the caring community everyone is loved to the degree they are a burden.
Granted, love may be too high a bar here. But since our anti-social social contract seems intent on dispensing with the demands of other people, we should aim high for inspiration. We might still land in a pretty good place. Because right now, when I consider: do we want each other or the comforts of wealth and privacy? I’m kind of scared of the answer.
Justine Toh is a Senior Research Fellow of the Centre for Public Christianity. This article was first published in ABC Religion & Politics.