Going Solo

by Eric Klinenberg

  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.

  5.

  TOGETHER ALONE

  ON AN UNUSUALLY HOT Monday night in June 2008, a long line of singles—mostly women, many in heels—snaked around the edge of San Francisco’s Kabuki Cinema until it reached a long pink carpet in the lobby. Ordinarily, the first night of the workweek is slow at the Kabuki, but this was a special occasion. Five local women, all of whom had written about being single, had organized a special screening of Sex and the City, complete with Carrie Cosmos, goody bags (translucent shoe boxes, actually, whose contents included gym passes, a makeup kit, and a prepaid card for thirty minutes of adult videos online), and an after-party in the theater’s bar. The women had met two months earlier, when they were copane
lists at a sold-out forum called “Single in the City.” The event was so successful that they decided to organize a follow-up, and what could be better than gathering to watch the ongoing exploits of that fabulous foursome, Carrie, Samantha, Miranda, and Charlotte? The Kabuki was willing to host, on the condition that the five authors agreed to buy every ticket for the theater in advance and handle the sales. This turned out not to be cause for concern: The gala sold out less than four days after it was announced on the authors’ home pages and social network sites, and the crowd was so eager to get there that scores showed up an hour before screen time. The group even included a singular Bay Area celebrity: Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist.

  The buzz surrounding the party came as no surprise to co-organizer Sasha Cagen, the author of Quirkyalone: A Manifesto for Uncompromising Romantics and the leader of an incipient movement that advocates for those who enjoy being single and are not particularly anxious about finding a partner. Cagen, a creative and charismatic Barnard graduate who’s now in her mid-thirties, took up the cause ten years ago when she wrote an essay called “People Like Us: The Quirkyalones.” “I am,” she wrote, “what you might call deeply single. Almost never in a relationship.” Cagen had always considered herself an oddball, but then she noticed how many lonely romantics were out there, unaware that, together, they had inadvertently become a social force. “We are the puzzle pieces who seldom fit with other puzzle pieces. Romantics, idealists, eccentrics, we inhabit singledom as our natural resting state. In a world where proms and marriage define the social order, we are, by force of our personalities and inner strength, rebels.” Cagen estimated that about 5 percent of the population was Quirkyalone, and she realized that they need not feel lonely or isolated: “A community of like-minded souls is essential . . . When one Quirkyalone finds another, oohh la la. The earth quakes.”