My neighbor was not elderly – he was younger than me, in his early 40s, single, and seemingly fit. The last time I had seen him, the day before, he was going for a run, wearing track shorts, looking trim and happy to have a day off from his busy work life as corporate lawyer, a partner in one of the city’s top firms. We had exchanged words of greeting and small talk.

Unexpected Phone Call

Sunday nights, at least where I live in Virginia Beach, seem to be quieter than all other nights of the week. I notice that quiet as I take my dog for a final walk or bring some trash out before retiring. The sky is darker, there’s a palpable stillness in the air. Typically I’m the last one to bed in my house – on school nights my wife is in bed by 10 and the kids are pretty well wrapped up in their rooms by then. So I take a few quiet hours to work, read, check out some videos – all in my home office/den. That Sunday night 6 0r 7 years ago was no different. It was late October, a week or so before Halloween, with a bit of fall chill present. Then the phone rang, which was unusual for the hour. The caller ID indicated the origin as the Washington, DC area.

“Hello, this is Mary S. Is this Ron? My brother is Brad S., your neighbor – we may have met once when I was down there visiting. I remembered that he told me he gave you a house key to hold in case of an emergency, and I looked up your number.” I remembered that to be the case, but I had to fumble through my messy desk draw to locate the key,  which I did. “Yes, I have it, what’s up, is everything ok?”

“Brad was supposed to call me at my mother’s in Virginia today and he hasn’t, and I haven’t been able to reach him.  Do you think you could check on him?” Holding the phone, I walked over to the window and  peered out to the adjacent driveway.

“Well, his car is in the driveway, but I’ve noticed that he often takes a taxi when I see him coming or going from a business trip. He could just be out of town.”

She insistently replied that he was definitely not traveling and that she and he were in almost daily communication. Something was wrong. She had even called the police. “What did they say?”

“Since he’s an adult, they’re not going to rush over – standard missing persons procedure is to sit on it for a day or two. Anyway, since you do have the key could you just check it out for me. I can stay on the phone.”  This was getting a little difficult. Is this something I should do by myself? But since it’s hard to say no to a sincere, emotional plea for help, I grabbed a flashlight and walked over to Brad’s house.

The Grim Discovery

Just as I reached his door, a patrol car pulled up, which was a relief. I identified myself to the single officer who had responded on what must have been a slow night for police calls. I think he was also relieved to have an “authorized” person with a key to facilitate the investigation. I reached to open the storm door so I could put the key in the main portal. The outer door was locked. In my experience, so-called “storm” doors are only locked when you’re inside the house, and thus my immediate thought was that he was at home.

It turned out that the same key I held opened a door on the rear deck, and the officer and I got into the house that way. I called out as people do when they walk into someone’s home. “Brad? Are you there? Hello? It’s Ron, from next door.” Downstairs was dark and quiet, but we heard some sound from the top floor, three levels up. Brad’s bedroom was the only room at the top of the house, an add-on to the original attic of the two-story that gave the roof an odd, cut-off appearance.

We walked in and there was Brad, prone in his bed, pajama-clad. His blue eyes were gazing vacantly in the direction of the television, which was droning on with picture and sound. I recall two distinct sensory impressions – a faint but pungent odor that I mentally tagged as the classic “death smell” having no other reference for it, and the fact that he had a prominent erection poking up in his pajama bottoms. Since based on all of the available facts he had been laying there since the previous night or very early that morning – at least 12 hours – I assumed that some state of general rigor mortis had caused this. Later, I looked it up, and discovered that the post mortem stiffening of the male member is a recognized phenomenon historically associated with men who have been executed by hanging as well as other causes of sudden death.

The officer stepped next to the bed and placed two fingers on Brad’s neck to test for pulse, and finding none called in for the detectives and coroner.

Now bear in mind, I am holding my cell phone the whole time on an open connection with Brad’s sister. So it had fallen upon me to transmit this major bad news to her. Live, from the scene.  Thankfully at that awful moment of truth, she had put her friend on the line to speak with me on her behalf, no doubt because she was anticipating the worst and was already somewhat hysterical. My memory of the conversation is a bit fuzzy, but I managed to tell her that Brad was gone. “I’m sorry.”

My work was over, but I couldn’t go to sleep. I sat in my study, watching through the window as other police personnel came and went. I thought  that I might be questioned as part of their inquiry, but I never was.  All of their business was done quietly, with an absence of flashing lights or curious neighbors. The final departure, after several hours, came when two men emerged from the side door, struggling to carry off the black body bag now holding the mortal remains of my neighbor.  So long, Brad.

The Funeral

I decided to go to Brad’s funeral the following Thursday, which was to be at an Episcopal church in the small town he grew up in, about two hours drive from where I live. His sister Mary had called me several times since his demise to help her sort a few things out, check on the house and car, make a call to someone, and the like. But I would not actually meet her in person until the funeral.

As I had mentioned, Brad was a partner at a very large corporate law firm. It occupies several floors of the area’s tallest new office building. He had his own page on their website, with a nice photo and description of his specialty – contract law – along with a superficial but impressive biography. By Tuesday, his page had vanished from the site.

I did not really know Brad very well – just a pleasant neighbor. My wife and I had invited him over for dinner one time, where the biggest piece of information we gleaned was that, upon inquiring if he was Jewish (because his last name sounded  as if he might be), he unequivocally stated that no,no  he was actually an Episcopal, without any further clarification.

The Sister

As I arrived at the historical-looking church located in a tree-lined residential part of town, I noted that the crowd assembling was fairly small. There had been no obituary or news story about Brad’s death. I was led by a church employee to a small receiving room where sat Mary in a black dress, holding a small metal box on her lap. Brad’s ashes. We exchanged few words, but she did inform me that “it was his heart” that failed, with no further explanation.  There were no other family members present – the two siblings’ widowed mother was physically nearby in a nursing facility, in an advanced state of dementia. Mary had not informed her of Brad’s death.

The Pastor

I walked outside to a patio garden in the front of the church that served as a small burial ground for urns. There was an open slot with Brad’s name plate above it, ready to receive the box  that Mary had been holding on her lap.  Next to Brad’s slot, I noted an adjacent mini-tomb containing what I assumed were his father’s physical remains, based on the common family name. I walked up to the white-collared minister who was milling about prior to the service and introduced myself as Brad’s neighbor. “Father, you know I assumed that Brad might be Jewish, based on his name,” I offered as a conversation starter.

“Oh, but he was Jewish,” the priest responded without hesitation. Evidently, Brad’s father was a first-generation Jewish immigrant who found his livelihood as a retailer in a Southern town – a very common story.  The midlife conversion to the Episcopal Church had been a father and son project, although it was not made clear to me which one of them first thought it was a good idea. Brad took his religion seriously, though, attending Sunday services and even weekly Bible study classes back in his adopted city, according to the pastor. Now, father and son would be resting together in this quiet churchyard.

Well, I thought, Jews are famous for shedding their own religious roots. Jewish Buddhist? Commonplace. Jews for Jesus, sure. But Episcopal? That was a new one to me.

The Colleagues

Next I sidled up to some young lawyer types and let it be known that I was actually the last among the gathered to have seen their associate.  The few attending from his office seemed in a bit of amazement that one of them had been suddenly reduced to earth elements in a small box, with no prior notice given. They all seemed to agree that Brad worked harder than any one of them – first in the office, last out – always jumping on a plane to see  clients. One said he had told Brad to slow down, he was pushing too hard. One type-A giving advice to another.  At that moment I myself recalled a scene of Brad pulling into his driveway in the evening, greeting me with rumpled suit and world-weary countenance that conveyed his utter exhaustion.

The College Classmate

The Brad his college buddy described to me was not the lawyer in a suit that I was acquainted with. “Brad was a wild man at UVA!” The classmate  briefly elaborated about Brad’s  life of sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll that was apparently noteworthy among his peers. Brad was in a band (heavy-metal) for awhile, and some days later I came  across a pretty fancy electric guitar in his garage while checking on the house for Mary.

The Ex-Girlfriend

A few months after all this happened, while walking my dog, I ran into a woman, also walking her dog, who said hello. She introduced herself and then I recognized her as someone I had indeed met, several times, at Brad’s  house a couple of years before. She had lived with him there for awhile. She had not been at the funeral.

If Brad’s life now seemed quite enigmatic to me, a mere neighborhood acquaintance, he was also a mystery to this woman who had been his live-in lover. He kept a lot hidden from her, it seems. She told me, in so many words, that his absolute reluctance to share his inner life with her was a major source of their break-up.

Much Unseen

The weeks passed, Brad’s old Jeep in the driveway was sold and then finally the house was as well. My presumption was that Mary, as the sole survivor, would see the windfall from the sale of his property and passing along of other assets that he no doubt had accumulated from what must have been a very high salary and a relatively frugal bachelor life. She would soon give notice at her stifling DC foundation job. Once the house was sold, though, I did not hear from her again.

As the years have passed since the night I found my neighbor dead, I’ve always felt that there was more of a tale to be told about all this. As a non-fiction story, a good investigator might fill in the details of this one man’s life where cultural identities were discarded, new ones tried on. The immigrant’s son, the rock star wannabe, and then the immersion into establishment religion  and the button-downed life of a fast-track lawyer.  Fictional embellishments might give us exciting family intrigues and dark secrets to heighten the dramatic impact of the bare bones plot known so far.

But leaving all that aside, what kind of gnawed at me was how easily I had taken this person’s life at face value, while he was alive. I mean, this dude was actually pretty interesting from a cultural and psychological point of view, at least to me. I would have enjoyed having a beer with Brad and hearing about this stuff first-hand. Not all at once perhaps, but over time. There were definitely a lot of fascinating stories simmering under the surface. I guess it’s unrealistic to assume that anyone will open up all of their windows with a mere neighbor, but surely it’s worth the effort to try to go beyond the banalities of the daily routines with another person, if there is any possibility to do so. It just doesn’t seem to go down that way, for the most part.

Now there’s a new family living in that house. I wave hello to them, say a few words here and there. Some teenagers, a dog – the mom’s a teacher, the dad is an engineer for the power company. That’s about all I can tell you.