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From: "Keith F. Lynch" <kfl@KeithLynch.net>
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.fandom
Subject: Re: Deb Geisler -- 1957-2024
Date: Sun, 24 Mar 2024 17:45:36 -0000 (UTC)
Organization: United Individualist
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Gary McGath <garym@mcgath.com> wrote:
> In today's world, I sometimes wonder if it's possible that people
> lie decomposing at home for months or more without anyone noticing.
> All their bills are automatically paid.  They may have Social
> Security or other payments automatically going into their bank
> accounts, so the payments don't run dry.

I recall a recent true-life horror story in which a woman who lived
alone disappeared.  Eventually her home was repossessed and auctioned
off.  Only well after the new owners moved in was it discovered that
she had never left.  She had been in the attic, part of its floor had
collapsed under her, and she then slowly died trapped between the
walls of the ground floor.

I also recall a long-abandoned high-rise building in which a skeleton
was found in an elevator.  The good news was that this was in China.
"It can't happen here."  Still, I continue to use stairs wherever
possible.  I do know a guy who was trapped in an elevator for a whole
weekend, in the US.

These stories are almost enough to get me to buy a cell phone.  Almost.

Disappearances were of course more common in the past.  Especially
among explorers.  More than a century after the Franklin Expedition
disappeared in the arctic, some of its frozen participants were found.
They were well-enough preserved that had they been found, not by an
archaeologist but by a paramedic, he probably would have tried CPR.
(ObSF:  The TV show "The Second Hundred Years.")

The antarctic explorer Robert Scott may have died the same day that
the Titanic sank.

It's been more than ten years since flight MH-370 disappeared.  It
still hasn't been found.

Ettore Majorana, who first predicted that neutrinos weren't massless,
disappeared decades before he was proven right.

Some claim MIT's Internet pioneer Philip Agre disappeared.  Others deny
it, and claim they're in contact with him, but he's just in hiding.

The filker Bill Wells has been a fugitive for the past seven years.
If anyone knows where he is, they're not talking.

> Caution is necessary about reports, though.  A few years ago a
> stalker falsely reported my death on Usenet and elsewhere, as a way
> to hurt my friends.  The report had many inaccurate details, and of
> course I was around to deny it.

Something similar happened to me, except it wasn't malice, but an
honest misunderstanding.  It was Keith Marshall who had died, despite
him being much younger than me.

And, due to his strong accent, I once misunderstood Yoji Kondo (aka
Eric Kotani) as saying that Fred Pohl had died.  He actually said
that Fred Hoyle had died.  (And now all three of them are gone.)
-- 
Keith F. Lynch - http://keithlynch.net/
Please see http://keithlynch.net/email.html before emailing me.