Community relations, or RIP to the guy across the street
I grew up in Mormon country, down the street from an LDS church and a few minutes walk from two more. My family weren’t Mormon, so we didn’t attend the church, but we were one of the first families to move into the neighborhood so we had a sort of social standing that made up for being heathens.
As my parent’s neighborhood aged, the neighbors lightened up about socializing with heathens and regularly talked to my parents. Of course aging neighbors also means dying neighbors. When I talk to my parents they’ll occasionally mention attending the funeral for a neighbor who’s died, and the funeral is almost always at the church down the street. They learn about goings-on (like deaths) in the neighborhood from people who stop by, let them know what’s going on, etc. So despite not attending the church, and being at arm’s length from the people who do, my parents still ostensibly have relations with, and a sort-of membership in that community.
I don’t have any of that where I live now. I’m not from here and there’s no community here that I’m a part of. This is an established neighborhood with a mix of old and young people living in it, but I have no children so I’m not one of the young families that have grown old here. There’s a church down the street but no one in my neighborhood goes to it as far as I know.
Part of this is totally on me. I have long-standing issues with social anxiety and find it hard to chum it up with strangers, etc. But where I live there’s nothing that structurally creates neighborhood communities. It’s up to me to seek it out and hopefully assimilate into some pre-existing clique. This isn’t something I ever learned to do after growing up in a near-monoculture where everyone had a default community. And the anxiety doesn’t help.
Which brings me to the guy across the street who recently died. Or at least I think he died. All I know about his life is that he’s lived on this street for ages, and the bits and pieces I gathered from talking to him in passing. No one has told me what’s happened to him, and I feel like it’s none of my business to ask his maybe-widow or children since I don’t know them at all. All the oldsters in the neighborhood seem to know, as I see them chatting with the family, but no one’s told me.
My cat’s vet once told me, after my cat had a mysterious bout of digestive issues, that “sometimes we just don’t get to know”. It feels like the maybe-death of a guy I’ve casually known for fifteen years is something I should get to know. But no one will tell me and I don’t know how to ask.
tags: month-of-blogs, anxiety