Filled with cats and sadness

“An 85-year-old Vancouver Island man has died in hospital after police found him collapsed in a home filled with cats last weekend.”

I have two thoughts when I read  stories like this one. The first is how isolated people are becoming and how unbeknownst to us they can fall so far off any radar and matter to nobody. It reminds me of Charlie LeDuff’s story about the person who froze to death. Recently we had a situation where someone seriously unravelled in our building. Certain images remain with me, one in particular just broke my heart. You’re left with all sorts of questions and wondering of what and why and if and how which settle to a calmer version of what and why and if and how. But you never quite attain clarity on the how.

The second thought when I read these saddening stories is that of collections and the collector. What Walter Benjamin referred to in The Arcades Project as “taking up the struggle against dispersion”.