For 15 years, Antonio Famoso remained in his apartment in Valencia, invisible to everyone. No one was looking for him, no one knocked on his door. When the firefighters entered due to a trivial flood, they discovered a mummified, clothed body, which had remained there silently for more than a decade. A man who disappeared from the world but not from the registers: his bills continued to be paid, his pension to be credited, the condominium regularly paid. As if he still lived, as if bureaucracy could replace human memory.
The normality of indifference
This sad story is not just a news story, but the bitter portrait of a distracted society, where one can die without anyone noticing. The neighbors barely remember his figure: a reserved, habitual man who spent his days at the supermarket, walking and at home. Then, one day, he disappeared. No one asked where he had ended up, not even his children, with whom he had cut off all contact. Maybe it was thought that he was in a nursing home or simply somewhere else, no one even asked. And so absence has become routine and loneliness an invisible detail.
In the meantime, as mentioned, Antonio continued to pay in his death thanks to direct debits to his current account: electricity, gas, condominium. An illusion of presence that even fooled the system. It’s as if the world has forgotten that behind every account number, behind every bill, there is a person. Only an accidental flood brought its existence, or rather, its absence, to light. Yet over the years no one has felt the need to knock, to ask, to worry.
Loneliness as a collective mirror
This story is a mirror we don’t want to look at ourselves in. The online comments demonstrate this: there are those who remember having had an elderly neighbor and having often knocked on her door just to find out how she was, those who admit that we now live as strangers, those who wonder how it is possible that the children did not look for their father. Yet, behind these words lies the most uncomfortable truth: we are increasingly connected and increasingly less close.
Antonio’s silent death is a warning to all of us. Because dying forgotten by everyone is not just a sad end: it is the sign that relational poverty has overcome economic poverty. And until we start looking at ourselves again, asking ourselves how our neighbor is doing, we will continue to live among ghosts.
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