Body on the Recliner

While stationed on a ship at the Norfolk Naval Base in Virginia, I rented a small furnished apartment off base. It sat above a garage next to the landlord’s home. The place wasn’t much, but it was inexpensive, close to the base, and gave me a quiet escape from the ship whenever we were in port. The landlords were in their eighties, and because the husband had some dementia, I usually paid the rent to his wife. I kept the apartment for about two years, even during long deployments. When I was home, I spent plenty of time in the living room recliner—eating, reading, and watching television.

While I was preparing to move out for a transfer, the old man happened to be in the yard and stopped to talk. His memory wandered, so he didn’t recall that I was in the Navy. When I mentioned it, he told me that the tenant before me had also been an old retired Navy man. No one had seen him for a while, so the landlord had gone into the apartment to check on him—and found him sitting in the recliner, dead. He had been there for several days. It took them days of cleaning and deodorizing to get the smell out of the chair.

It would have been nice if he had remembered to tell me that two years earlier.