Our new bull had a hump higher than my eye line, a tan brown hide, a wobbly black-and-white spotted dewlap, a stunted horn, and droopy Brahman ears. We named him Elvis at first, because our great-nephew had just won the fire brigade fundraiser’s talent competition with his rendition of ‘Blue Suede Shoes’. It seemed right for this grand and regal bull that had instantly claimed his harem of Hereford cows, hovering and supervising, patrolling and corralling. He was king. Months later we felt compelled to rename him ‘Angel’, because of the quiet way he walked up the race, poking his head through the bales, presenting his ears for fly tags, or opening his mouth for the drench tube. He didn’t snot and snort; he didn’t assert his territorialism like the Angus bulls. Angel was above all that – different somehow.

Six months later, on a hot February day, Jen told me that she had found Angel dead, with a shattered lower leg, in the river paddock. We slumped on the couch, stunned. Of all the bulls, why easygoing Angel?

‘It doesn’t make sense,’ I said. ‘He was fine when we drenched them before the floods.’ I flicked to the calendar entry: January 19 – drenched and fly-tagged Angel and Herefords. That was when it was hot and dry, when the grass crinkled and the buffalo flies tickled and pecked the cattle until coin-sized dabs of pink flesh spotted their hides.  

Jen sighed. ‘Maybe he got his foot stuck in a rabbit hole or between two rocks. Or maybe those bloody neighbours shot their high-powered rifle.’

It had rained for twenty-three days in January. The causeway had flooded. The driveway was a bracelet of divots and ditches, the paddocks too swampy to even ride a horse across. We hadn’t seen Angel and his herd for three weeks. I wondered aloud if anything could have been done to save him if he had been found earlier. I wondered if he had suffered for long.

On a summer’s night, my social-worker friend sniffed the air when we walked past a high-set weatherboard house with drawn curtains and dandelions springing from the lawn. She laughed apologetically. ‘Just in case someone’s dead in there,’ she said. I imagined a pitiable figure, sprawled on the linoleum. No one wondered why she didn’t answer the phone. No one knocked on the door. No one cared.

No one cared about eighty-eight-year-old Mr Clarke, dead for more than a year when he was found in his flat in Wellington, New Zealand. No one cared about Miss Elsie Brown, dead for two years when her skeleton was found in her Melbourne home. No one cared about Natalie Wood, dead for eight years when her bones were found among the cobwebs and dusty furniture of her Sydney terrace.

In Japan they have a special name for these deaths: kodokushi. For the purpose of collecting statistics, government agencies like the Hyogo Research Center for Quake Restoration define kodokushi as ‘a solitary death where one dies completely alone without being taken care of or accompanied by anybody. One’s body is often found several days after, in some cases even over a month after one’s death.’ In 2008, according to Tokyo’s Bureau of Social Welfare and Public Health, there were more than 2200 cases of kodokushi.

Wherever these deaths occur, the news headlines are the same. They tell us that a solitary exit is tragic and lonely:

Sad and lonely death

Lonely death comes to light, eight years on

Noida sisters’ lonely deaths

Died lonely and miserable

Dead pensioner was ‘Mr Lonely’

The last time I heard my father’s voice I was living in Cape Town, studying for my law exams. My father, a businessman, was at home in Johannesburg. He told me exactly what he thought of the law of wills and estates. Four days later my cousin Jeff knocked on my front door at 6 a.m. My father had died of a heart attack in his beloved maroon Rolls Royce on his pig and chicken farm. I packed a suitcase full of gypsy skirts and jeans and my only sombre dress – stormy grey with mother-of-pearl buttons up the front.

On the flight back to Johannesburg, I imagined my father’s death on that red dirt farm road. He was wearing one of his polo shirts, probably chocolate brown, rather than a long-sleeved cotton shirt with a thin stripe. When his heart attacked him his head hit the steering wheel. It set off a long plaintive hoot, not the staccato da-da-dadada that he would use when he came to collect me from my mother’s home. What happened to my father’s square-framed glasses when his head fell forward? Either they were askew on his face with the long fair sideburns, or they were smashed and splintered from the impact of his head falling against the steering wheel. He stayed like that, in his car, for I don’t know how long. The horn whined insistently. Flies twitched and buzzed around him. They settled on his arms and cheeks.

Some time that afternoon a farm worker stepped out of a chicken shed. In the distance, he saw the ‘Big Master’s’ car. It was parked slightly off the dusty road. He called out, but no one heard him. He ran along the dusty road to the manager’s office.

I never saw my father’s body. At twenty-one it didn’t occur to me that I could ask to see the body or that there might be some benefit to seeing it. Back then, in the Jewish South African culture into which I was born, such a request from a young woman would most likely have been considered ghoulish, and possibly refused.

When Jen’s mother, Lola, died in her little room at the nursing home with green and pink candy-coloured hallways, we were standing beside her. Jen was still holding a damp face washer to her forehead. We had been with Lola for the last twenty-four hours. I had asked that old Jewish God of mine to end Lola’s suffering. Then I switched to a more familiar Buddhist mantra.

We had watched her breath change until it came in irregular gasps. Jen had wiped away the black gunk that oozed from her mother’s lips. We had begged the nursing sister and the doctor to ease her pain, witnessed the needle pierce her papery white skin, then the morphine slip from the plastic syringe. Gradually, her colour had drained away. Nothing could have been done to save Lola. She was eighty-two. For four long years she had lived with the disabilities and disappointments caused by a stroke.

I like to think Lola did not die a lonely death. I like to think our presence and love offered her some comfort before she died. But I can’t help wondering whether our presence really mitigated Lola’s sense of loneliness or whether she was so caught up in the transition to death that she wasn’t aware – or didn’t care to be aware – of us in the room with her. Perhaps our presence – and the thought that she didn’t die a lonely death – had more to do with our own need for solace.

In a letter published in The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955–1967, Hunter S. Thompson wrote:

We are all alone, born alone, die alone, and – in spite of True Romance magazines – we shall all someday look back on our lives and see that, in spite of our company, we were alone the whole way. I do not say lonely – at least, not all the time – but essentially, and finally, alone. This is what makes your self-respect so important, and I don’t see how you can respect yourself if you must look in the hearts and minds of others for your happiness.

In 2005, at the age of sixty-seven, Thompson shot himself in the head.

Jack, our seventy-two-year-old neighbour, dug holes for fence-posts in rocky ground. He hefted the heavy borer to drill the posts; he mustered on horseback all day and worked in the hot sun in the dusty cattle yards. Before his stroke.

Barely conscious after a second stroke, he lay pale and white in a hospital bed, his hands soft and smelling of the lanolin cream Jen had rubbed into his cracked skin. On his last night, he lay in that narrow bed surrounded by his family of nieces and nephews. Standing at the bottom of the bed, I could feel Jack’s skinny calves through the thin white cotton blanket. At one in the morning, Jen and I kissed Jack’s smooth forehead and whispered our goodbyes into his ear. An hour later, one of his nieces called to tell us he had died.

‘We weren’t even with him,’ she said. ‘We were downstairs saying goodbye to the others. He shouldn’t have died alone.’

But had he waited for them all to leave? Perhaps he wanted to die alone.

Like Adelaide Crapsey. She was diagnosed with tuberculosis of the brain lining when she was thirty-three, and died three years later. Her poem ‘The Lonely Death’ reveals her desire for a solitary death:

In the cold I will rise, I will bathe
In waters of ice; myself
Will shiver, and shrive myself,
Alone in the dawn, and anoint
Forehead and feet and hands;
I will shutter the windows from light,
I will place in their sockets the four
Tall candles and set them a-flame
In the grey of the dawn; and myself
Will lay myself straight in my bed,
And draw the sheet under my chin.

When a dead person is not found for weeks, months, or years, our sense of cultural shock deepens. The death is not merely solitary – it is ‘lonely’, with an implication of sadness.

Perhaps it is because we have a deep-rooted belief that the soul doesn’t completely leave this world until after the burial. Judaism says just that: the in-between state is confusing for the soul. It has no body with which to relate to the physical world; nor is it free to see things from the purely spiritual perspective. While the dead hover in that in-between state, the presence of others supposedly provides comfort.

However, this doesn’t hold for all religions – other belief systems, from Christianity to hip hop, seem to regard death itself as liberating. ‘Death Frees Every Soul’ chant rappers like DJ Muggs, Sick Jacken, and Planet Asia. Christina Rossetti, in her poem ‘Let Me Go’, asks ‘Why cry for a soul set free?’

If most people aren’t concerned about the soul’s wanderings before burial, what is the root of this widespread cultural horror about the lonely death? Fear of our own death? Fear that no one will save us, that no one will miss us when we are dead? John Donne wrote, ‘And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.’

After the discovery of Mr Clarke’s body in New Zealand, one of his neighbours told the Dominion Post, ‘We’re put away here, we’re just forgotten about. We live as hermits and we die as hermits.’

That was the case too with Juanita Goggins, a civil- rights activist and the first black woman on South Carolina’s legislature. The Guardian reported in 2010 that her body went undiscovered for a fortnight after she froze to death in the house she had rented for sixteen years. She was said to have divorced herself from family and friends, and become reclusive after a mugging.

Many of the people who have been found weeks or months after their deaths are described as ‘private people’ who ‘kept to themselves’ or enjoyed their ‘own company’. More pejoratively, they are regarded as hermits or recluses. But their deaths are always described as ‘sad’ and ‘lonely’.

Is it that a solitary death highlights a life lived without community and that such a life is a lonely one?

My mother’s cardinal rule is ‘Distract yourself’. As a child in Johannesburg, I thought there was no other way to live. My mother taught English at high school, supervised the debating team, played tennis three times a week, went out to dinner or the theatre several nights a week, and squeezed in gossip sessions with her girlfriends. Her pocket-sized diary was always jammed with arrangements.

‘What are you doing on Saturday night?’ she has asked, again and again, all my life. Even today when I tell her that I have no plans, she falls silent. The phone line buzzes with disappointment at the quality of my life. Then she rallies and comments on a book or film or dinner party.

Living on a remote cattle farm these last eight years, I realise that I like blocks of time without arrangements. I begin to understand the difference between being alone or solitary, and being lonely.

I am also beginning to wonder if the religion of busy and constant communication by mobile phone and social media has more to do with a deep terror about disappearing unnoticed and unacknowledged. Despite the warning in Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ that ‘The paths of glory lead but to the grave’, staying busy may be the contemporary antidote to a fear of dying a lonely death.

Catalogues and newspapers mounted up outside Elsie Brown’s suburban Melbourne front door, but no one checked on her. It was two years before someone finally discovered her decomposed body.

Disturbed by the ease with which this unknown woman had been forgotten, a man named Andrew Heslop wrote to The Age newspaper in March 2003 proposing a ‘National Check on Your Neighbour Day’. Neighbour Day, held on the last Saturday of March, is now a celebration of community with street parties and barbecues.

Our rural community does not celebrate Neighbour Day formally. Our equivalent is the bimonthly function down at the local community hall, where you can get steak and salad for $7.

Country people seem more aware of their neighbours. Perhaps the isolation and distance compel us to rely on one another rather than on public services. Perhaps it’s because, unlike city folk, we’re aware that something tragic can easily happen without other people realising.

After her husband was hospitalised, our eighty-five-year-old neighbour Nessie lived alone in her fibro house. She had lived there with her family for sixty years. The bathroom was out the back door and along a cement pathway. Nessie was blind in one eye, and the vision in the other was compromised by glaucoma. She had fallen off horses countless times and walked with a black lacquered walking stick.

Nessie’s neighbour struck a deal with her: ‘If I don’t see the roller door of your garage up in the morning, I’m coming over to check on you.’

But lonely deaths occur in the country, too. One hot summer’s night at the community hall, I heard that John Bonhominie had been found dead outside his back door. A swarthy Italian with molasses eyes, Bonhominie – was that really his name? – was the bush Casanova of our rural community, always trailed by a swarm of local women. He lived on a property ten kilometres from our front gate, along a dirt road that the Council had forgotten.

‘He was all bloated and blown up,’ Chris told me, his voice low, across the bar counter. ‘Cops reckon he must’ve been there a few days at least. In this heat.’ The cause of death was unknown.

Neighbours found him behind the house. His black kelpie sat beside him, guarding against wild dogs and predators. I imagined the sight and stench of Bonhominie’s fly-blown, decomposing body.

I am a secular Jew who has not been inside a synagogue for twenty years, but I remember the stir my paternal grandmother’s wish to be cremated aroused in the Johannesburg Jewish community. Jews believe that the soul is able to ascend to heaven only if the body decomposes into the earth. So the integrity of the body must be preserved – there must be no cremation – and the burial should occur as soon as possible, using a shroud or simple wooden coffin – no metal hardware.

Some indigenous cultures have a different approach and prefer exposure. For the sky burial in Tibet, the corpse is dismembered and the body parts left for the vultures. The Parsis in Mumbai have towers of death (or silence) where the cadaver is left for vultures to feed on. Some Aboriginal clans in Australia do this. In Peter Goldsworthy’s novel Three Dog Night (2003), the narrator, Martin, describes how, consistent with Japaljarri custom, he carried the dead body of his old friend and foe, Felix, to the chosen funeral tree, a desert oak, and placed it onto a shoulder-height platform of boughs. ‘Too cold still for flies, but the crows were settling heavily into the nearby trees, talking their tough talk. Come and get it. Big feast today.’

Sure, there have been some Westerners who might opt for this. In Plato’s Phaedo, when asked how he wants to be buried, Socrates playfully says, ‘In any way that you like; but you must get hold of me, and take care that I do not run away from you.’ To Socrates they were burying only his dead body. They were not burying him.

Most cultures and religions hurry the body away from the vultures and flies. Even if we want the body to decompose, few seem to want to witness the process. We opt for burial or cremation – or body preservation for figures like Lenin or Mao. The word burial even comes from the Anglo-Saxon word birgan, which means to conceal.

Perhaps the solitary death is described as lonely because the body has decomposed before the appropriate burial or burning, and this forces us to confront the disintegration of the human body after death.

As a child in Johannesburg in the 1970s, I grew up in a family that was squeamish about death. Dead animals, even our pets, were ‘dealt with’ by the vet or by Million, the black man who worked for my family. No animal graveyard, no whittling at an offcut of soft wood for a headstone, no child’s posy of pansies was ever laid on a mound of dirt. I never saw a dead cat or bird or mouse. I wonder now where our dog Pandemonium was buried and if McCavity (how many cats were given T.S. Eliot names after the musical Cats?) really strayed from home. When Tich, my mongrel dog with the pink-rimmed eyes, was run over by a car, I caught a glimpse of his body lying on the cement of the backyard.

‘Don’t touch, darling,’ my mother said. ‘It’s dead.’

Tich had even lost his gender.

Our other dog was Dino, a Belgian sheepdog. He had been with us since I was six; he moved in the year my father moved out, originally as my sister’s companion. When she too left home, he would sleep beside my desk or squeeze under the low coffee table. The week before I left home to attend university in Cape Town, I had struggled to lever him from the front doormat. Aged twelve, Dino’s short black hair and whiskers had greyed; his hips were stiff with arthritis.

Midway through that first year at university, the last paragraph of my mother’s weekly letter read, ‘I had Dino put down after you went back to Varsity. I thought I’d spare you.’

Years later in Australia, my housemate rescued a bird with a broken wing. She lined a shoe box with a towel and cotton-wool and fed it water from a dropper. I watched from a safe distance and begged off touching the fragile bird. Dead or alive, I wouldn’t touch it. I couldn’t. It was hard enough to even look at it.

My heritage. Dead = painfully sad. Dead bodies = creepy and disgusting. Dead = disappeared.

Weeks after Angel’s death, I clung to the bar of the truck as Jen drove, tyres hissing along washed-out dirt roads and sodden tracks. We bumped up and down across the river paddock and then left the ute parked on a hill. In our gumboots we moved through thigh-high sticky grass, watching out for wet manure and snakes.

Near a barbed wire fence, Jen pointed out an area where thick clumps of bladey grass had been flattened in circles. There were six of these rounds, side by side. I imagined Angel pivoting his large bulk, thrashing about, swinging himself around from grass bed to bed. Was he trying to get up? Trying to get to water? Further down the paddock was another Venn diagram where Angel had settled and rotated. A crow quark-quarked from a nearby spotted gum. There was no one but Jen and myself.

I wondered if Angel knew he was going to die. If so, like all cows he would have withdrawn from the others. I wondered if it was an accident, whether the cows witnessed him thrashing around, whether they witnessed his death.

Further down the paddock, closer to the gully, I screwed up my nose against the stench. But what did I smell? In the grey evening, I stared at what was once the regal Brahman bull. There was no flesh left. He had been sucked dry, eaten from the inside out and the outside in – a feast for maggots, flies, beetles, moths, wasps, wild dogs, and goannas, maybe even foxes.

Now Angel was a grey skeleton: a backbone with vertebrae the size of my hand; the skull with its deformed horn. The jaw, as long as my forearm, lay separate from the rest of his body. There were his hinge joints at the hips and knees. One leg – the broken one, the cause of his death – was missing, probably carried away by wild dogs. His hide was draped over his upper body like a cloak, spattered with the white paint of bird droppings.

Silly and sentimental though it was, I told Angel that we both missed him, that other farmers like Rusty Bell and the cowboy Roland had been saddened by his death. I told him I was sorry if he had suffered. Although Jen wanted to recycle his yellow ID tag, I suggested we leave it beside him like the dog-tag of the fallen soldier.

Close by I noticed black pieces of his hooves, like plastic heels I once used to anchor a bed’s wheels. That’s when I realised that, instead of wanting to flee, I was regarding Angel’s body with the same fascination that I bring to the ruins of ancient buildings. I wondered what was on the underside of his skeleton – was his hide intact? Would it all be gone next time I entered the paddock?

That skeleton wasn’t Angel. That skeleton was just a hollow container, now just part of the rocky landscape.

Twenty-four years after my father’s death – and three months after Angel’s death – I visited my stepmother, Genee, in South Africa. Sitting in the same wingback brown leather armchairs I sat in when I used to visit my father, I asked about the day he died.

‘He had a lunch meeting with the farm managers in the cottage, then they played a few games of pool and then he left to drive home,’ she said. ‘After a little while Ronny realised he hadn’t heard the car.’

‘So why didn’t they get him medical help?’

‘Nothing could be done. He was already dead.’

‘Why then,’ I said, bewildered, ‘have I carried this image of his lonely death on the dusty farm road?’

Why, I wondered silently, had I tormented myself with images of flies settling on his forehead and cheeks?

After a while Genee told me that the night before his death my mother had phoned to say that she, my stepfather, and I had been granted visas to emigrate to Australia.

‘He wanted you to get out of South Africa, and to get another passport,’ Genee said. ‘And he dreaded your going. He knew he’d miss you terribly.’

My fingertips pressed the metal studs on the arm of the leather chair. Oh, how I had missed him. Since his death – and my emigration to Australia six months later – I had felt intensely alone so often.

Now I wondered if I had funnelled a dread of loneliness into the more tangible image of my father lying dead in his maroon Rolls Royce, unable to bash away those flies, the frontrunners in the decomposition army.

That image of my father’s lonely death was easier to bear than my own fear of disappearing unnoticed into death.