Tag Archives: Joyce Vincent

Tragedy in death…

I’ve mentioned it before and I’ll write about it again:

A number of years ago, perhaps as many as 25+ years ago, I was driving near a friend’s house and on my way, likely, to a mall or bookstore and noticed, on the other lane, two or three parked police cars.

The officers were out of their vehicles and stood over a black gentleman, an older man with white hair and beard, who was slumped against a wire fence.  Beside him was a shopping cart with some junk in it, likely this homeless man’s earthly possessions.

The man didn’t move.  His head was down, as if asleep, and the officers, though standing around him, didn’t disturb him.

Not that they could have.  It was obvious this homeless man had passed away and the officers were waiting for an ambulance to come and take the body away.

I found the whole thing incredibly sad to see.  This homeless man, lying dead on the ground, with only strangers around him and would likely be interred with few, if anyone at all, knowing of him or caring.

Today those same feeling came back to me when I read this article, which someone else posted on reddit.  From allthatsinteresting.com and written by Kara Goldfarb comes this story…

The tragic story of Joyce Vincent – the dead woman who went unnoticed for two years

I know I’m going to spoil the article, but the headline essentially tells the story: Joyce Vincent was a 38 year old woman who died in her apartment sometime around December 2003 (a more specific time of death could not be determined) but her body wasn’t found until January of 2006, when her social housing apartment was about to be repossessed due to unpaid rent.

How does a young woman who had contacts and friends die but no one notices for 3 years, and the only reason for the discovery is because of unpaid rent/repossession?

It’s a tragedy, of course, no less different from that man I spotted all those years before, a lost soul whose ties to society were severed and whose disappearance from this world would mostly go unnoticed.

A tragedy, for sure.