I Thought My Neighbor Was Ignoring Me for a Year (Continued)

I heard a faint sound inside. When I finally got the door open, I found Eleanor on the floor of her kitchen, weak and cold, where she’d fallen two days before and couldn’t get up.

I called for help, and I sat with her, and it was there, waiting for the ambulance, that I finally understood the whole sad truth of that year.

Eleanor wasn’t cold. Eleanor was nearly deaf, and her eyesight had been failing since her husband died. She had never heard my knocks or my calls from the garden. She couldn’t see me wave. She was too proud and too frightened to tell anyone how alone and how lost she truly was.

All that time I thought she was ignoring me, she was a grieving woman going deaf and blind in an empty house, certain the world had simply forgotten her.

Eleanor is all right now. She has hearing aids, and she has me. We have tea every afternoon, and I’ve learned to touch her shoulder so she knows I’m there. I nearly wrote her off as unfriendly. She was just drowning quietly, an arm’s length away. It has made me wonder how many ‘cold’ people are only lonely ones nobody knocked hard enough for.