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Anne Iddon was 81, my mother's age, when she died of what seems likely to have been starvation and dehydration. When police broke into Mrs Iddon's fine, double-storey sandstone house on Bynya Road on a hill high above Palm Beach on Tuesday, they found her corpse.
Somewhere in the house, they also found the body of her husband and carer, Geoffrey. He was 82. Police believe Mr Iddon had died of natural causes some time earlier, leaving his blind and possibly immobile wife helpless.
The couple, whose closest kin live overseas, had been dead for weeks inside that house while, outside, dog-walkers, day-trippers, neighbours, joggers and tradies had passed along a road from which there are magnificent views of the sea.
NSW Police Force's Northern Beaches Local Area Command put a message up on Facebook after the discovery of the bodies: "Time to put down those iPhones and iPads … and have a real conversation with your elderly neighbour," the post said.
A chill ran through me
The couple was, by all accounts, fiercely independent. That is, so far, the best explanation for why their bodies decomposed for weeks in a silent house in a sunny, affluent Sydney street while outside, life went along as normal.
But Mr and Mrs Iddon may also have been reserved, or fiercely private and may not have wanted to have a conversation with their neighbours. Police say that, on May 4, NSW Community Health representatives visited the couple but they rebuffed offers of assistance
My mother is fiercely independent. A chill ran through me as I read of Mr and Mrs Iddon's awful story. I thought of my mother. She is 80 and she lives alone in another state in a big house on a hill with views of the sea.
She is a widow. I ring most days, sometimes two or three times a day.
Still, some days, the only person she talks to is her beloved husband — she keeps photographs of him all around her.
"Remember, I will always love you," was the message dad wrote and had framed with a photograph of himself shortly before he died in 2010. "Why did you leave me?", I know my mother says to her photographs.
Mum is fit and healthy. She drives herself — to quilting group once a week and the TAB for a flutter, to the shops and the post office. But she has only a smattering of friends in her town and she might not see them for weeks or longer. I fret about her isolation and her loneliness. When she doesn't answer the phone I get panicky.
So I nag her incessantly.
"You must get out more," I tell her. "At your age, you must keep making new friends."
I send her brochures about seniors' activities that she doesn't look at and, when I visit, I drag her to fitness centres and libraries to look for oldies classes to which I know she'll never go. I spend hours tutoring her in the art of text messaging, which she then forgets to do. I suggest to her that it's time she thought about moving to be closer to me and my brother in Sydney. She won't budge.
There's no easy blame
One night last year, my mother had a terrible fall in her house. She toppled down a flight of hardwood stairs and hit her head at the bottom. She lay there for a while, on her own, in pain and distress. Eventually, she pulled herself to her feet, decided she hadn't broken anything and rang me, shaken, to recount the tale.
She still doesn't want to budge from her home, but she does hold on to the stair railing a little tighter these days.
Perhaps Mr Iddon held on tightly to the stair railing as he moved about caring for his wife. Perhaps he was fit and healthy and thought that he would out-live his wife and was the best person to look after her.
"This is not a case you can blame someone for easily," said Superintendent Rob Critchlow, Hills Local Area Commander for NSW Police, who has long had a specialist interest in policing related to the elderly and elderly abuse.
"It's a tricky one because [the Iddons] were pretty functional within their own limits. They weren't being victimised by anyone, they had resources."
Our own worst enemy
In a sense, the couple were their own victims.
Superintendent Critchlow points out what some experts describe as "self-abuse" or "self-actualised abuse", in which a person doesn't seek appropriate external assistance.
"It is seen medically as a form of abuse but not involving a third party," he said.
Sometimes, he says, a person might not be the best judge of their own best interests.
I wonder whether, by living in such isolation, my mother is making the best decision about her own best interests.
But there are no simple answers in this complex situation: any alternative to how my mother lives now would mean she would be deprived, to one degree or another, of the independence to which she so fiercely clings.
Superintendent Critchlow says the alarm technology available to elderly people and their carers is increasing in sophistication. Some devices have sensors that pick up movement. Some have GPS functions to track an elderly person's location; effectively, Superintendent Critchlow says, putting "a virtual fence around an elderly person's property in case they wander".
I think my mother should be allowed to wander for a while longer, but perhaps it's time we talked about alarm technology. If she'll listen.
Topics: older-people, aged-care, health, sydney-2000