Four days before Thanksgiving 2013 in Rotterdam, Netherlands, construction workers arrived at an elderly woman’s apartment to replace her gas pipes. After repeatedly ringing her doorbell without a response, police were called and arrived at the scene. Finding a pile of the woman’s mail inside the door, police noticed that the oldest mail was postmarked from ten years ago! As police progressed into the apartment, they made an appalling discovery—the decayed corpse of the woman who had lived there. A chilling realization hit them: This woman had been dead for ten years.1

How could something this unthinkable happen? The woman had not been living on the streets. Rather, she had been living within a bustling community of people connected through multiple means of communication. Nonetheless, despite the available modes of technologically driven communication, this woman had not been able to meaningfully connect to another person.

Read the full article as it was originally reported on lifeandhealth.org