I was sitting watching TV this afternoon when the doorbell rang. It was a man dressed in T-shirt and slacks, who identified himself as a former tenant of my duplex. I recognized the name he gave because I had gotten his mail, mostly hospital bills. He said that his son had passed away about three months ago, and that he had first started having seizures while they were living in the duplex. He said he just wanted to stand outside in the yard and pray for a little bit. (It was obvious he was still very much affected by his son’s death as he teared up and got emotional talking about it. I don’t know how old the son was, but the man looked to be in his late 30’s, so the son couldn’t have been very old.) I made appropriate responses (what do you say in a situation like that, anyway?) and said it was OK. He was the one who had planted the roses, apparently. I apologized that the rose bed badly needed weeding, but he passed this off, saying, “It’s your house now.”
What made it even more disturbing was that the elderly couple who moved out just prior to my moving in were both quite frail. I got conflicting stories from the landlady as to why they moved. First she said that a sister was supposed to be moving in with them to help take care of the man and she had a dog, and the landlady didn’t want any more dogs. Then later she said they moved out because they needed three bedrooms, and the duplex only has two. The husband really, really didn’t want to move as he really liked the duplex. Three months after they moved, he died.
And then, since I’ve lived here, some chronic health problems I’ve had for a while have gotten much worse. Cue the Twilight Zone theme.
I knew the place had terrible feng shui when I moved in, but I’ve done the best I can with it. Mom was very keen on my living here because she really likes it. It’s probably five minutes away from her house, driveway to driveway, and it’s important to her to be able to drive by where I live all the time, so there it is. You do the best you can with what you have.
On a more whimsical note, the other day I had finished eating my daily ration of nine Rolo candies, which come wrapped in tin foil. Sometimes I spread them out, like four after lunch and five after supper by way of desert, and sometimes I eat all nine at once. The other day I was blogging, looked over and saw these rolled up balls of tinfoil and thought — owl pellets! Then I cracked up laughing.
The Owl Underground 
There will always be illness in a home, whatever sort of home it is – everyone gets ill. And yeah, some die, too. (We all do eventually and we all have to die somewhere!) Try not to think that the place is affected by it. Try adding some flowers (potted ones rather than cut ones so they stay alive longer), make yourself some wall hangings, brighten the place up – change the place’s fortune yourself… you’ll start feeling better.
LikeLike
Are you sure your “distraught father” was genuine? For a competent actor a few tears aren’t hard to produce. He could have been casing your flat for future break-in. It isn’t hard for a conman to gain a little local knowledge about residents and their building. If I were you, I’d be checking my door locks and window bolts. Informing the local police wouldn’t hurt, either, as they might have received reports of people trying the same trick elsewhere.
If there are physical conditions in the building apt to affect the health of residents, then maybe these are affecting you. That is something that could be checked out. Nothing else will. The position of the doors or the orientation on your bed has nothing whatever to do with it. It’s very easy to talk yourself into a neurotic belief that you are being affected negarively by woo-woo factors that have no reality but we should save our energy for the real problems of life without without wasting it on spurious ones.
LikeLike
It makes perfect sense to me that a man grieving the loss of a child would want to come back, just to see. When I took Mom’s ashes to Iowa for burial, I experienced a sudden compulsion to go visit the neighbors, see our houses, and eat where we always went for a sandwich. It was a strange combination of wanting to revivify the past, and put it to rest. I suppose we all do that in smaller, more subtle ways from time to time, but sometimes the compulsion gets writ large, and you got a knock on the door because of it.
LikeLike