Spooky weirdness

Just received a departmental e-mail that one of the professors from my wife's department (we both work at a university) died. The nasty bit is that he'd been feeling poorly, so he'd requested two weeks of leave. About a week and a half into his leave, various people wondered why he wasn't returning his phone calls or e-mails, so one of the other professors drove out to his house. The windows were all wide open, and he could smell the stench from outside -- so he called the cops.

Apparently, he'd simply collapsed on the floor, and died. It's not clear yet whether he'd died immediately (e.g. a heart attack), or passed out, but -- because he lives alone -- gone without assistance and died hours or days later. But he'd been there long enough to start decomposing. Ironically, he taught forensic archeology -- ironic because forensics will tell how he died and how long it had been.


The police interviewed the neighbors, who said they'd noticed the smell, but thought it was a dead possum somewhere.


Fairly young -- around 55, IIRC -- and twice-divorced. His younger batch of kids are around eight or ten years old: that stinks.

As my wife pointed out, the really sad thing is that his social ties were weak enough that no one immediately noticed his absence -- at least, not enough to check in.

And on a more pragmatic level, he has about eight graduate students that he's the key advisor on their Ph.D. dissertation, and no one else in the department does his type of work. (Chemical-type analyses of artifacts: carbon-dating, DNA analysis, that sort of thing.) Plus several grants and projects that are partly-finished: someone will have to contact all the funding agencies and ask what they want done.


Eesh. Nasty, weird stuff.

Weird for my wife and myself, as she'd guest-lectured a few times for his class, and I'd had a few conversations with him in the hall (I'm from Seattle, he's from Vancouver, B.C. [IIRC]). I have one of his U.S.-->Aussie voltage converters that he gave me a few months ago (he had an extra).


--GG