When the World Doesn't Want You

*** Trigger Warning***

Isolated Death and Neglect Discussed

“When the world doesn’t want you

It will never tell you why.

You can shut the door, but you can’t ignore

The crawl of your decline”

(from “Ancestral” by Steven Wilson)

I’m haunted by Joyce Carol Vincent’s story. I’d read about her from various news sources then consigned her memory to the same disregard cache where almost all news stories go, at least with me. More than a decade later my son got me into Steven Wilson’s music right about the time Wilson released his Hand. Cannot. Erase. album, inspired by Wilson’s own wish to memorialize Vincent.

“Oh right, I remember this from the news,” I told my son as we listened to the story of H, Wilson’s fictionalized version of the painfully real Joyce Carol Vincent. Vincent died absolutely alone in a North London bedsit sometime in December of 2003. Her death was the result of either an asthma attack or a peptic ulcer. She was so alone in this world that her body wasn’t discovered for more than two years!

At first glance that sounds so incredible it seems to approach impossible. The thing is she’d managed to gradually and deliberately estrange herself from all family, friends and coworkers over the course of the preceding three or so years. Theories are legion as to her motives. Was she a victim of some form of abuse or mistreatment? Did emotional or psychological issues cause her to self-isolate? Was she running from something or someone?

Various U.K. social assistance programs inadvertently helped the world to forget about her. The rent on her bedsit apartment and its utilities was automatically covered by government programs. Vincent’s most immediate family members hadn’t heard from her for a very long time and assumed that’s the way she preferred things. A former boyfriend suspected the same. She’d suddenly left her most recent job in the Treasury Department at Ernst & Young and her ex-coworkers guessed she’d been fired or was running away from something. Of these dozens, maybe a hundred or more people no one thought to ask after or investigate where Vincent was or how she was fairing. Her sisters did hire a private investigator to look for her but he or she failed to uncover anything.

Of course, someone dying alone and unremarked happens multiple times every day. But Joyce Carol Vincent didn’t fit the ‘model’ in any way, no more than J.M. Barrie’s Tinker Bell does. In some of my comments to other Vocalites I’ve mentioned my continuing horror at the fate of the original version of the tiny fairy sprite from Peter Pan and Wendy.

Before Disney’s homogenization of Barrie’s story, the original Peter Pan gradually loses interest in Tinker Bell and pays her less and less attention. Since “Tink” literally feeds off of her love for the boy who refuses to grow up she is slowly starved of love until she dies completely alone, forgotten, in a kind of self-made sarcophagus of leaves within which she has shrouded herself from the elements. Please consider remembering this the next time you see the little green sprite fly into view before waving magic out of her wand. For the record, I don’t bear any particular animus toward Disney; I’m just a bigger fan of literary veracity than I am of their corporate brand.

It makes you (or at least me) wonder where J.M. Barrie was coming from with his most famous creation. That’s an enormous subject which has won doctorates for a whole army of academics and literary historians (it’s fascinating stuff too), but my thoughts right now are with Tinker Bell and especially the all-too-real Joyce Carol Vincent. Yet Tinker Bell is a fictional character and not even a human one and Vincent sounds like what some crasser people might label a ‘loser’.

But here’s the other thing. Joyce Carol Vincent was far from what an average, ‘normal’ person could fairly describe as a loser. She was bright and successful in school. She was beautiful and has been described as the kind of little girl upon whom dozens of little boys and girls had a crush. At points in her life, she had a growing modeling career and a budding musical career. She was at least very competent in the workplace and definitely had the respect of her coworkers. Romantically Vincent experienced several serious relationships which didn’t seem to trigger any negative concerns among those who knew her. Hints of abuse in her last romantic relationship have been thoroughly disproved.

She even flirted with the edges of stardom. Beautiful and charming enough to catch the attention of people in politics and the entertainment industry, Joyce Carol Vincent knew some big names. Betty Wright, Stevie Wonder, Isaac Hayes and even Nelson Mandela spent time with her. Vincent was among the people on stage at the end of the giant 1990 Nelson Mandela tribute concert at Wembley Stadium, televised around the world! Today she might have been a successful Influencer.

What happened? No one really knows, though serious efforts have been made to fathom her story. Many people have been at least as affected by Vincent’s story as me. Nothing really adds up to explain why she dropped out of life, though the subject remains fodder for speculation and identity politics-tinged opinions.

The sad fact remains that Joyce Carol Vincent has become a celebrity representative for thousands, perhaps millions of people who have left life and us, utterly, totally unremarked. Why am I so drawn to the pathos of this particular story? Why, as I suspect, are so many others interested in the stories of sufferers of such extreme neglect? For myself, I have working theories about my identification with the outcome for Joyce Carol Vincent, Tinker Bell and more recently a character named Euphemia Baxter in a novel I just finished reading. I might explore these ideas with you someday. (But don’t hold your breath.)

On the larger stage it seems to me that abandonment and fear of abandonment in particular must be awfully close to a universal concern among us. With our protracted and delicate childhoods in what until very, very recently was an extremely dangerous and uncertain world, parental abandonment or even community banishment would have been an unavoidable death sentence for a child.

So, we’re probably hard-wired to require the security and relative safety of communal and certainly parental attention. It’s in our DNA. A world without these things looks like positively Lovecraftian horror to us! Negligence and abandonment are such powerful notions in our collective conscience that they can be found in our stories with only a tiny effort. Just think of Little Orphan Annie, Lassie, almost all of the characters from Lost or even King Kong. This subject often conjures greater fear than death itself.

In Michael Christie’s excellent novel Greenwood a character named Euphemia Baxter is the essentially absent hero. She is abandoned by everyone (or at least so it seems to her) to give birth alone in an isolated cabin in the woods of New Brunswick. Her only value to anyone in the world appears to be as a ‘breeding mare’ for an absurdly wealthy monster of a man.

Euphemia Baxter dies alone, horribly; hemorrhaging after the birth of a daughter she has placed in a nearby tree for hopeful but unlikely rescue. Christie engineers a brilliant, beautiful story in which we eventually discover that Euphemia was in fact cared for by someone and she has even managed to leave behind a powerful message for her daughter and her progeny.

I couldn’t say how Joyce Carol Vincent or even a real-world version of Tinker Bell would feel to know that they didn’t leave this world completely unregarded after all. In Greenwood a small portion of the message Euphemia Baxter leaves behind states, “For so long I’ve felt as though my life were a seed that the soil of the world refuses.” To leave life so bereft of the care and attention of others strikes me as a threshold of grief no one should ever face.

Whatever drove Joyce Carol Vincent to isolate herself in life it still saddens me profoundly to consider she may have passed on feeling utterly forgotten. Yet there is some consolation in the fact that, like the characters in the stories we read and the ones we write she can still carry on in our memories.