Actually, it looks as though they're looking for any information at all about the life of Shirley Fell, found dead in her Monmouth home, Monday. Ms. Fell was a renter, with no "person to contact" information anywhere in her lease or, so far, in the house she rented. She is, then, an enigma.
If anybody knows anything about Ms. Shirley Fell of 217 W. Detroit Ave. in Monmouth, call (309) 734-8383. The coroner's office and the city are looking for "a repectful way" to handle her. They need as much help with her as they can get, right now.
I do sometimes worry about my tendency to want to hide away from everybody... one of the reasons I blog is so that there will at least be some record of something other than the crap they'll find in my house when I'm gone. I mean, I'd like to be remembered as something other than the collector of a buzillion books and tchatchkes and layers of dust. I'd like to have, at least, a name and a few words recognized as mine after I'm gone.
And, I guess, I'd like to have at least a few people remember me fondly. I'm operating on the theory that not everybody who meets me grows to hate me.
It's just a theory.
I think what makes the case of Ms. Fell so sad is that this is a small town. We have a population of under 8,000, and it's shrinking each census. A woman living alone should not be anonymous in a town this size -- for crying out loud, if I could be a bland, ordinary teen-ager, and have three-quarters of the population know what I was doing on a Saturday afternoon in the mid-1970s, surely a woman living alone in a rented house would have somebody at least spreading a little non-malicious gossip about her today.
217 W. Detroit is not a slum. It's not some crummy dive where nobody goes out at night for fear of being hit by a drive-by shooting. It's not fancy, either -- not one of those gated communities where everybody keeps up with the neighborhood image, but nobody swaps cooking hints. It's just a lower-middle-income quadrant in a modestly middle-class town. We try to look out for one another, keep each other's families in mind, protect each other from the miserable fate of urban anonymity.
This time, it appears we failed.
We'll have to see that it doesn't happen again.
Hello, I'm your neighbor. I'll be shaking hands with you and getting to know you, before the parade begins tonight.
Update, 16 Sept. : The Galesburg Register-Mail informed us in an obituary that family of Ms. Fell have been found, and a proper private service for her was scheduled.
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