A few days after my 53rd birthday, the hallway outside my apartment began to smell. It wasn’t a forceful smell, just an unpleasant one, like that of rotting food.

A few days after that, I learned why. I came home to find a policewoman in the hallway. She said the man in the unit at the end of the hall had died, alone. The building managers had just discovered him. The policewoman said there was no immediately known cause; it could have been simply “old age.”

He was three years older than me.