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Mildred, just get in the box!
Near Sintra, an old lady lay dead in her own home for nine years. She was last seen in August 2002. In the intervening period, the tax department put her home up for public auction, and sold it, along with her body still inside…
Edition 667 ( 3 Mar 2011), 
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And who’s to blame? The government of course, which doesn’t think things through properly! All they needed to have done was import some sarcophagi from Egypt (instead of palm trees infested with Red Palm Weevil) and pass a law that obliged the over-65s to live at least half of every day (and the entirety of every night) inside one of them - in order to avoid unpleasantness like this ever happening again…
Pensioners who refused to comply with the law would lose their entitlement to benefits and medication – and, in some cases, could be forced back to work, in order to pay the resulting fines.
This simple measure would thus make the whole process of dying alone in one’s home a great deal more hygienic, and a lot easier and more convenient for everybody else. Let’s see: this way, the taxman could put the homes of elderly people up for auction with far greater peace of mind… even if they WERE lying dead inside them. They could be confident that incoming occupants would be (almost certainly) spared the grisly surprise of previous inmates lying dead in the kitchen - or on the living room sofa. Also, the sarcophagus could be easily disposed of – leaving the rest of the property free to be sold down to the last saucepan at public auction. Who knows, the plan could save the country from financial ruin!
Equally, no longer would anyone living in one of those blocks with old people need to be bothered by “weird smells”, as even the cheapest Egyptian sarcophagus offers excellent conservation from here to eternity (and usually the taxman doesn’t require that much notice). Almost 390 000 people over the age of 65 live (?) alone in Portugal. So, you see, something has to be done urgently. Moralists blame the “de-humanising” of society”. Rubbish! When an old man goes missing without anyone filing a report, that’s not really a disappearance – it simply means no-one was that concerned with his presence…
But truly, there are thousands of reasons for the disappearance without trace of our old folk. Most of them receive excellent pensions, after all! Thus, even the most indifferent neighbour knows that a lot of them travel frequently to the tropics. If they fail ever to return, it’s because they’ve had a stroke somewhere enjoying casual sex. So what? No one will miss them, will they?
