Cindy Lange-Kubick: For Ezekiel, who died alone

Ezekiel Berry lived just 21 months.

Monday, the toddler with fair skin and hair like peach fuzz was found on the floor of an Omaha apartment near the body of his 43-year-old mother.

Janelle Browning was on the couch. The TV was on.

Kitchen cupboards were open and their contents scattered, as if the boy had foraged for food, news reports said.

Christmas presents were under the tree, still unwrapped.

It’s a story that takes your breath away.

A child inside an apartment. Unable to open a door. Unable to call for help. Or fill a glass with water. Or understand why Mommy won’t wake up.

Who is to blame when a little boy dies in an apartment in the middle of a city of half a million people?

Anyone? No one? Everyone?

That’s the thought that won’t let go. All those days and nights and no one came to the rescue.

Not a neighbor missing two faces in the hallway.

Not the little boy’s father, whose weekend to visit came and went without a phone call.

Not a grandma knocking at the door to check on her grandson.

No one who expected a mother and child for Christmas dinner and called to see why they hadn’t arrived.

No one.

Until two weeks after Christmas, when a friend of Browning’s finally called police.

By then it was far too late.

A lifetime ago, working my way toward a double major in journalism and sociology, I took a class called urban sociology.

I’m not sure I saved my notes, but I remember talking about anomie — a strange new word that described that sense of disconnection and isolation in the midst of people, a breakdown of social structures, a feeling of anonymity.

In small towns we know our neighbors, their habits, when things are out of place.

But the mechanics of the modern city, even with all that humanity jammed so closely together, or perhaps because of it, often made short work of intimacy.

Thoreau wrote about it. “City life is millions of people being lonesome together.”

He wrote those words long before there were suburbs and garage doors that open and shut by magic. Where we can live a back yard away from someone for years and never know them.

On my street in an old part of town, renters come and go without my ever knowing their names, or even their faces.

I wouldn’t miss them if they disappeared.

But surely someone would. At least that’s what we all hope.

That we are bound together by blood or love or work or proximity to somebody who would notice if we vanished. Someone who would care enough to knock on the door.

But people die alone.

Often they are old. Their obituaries appear in newspapers, with no survivors listed.

But a child?

A child whose age was not yet measured in years, but in 30-day life-altering increments — new word, new tooth, new discovery — dying alone, without comfort, is hard to bear.

After the news of Ezekiel and his mother appeared, relatives were interviewed.

One of Browning’s brothers explained how Ezekiel’s mother had distanced herself from her family, even as she recovered from addiction and put her life back together.

A brother who said his sister’s closest neighbor was gone a lot and folks at the apartment building “aren’t that close of a group.”

A brother who said he’d never met the little boy his sister called Zeke, whose body was cremated Saturday along with his mother’s, their ashes mingled.

A brother who said he was told when children die of dehydration “they just cry themselves to sleep and never wake up.”

No foul play was suspected, the newspaper story said.

The mother and son died of natural causes.

Or as natural a cause as a 21-month old child wandering alone in an apartment in the middle of a city of a half-million people, and dying on the floor, undiscovered for days, can ever possibly be.

Reach Cindy Lange-Kubick at 473-7218 or clangekubick@journalstar.com.