Life Imitates Art

Life…

New York Woman Found Living With Husband’s Skeleton
Wednesday, November 22, 2006

NEW YORK — A man hoping to reconcile with his parents made a grisly find in their Brooklyn apartment, police said: His mother may have been living with his father’s corpse for three years.

Police said Paul Iversen went to his parents’ Bay Ridge apartment on Tuesday to make amends after years of estrangement. When he arrived, his mother, Joanne, told him his father, Frank, had died, police said.

Then she showed her son the skeletal remains of an adult man, stored under bed covers in her bedroom, according to police.

The medical examiner was to conduct tests to confirm the identity of the remains, Police Sgt. Mike Wysokowski said. No charges have been filed.

Neighbors at the Iversens’ building on Bay Ridge Parkway said Joanne Iversen had told them her husband was simply away.

“I said, ‘I haven’t seen your husband,’ and she said, ‘He’s in Philadelphia.’ She told others ‘Long Island,”‘ said an upstairs neighbor, Vincent Clements.

Several neighbors said they noticed a foul smell emanating from the Iversens’ first-floor apartment but couldn’t fathom the source.

“We complained a lot, but I never would have guessed there was a body inside,” said neighbor Carole Clements.

All the while, Joanne Iversen continued to interact affably with her neighbors, several said.

“She was always outside, always had some sort of story to tell,” said longtime resident Roman Rushtlion.

Art…

Summary: A ROSE FOR EMILY
by William Faulkner

Most discussions of the short story center on Miss Emily Grierson, an aristocratic woman deeply admired by a community that places her on a pedestal and sees her as “a tradition, a duty”—or, as the unnamed narrator describes her, “a fallen monument.” In contrast to the community’s view, we realize eventually that Miss Emily is a woman who not only poisons and kills her lover, Homer Barron, but she keeps his rotting corpse in her bedroom and sleeps next to it for many years. The ending of the story emphasizes the length of time Miss Emily must have slept with her dead lover: long enough for the townspeople to find “a long strand of iron-gray hair” lying on the pillow next to “what was left of him, rotted beneath what was left of the nightshirt” and displaying a “profound and fleshless grin.”