Five years ago yesterday (according to my Google Photos), I got the first of the two original Covid vaccines. But me getting the vax is not why I gave this entry its title. What took place two days before that is why. And anytime loud noise is involved, I remember the moment more.

I had woken up all of a sudden around 4AM on Valentine’s Day, 2021, to loud banging on the walls. It came from the side of a neighbor who was an old, former homeless drug addict (he told me so) but had been sober for years. (Only vice he had was smoking cigarettes.) The noises weren’t consistent, but that he kept banging on the walls (it sounded like he was hitting the walls with something?) every other minute drove me to call & email my then-property manager about it. It’s always a horrid inconvenience to have your sleep interrupted, but worse when you also have to wake up early that day for both a Covid testing (to make sure I didn’t have “The Rona” before getting my Covid shot) and work (I worked a temp job during pandemic lockdown).

I turned up my sleep noise machine (which I must always have on when I hit the hay), put on some earplugs, and managed to get a little bit of sleep before needing to wake up at 7am. While I was at the drive-thru for Covid testing, my property manager emailed me back. Here was her reply:

The gasp that I gasped in my car when I read that. I had no clue my neighbor had an emergency. I had to report him over noise disturbances in the past, but what happened to him that early morning was unusual. (His previous noise issues were things he could’ve controlled, like turning down his TV or music player, or not talking to himself too loudly.) I later talked with my property manager about this, and she told me he had a heart attack that morning.

(By the way, I was surprised that I didn’t make a single spelling or grammatical error in my 4AM email to my property manager. I thought there’d be at least some incoherence in my email that was written when I was half-awake.)

While my neighbor survived that incident, he would sadly pass away a year later. I found out from another neighbor that he passed away (of a stroke, unfortunately) while I was out-of-town for a few days. It’s a shame, but I felt like his fate was inevitable. Even after that heart attack, the guy still kept smoking till the very end. Dude just didn’t care. Just as sad was finding out he didn’t get a proper leave–no funeral or wake whatsoever.

RIP to my neighbor. 🕊️

To this day, I’m still that chick who will say something if I see or hear something (unusual or suspect). Who knows–it could end up saving another life.