Mom Dies, Adult Son Incapable Of Feeding Himself

Nobody cooks like mom. If you're Gale Bear, nobody cooks but mom:

It was one of those strange, anonymous urban deaths that you read about from time to time. This time it happened in Lancaster, in the 900 block of Union Street.

Gale Bear, age 55, lived with his mother, Suie, who turned 90 in June. Suie had dementia, said Lancaster city police, and her son, who never married, took care of her. The son, a family member said, had always lived with his parents.

Sometime over the course of the summer, Suie died. No one knows exactly when, because the son never reported it. Indeed, Gale Bear continued to live in the house with his dead mother, who lay on the floor of her bedroom, covered with a blanket, her head propped up by a pillow, for about three months.

Officials discovered her body — which they say was mummified — on Oct. 21, after receiving a call from a friend of Gale Bear’s. The friend contacted Gale periodically to check up on him, said Detective Thomas Kiss of the Lancaster Bureau of Police, but when a “planned contact” was missed, the friend stopped by the Bear home to check things out.
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Police and the coroner came, but their first job was getting an emaciated Gale Bear to the hospital.
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Kiss said that when police arrived at the Bear home, they found Gale Bear physically wasted, with open, infected sores on his legs. He couldn’t walk — neighbor Lori Wanner said she saw police take him out on a stretcher — and he “had no idea what was going on,” said Kiss.

Kiss said it didn’t appear that he had eaten in quite some time.

“A couple of items of canned food had been opened,” Kiss said. But that may have been the extent of his food intake for three months.

I think the best sad stories are the ones that makes me laugh really hard. The next time I'm in the kitchen, I'll raise a can of niblets in Mr. Bear's honor.