After putrefaction, the butyric fermentation and then dry decay, her bones were the only things left for the Coroner to remove except for the grey wisp of her disembodied scalp left perched on the chair she must have collapsed on. Her tea cup was sideways on the table, the tablecloth was wrinkled as if by two hands in agony. Her cheap Chinese slippers were left scattered amongst the dead maggots on the still damp floor. The forensic cleaning crew set about pulling up the floor, even excavating the dirt underneath it, and stripping the entire house of soft furnishings as is standard practice when a death occurs in a house shut up for months like this. By not disclosing the woman’s name, whose worldly possessions are now in the hands of the public trustee, light can be shed on more intimate details of her life. When the elderly die alone without any relatives, such as in this case, a state-appointed cleaner collects everything worth selling. Everything else is thrown away. The oil paintings she made hung on the living room wall. What few photos, mementos and sentimental papers from her immigration she kept in a tin. It all ends up in a skip bin. So too the unassuming pile of cheap exercise books which lay next to her unfinished cryptic crossword and spectacles. They were filled with thousands of pages of immaculately handwritten diaries, which although smelling deeply of death and decay, would affect me profoundly.

She was born in the Czech Republic in 1924. She was intelligent and studied medicine, before travelling to Egypt where she was married. She worked as a bilingual translator in Morocco before immigrating to Australia in 1957. She lived with her husband in their Auburn house from 1966. Her husband died in 2001 in an aged care facility, a place she reviled and remained suspicious of until the end, perhaps explaining why she hesitated to seek help. She wrote about falls she suffered and how grateful she was for the strength to get up again, otherwise she would have remained on the floor. Her one neighbour often saw her writing in her diary on her porch, describing her as an independent and philosophical woman. She wrote with exquisite clarity in English for a Czech-born migrant with a beautifully deliberate cursive script, without errors. Some pages, which according to her index listed topics such as “depression”, “ageing”, “the mind” and “progress”, were razor-bladed out. Her handwriting noticeably deteriorated in the 10 or so years she kept writing them. Her bank statements revealed she had money, but she chose to live simply. She complained about the upcoming digital TV retune. She wrote that Telstra disconnected the phone because she wasn't getting enough calls from friends who were all dead. She wrote that her Medicare card was discontinued and she didn't know how to renew it. Most disturbingly, she wrote about how she had prepared to commit suicide by preparing a cocktail of lethal drugs to hasten the coup de grace.

Her will showed her beneficiaries neatly crossed out as they had died successively. She left the house to the RSPCA. Her last testament requested her two remaining wishes to be granted. One was that her ashes be interred with those of her husband, which sat high up over the mantelpiece. The other was that she be allowed to die with dignity, with no extraordinary measures to be used, no needles, no tubes, no machines. Andy Park's story Unattended Death aired on Wednesday on The Feed on SBS 2.