Sunday’s Sad Stories — Story One

I’m going to take different Sundays throughout the year to tell a truth, I know, from working with homelessness. Everything I write will be unimpeachable though unbelievable: at least to people with a kind heart. Hopefully it will remind people that we need to love and be loved. Otherwise these enormously painful, preventable tragedies will continue.

I worked at a shelter where single individuals had their own room (luxurious digs for shelter, I must tell you. It was an old hotel).

There was an elderly woman of color. Elderly means old. She’d lived a hard but decent life. Her mobility was impaired — strokes will do that to you. She could get around — make amazing fried chicken when she had the ingredients (which I thoroughly enjoyed supplying) — but her sprinting days were over.

When her husband had died. She couldn’t make it alone. She ended up at the shelter.

One day she opened the door to her tiny room to see to police officers with a warrant for her arrest. If memory serves, they were transporting her to Allegheny County (out Pittsburg way). Seemed she’d cashed her hubby’s last social security check. The one that arrived the month after he died. She said she thought that was customary. I believe her.

I wasn’t at the shelter at the time of the arrest. I went to work there a few months later. The cops took her in her nightgown and slippers (parlor shoes, she called them). They told her she didn’t need to change, she’d get a new outfit at the jail.

More than a hundred miles from her arrest, standing in front of the judge — she told him that she had no idea the government didn’t send the check on purpose. Maybe to help widows pay for cremation. The judge believed her and told the cops to let her go. Which they did — in her nightgown.

There were two angels (her words again) that gave her bus fare — then train fare to get back to the shelter — but

And this is where the sad part comes in…

Yeah, no, you thought that her husband dying, then becoming homeless, then being arrested, exonerated but abandoned on the street were the sad parts? Silly you.

When she made it back to the shelter the staff had thrown her things away.

Can’t hang onto some homeless old lady’s stuff while she goes to jail — that’s the way things work in shelters.

She freaked. Of all the things she’d lost. Her heart ached for her husband’s ashes.

I’ll give you a minute.

Okay to go on?

There is a tiny bright spot in this story. The dumpster hadn’t been emptied yet. The box of ashes was in there.

Got a home? Maybe that means if you were surprisingly called away for four days or so, your stuff would still be there when you get back. I don’t write these stories to ruin your day. I write them so you’ll know how ruined the days of others already are… and know that we can do something about it.

How many people are like my friend from the shelter? We don’t know. 10 million… with more to come when the eviction moratoriums end.

You can learn more about homelessness by reading Still Left Out in America. That’s the link to Whistlestop Bookshop. He’s got signed copies. He can get you Diane Nilan’s new book Dismazed and Driven too. Another great read about homelessness.