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than "Re: Contents of HPN digest..."Message: 1
Date: Fri, 21 Dec 2001 10:07:42 -0800
From: chance martin <streetsheet@NOSPAMsf-homeless-coalition.org>
To: "Homeless People's Network" <hpn@lists.is.asu.NOSPAMedu>THE LAST WINTER OF REST AND GRACE FOR SAN FRANCISCO'S HOMELESS DEAD
by JOSH BRANDONFor the past 16 years in a row, on the day when the night darkness is the
longest of the year, San Franciscans have gathered in front of City Hall for
a candlelit ceremony memorializing each homeless San Franciscan who died in
the previous year. It has been the longest such memorial service in any city
anywhere in the United States.
But on this first Winter Solstice of the new Millennium, this act of
rememberance will have been sadly different. No names of our city's homeless
dead will be provided by San Francisco's Department of Public Health for
this simple, yet significant, act of public compassion for our most
vulnerable and unfortunate citizens.
These dead have become the first collateral damage in our City's public
health response to the first war of the 21st Century.And Reverend Glenda Hope -- who has coordinated and participated in this somber event since it began with 16 names in 1985 and has seen it now grow to over 150 names for the past five years -- is angry.
She has been told that SF-DPH will not determine these names because its
staff is too busy developing a public health response to a threatened bio-terrorism attack. She has also been told that the DPH bureaucracy is more geared to publish its reports in the spring and summer, which better suits its funding cycle.
She doesn't buy it.
"I don't doubt at all that we need a public health response to
bio-terrorism> I don't doubt it at all. We simply are not very prepared,"he said. "But we have an ongoing terror on and off our streets."
"The point of the [DPH] study," she continued, "Is to know how, where, when
and why homeless people die so we can have a better response that prevents
more deaths. This rises to a new level [of lack of concern]. This is not an
if, this is happening now. These are God's children dying on our streets,
and now they have been relegated to a different and lower status than
before."
"September 11th is being used as an excuse to do some things -- such as oil
drilling in the Arctic wilderness, giving the rich a tax break, and ending some civil rights -- and as an excuse NOT to do others," she concluded.
When asked how one can balance the importance of protecting the lives of the
living with finding the names of homeless people who have already died, Rev.
Hope gave a concrete example.
"About three years ago," she said, "A formerly homeless woman named Francine was a last-minute substitute for the person who strikes the bell once after
each name is read aloud. She cried every time that bell was hit. I asked her if she was all right, and she told me this: 'Every time I hit that bell, I felt pain and had to cry. My greatest fear when I was on the streets was not dying -- it was that nobody would find me if I did die, and, if they did, nobody would care'."
Medical Examiner records of death are public records that can be obtained
under the guidelines of California's Public Records Act. Charles Newman, administrator for the San Francisco Medical Examiner's office, made the names of 2001's homeless deaths available for the memorial service once he learned of the problem.
75 homeless San Franciscans were found to have died in obviously homeless
circumstances in 2001. In past years, these easily-determined deaths
accounted for about 40-45% of all homeless deaths. This is because many
homeless people die in hotels as either visitors or during short-term
respites from the streets. That is why DPH reviews all the past year's death
records in order to determine which decedents were legal tenants and which were seeking some brief relief from homelessness.
The list of 75 names took less than a hour to be compiled.
At least those homeless San Franciscans will have a bell struck in their
memory, their names will be uttered in front of others who also cared whether they lived or died. And, in the coming months, whenever a bell peals from a church, the living might pause to think of those remaining nameless homeless souls, in their long winter of rest and grace.Coalition on Homelessness, San Francisco
468 Turk Street, San Francisco, CA 94102
415/346.3740-voice € 415/7755639-fax
coh@sf-homeless-coalition.NOSPAMorg
http://www.sf-homeless-coalition.org****************************************
Message: 1
Date: Fri, 21 Dec 2001 00:46:30 -0800
From: Jason Albertson <blakjak@attglobalNOSPAM.net>
Reply-To: blakjak@NOSPAMattglobal.net
To: chance martin <streetsheet@sf-homeless-coalition.NOSPAMorg>,
hpn@lists.is.asu.NOSPAMedu
Subject: [Hpn] Memories in the rain; raining memoriesChance,
Tonight I was at the 16th annual homeless deaths memorial, officiated by
my dear friend and sometime mentor Reverend Glenda Hope, and for the
first time, it rained on us. Not a heavy rain, though at times the drops
fell pretty fast; not as hard as the rain has been during the day. It
was cold, windy and I curled up in my leather and thought a lot about
the folks who were not going to go back to a warm house after the
ceremony. Not many people were there. I stood with a group of folks from
Public Health, Dr. Barry Zevin, Marian Pena, Sandra Hazeltine, Dr.
Barbara Wismer, Jim Tate. I'm part of the public health gang too now, I
guess, working on the MOST team.
Rebecca Vilkomerson put her umbrella up over my head when it started
raining, but I had a hat and took the parasol to cover Reverend Glenda
with it.
Those folks whose names we read then tolled on a bell, I suppose they
didn't die unshriven. Our ceremony is not a comfort to them in our reality, not
to the John Doe who died a few weeks ago on the St. Anthony's steps, a place
where perhaps he'd sought shelter or food; not a comfort to Amber, who died
in a hotel, stabbed, I think. Their pain and their death was, like all of ours, a
thing that was faced alone. But we gathered in the cold to bear witness, to hold memories, to give thanks and peace to each other and to be, in our own way, a statement, an indication that there was a community here and the community had its
supporters and that its supporters cared enough to come out on this rainy and windy night. I looked around, heard the steady whir of the small generator powering the sound systems, looked around at the place where the reflecting pool had been, that was now sod, and reflected on how things just change and then you notice them. I thought about how if people die in the cold and we hold their names, writ on a piece of paper, and burn that paper, and if we have warm places to live, well, maybe those souls, or whatever is left of the people who die won't be cold. I like to think that if there is a place that we go after we die (and by no means am I even the least bit sure that there is) that those who have suffered in the cold and the rain, those who have unwillingly born hunger will be warm under the most expansive roof ever, with a fire to sit by and good food to eat and most importantly, an end to pain.
I know that for those folks who died this year, their pain ended. I hope
that along with that end also came a place of peace, of comfort, for that is the
due that they didn't get here.There weren't enough people there. I wish there had
been more.
Love to you Chance. Take care. See you soon. Jason
Message: 2
From: "Morgan W. Brown" <norsehorse@NOSPAMhotmail.com>
To: hpn@lists.is.asu.NOSPAMedu
Date: Fri, 21 Dec 2001 11:45:55 -0500
Subject: [Hpn] A life recalled: Relatives & longtime friends remember... homeless
man-------Forwarded article-------
Friday, December 21, 2001
Boston Globe <http://www.boston.com/globe>
[Boston, Massachusetts]
Metro: City & Region section
Page B1
A life recalled
<http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/355/metro/A_life_recalled+.shtml>Relatives and longtime friends remember the talents and dreams of homeless
man
By David Arnold, Globe Staff, 12/21/2001The last time the mother tried to call her son was one week ago,
coincidentally just an hour or two before the homeless man would die.
She telephoned the Pine Street Inn from her home in Atlanta to tell her son
that she loved him and that there would be a Christmas card and a little
money coming. She knew he might spend it on liquor.
''But it was Christmas!'' the mother cried yesterday, her tears mixing with
he guilt, love, frustration, and fatigue of a parent unable to help a child
unable to help himself.
At 7:20 p.m. last Friday, the son, who carried no identification, was struck
and killed in South Boston by a commuter train. It was a gruesome news
event. And then the story dropped out of sight.
On Tuesday, police finally were able to identify the victim using
fingerprint records. He was Mark Harold Henderson, 40. He was once a towheaded boy, a track star, a top student, a voracious reader, a dexterous guitar player, a songwriter, a poet, a hopeless romantic, and a man who more than once gave up his own coat to someone who needed it more.
But, those who knew him say, he also was haunted by demons - that he had not
lived up to a father's expectations, that he had lost forever the love of a girl, and that humankind was lacking compassion. Occasionally he agreed to enter a treatment center. But in the end, he chose to fight his demons with drink. And he lost.
What he was doing on the tracks remains a mystery. This year, trains in
Greater Boston have killed four homeless people, who frequently slip through
cuts in chain-link fences to use the tracks as shortcuts.
''With your head down in a driving rain and a train being pushed from the
locomotive in the back, you'd be surprised how easy it is to be hit,'' said
Peter Pasciucco, an MBTA police superintendent.
At least police were able to put a name to Henderson. One man killed a year
ago on tracks in Somerville remains unidentified.
Many people prefer to make the homeless invisible, said Debbie Vaughn, a
longtime friend of Henderson's and a resident of Winston-Salem, N.C. ''It's
easier if you can pass someone by and think: They didn't have dreams, they
are not loved, they do not have life stories.''
But to Mark Henderson's friends and family, most of them residents of
Winston-Salem or the Atlanta area, he was far from invisible. Four of them
wept during telephone interviews yesterday. They suggest that, using the
same ratio of 4 to 1, there might be at least 24,000 people for whom the
estimated 6,000 homeless in Boston are heart-wrenchingly visible.
they're all laughin', lyin', livin', cryin'
i can't hear a sound
alone in the crowd, i'm
alone in the crowd
Melba Lee, Henderson's mother, found those lyrics yesterday while sorting
through some of his belongings that have accumulated over the years in her home.
''I guess this says something about some of the things he was feeling,'' she
said, referring to a 15-year struggle to understand the depths of his loneliness.
Henderson was born the second of six children to Melba Joe Bare and Richard
Grier Henderson, who was in the credit business when the family got started
in Columbus, Ohio.
By the sixth grade, Henderson was creating books filled with his drawings
and writings that he gave to classmates; he dreamed of becoming a writer. He
also was winning ribbons in interscholastic track and field events held at
nearby Ohio State. Mom still has the ribbons.
In 1976 the family moved to Winston-Salem, and then to Atlanta in 1987. By
then, the parents' marriage was breaking up, and Henderson was AWOL from
high school. There was a girlfriend and older brother in North Carolina, and
at some point, Henderson, a teenager, started drinking.
''Who knows why?'' said Melba, who eventually would remarry. ''He never
really got the approval he sought from his father [who could not be located
for this report], but he also felt the world was a particularly hard
place.'' Once, she said, when her son was 17, he decided he would join the
Navy. He took the GED exam without studying and scored in the top 10th
percentile. But when the Navy placed him in a six-year nuclear science
program, he opted out.
Through his 20s and early 30s, Henderson worked with Quincy Vestal, a
distant friend of the family's, in a roofing business. ''When he wasn't
drinking, he was a great guy - and a stickler for doing a job right,'' Vestal recalled. On breaks from roofing when he was sober, Henderson - nicknamed ''Breezo'' for his penchant for taking long trips from home - was reading such authors as Herman Hesse, Saul Bellow, James Joyce, and Alexander Pope. He also was scribbling song lyrics on anything he could find. Frequently his pockets were filled with napkins inscribed with lines such as:
when the bottle is your bible
a hardwood floor is home
when morning comes twice a day
or never
He would never stay long in treatment centers, and absences from Georgia
became more prolonged. And there was some petty crime and some jail time -
that would result in the fingerprinting records that allowed MBTA police to
identify him earlier this week.
In 1992 Henderson wrote in a journal that ''the decisions I make now ... are
the ones I will have to live with. This time it's for all the marbles. This time it has to be right.''
But he could not meet his own standards. The last time friends and family
saw him was about five years ago. No one knows why he landed in Boston or
how long he had been here. But he would occasionally telephone his mother -
almost always drunk. She would instantly become emotionally torn, desperate
to hear from him but infuriated that he could not sober up even for the
call.
Sometime last spring, Melba said, she heard from her son in what would be
his last telephone call. She pleaded with him to come home, and offered, as
always, to send him the bus ticket. But he would have to sober up. And now,
she wonders if a part of her was too tough on her grown son.
Early next week, Mark Henderson will go home, his ashes to be placed on a
mantel in an urn that Melba has already purchased.
''There comes a time when people do what they're going to do, and the truth
is, you can't change that,'' Melba said.
''At least I couldn't,'' she added. ''And I tried. And I tried. And I tried.''This story ran on page B1 of the Boston Globe on 12/21/2001.
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