15 August 2009
by Kobai Scott Whitney
On Monday July 27, some men living outside in Aberdeen found one of their friends, Steve Major, dead at their river-side camp. They had all been drinking together the day before, one of the hottest days this year. Major had been drinking too.
“Living rough” is the term the British use. It refers to someone Americans would call “homeless.” But the American term is one of subtle disapproval and I prefer the Commonwealth sense of how rough it can be living outside. I sometimes wonder if the Buddhist term “home-leaver” is better. It’s a term of honor referring to monks and nuns who leave home to pursue the communal monastic life or the path of the solitary hermit. Jesus also asked his followers to demonstrate their commitment by leaving home.
Drinking. Dehydration. Despair. All possible causes of death for Major, as well as an unknown illness, probably cancer, that had been making him lose weight at an alarming rate. A man named John, who had been drinking with Steve that night, was one of the ones who discovered him lifeless the next morning.
On Thursday that week, a few local clergy and 25 or so men and women who live outdoors or who knew Major in some way, gathered at Morrison Park, behind the Log Pavilion, to do a simple memorial service. Major was well-known and well-liked among the citizens of the alleys and camps around the Harbor. Yet Andrea Vekich, who works for the City of Aberdeen and knows the home-leaver population well, insisted in her eulogy that Major was essentially a recluse. “Steve knew the causes of his homelessness and was willing to live with that,” she told the mourners, “and there are sometimes very good reasons why people leave home: domestic violence and sexual abuse, for instance, are involved with many young people. Often those who live outside are Vets from the Vietnam era or the two Iraq wars or, now Afghanistan. Being around other people is too frightening for them.”
Social anxiety is one of the properties of those with schizophrenia or other major mental illnesses. Those addicted to drugs and alcohol will often give up shelter to retain enough money for their drug supply. Others on the streets had no home to leave. They are returning from stints in prison or graduating from a foster care system that drops them cold into the adult world at age 18.
Vekich talked to Major the day before his death. “He told me that he had given someone money to make the beer run that night, but the guy had never returned. Yet Steve just smiled and said he forgave him.” As Vekich said this, John cried out from the mourners’ circle, “That was me!” and the trickle of tears down his cheeks turned into a torrent of weeping. Yet this was actually a moment of humor at the service as Vekich hugged John and reminded him he was forgiven. The thing is, this sort of thing happens all the time in the camps as addicts swipe or bum each others’ cigarettes, rolling papers, beer or bourbon. We all understood this.
After the formal praying, the food from the church people came out: meatloaf, corn on the cob, watermelon. After days of heat, this day had turned cold and overcast. There was a slight mist beginning to coat us all. As we ate, the paper bags began to appear. They were twisted around the top, giving them a silhouette suspiciously like liquor bottles. As we broke up to go our separate ways, there was a tinted sky behind Top Food & Drug, Ross Dress For Less, Staples and Wal-Mart, where other citizens wandered the aisles looking for something to buy, something to ease the unease of hard times.
Looking west I remembered a poem by ee cummings about something like this. When I got home I looked it up. It’s a New Testament story retold, about “a man who had fallen among thieves” who “lay by the roadside on his back.” Here’s the last stanza:
Brushing from whom the puke
I put him all into my arms
And staggered banged with terror through
A million billion trillion stars
This piece appears in the Sat. August 29, 2009 Religion Section of The Daily World in Aberdeen, WA.