The stars, how about the stars? I wonder, what was his rising sign, or his dominant house?

Do you think, given the fact that he dressed a dog in a tutu, that he was more prone to identify as a Republican or Democrat, Baptist or Presbyterian? 

Here is what I know about the inherent nature of this man named Boodah: 

Two days before he was shot to death, I ran into him in the U-district where I found him holding a small dog. He smiled proudly as he told me that he was dog-sitting for his friend and had bought this dog this tutu and got her dressed that morning. I look at this cute dog in this stupid little cute tutu and see that it is on backwards. We both giggle with delight at the mistake and work together to right his wrong and get his girl “decent”.  

I give him a ride back to the Aurora Avenue motel where- I don’t know it yet and he doesn’t know it and certainly the dog in the tutu doesn’t know it- where he will be murdered two days later.

Now, many folks like Boodah would interject here and say that you, reader, will likely care more about what happens to the dog in the tutu after Boodah dies in this story then you will care about that fact that Boodah is dead at all, so let me beat you to the chase: the little dog in the cute stupid little tutu is fine but the grown man who took the time to dress a dog in that tutu, take it off when he realized it was on wrong and then put it back on again so that she looked good, is not fine.  

He is dead.  

And he died two days after we were in my car driving back from the U-district talking about how good it felt to care for the little dog, keep her alive and make her feel loved. It was reminding him of his own desire and ability to be a good dad and convicting him in his heart that he wants to try again, to reach out to his kids with humility, and try again. I hardly ever pray with folx, but that day he asked me to and if there is one thing I know and believe that prayer is for – it’s for this man’s holy, hard-earned hope that he be the man, the father that he so badly wants to be.  

So, we pray. 

Where do these prayers go when the man that prayed them is dead two days later?

I pray now, I pray in this moment that his prayer goes directly into you and that it flows from you the next time you see a man trying to survive these streets with all the bits of dignity he can muster. 

And then, I pray that the next time you see a little cute dog in a stupid crooked tutu, you tip your hat and think of Boodah’s unlived but most certainly muttered reunion with his children as you hold yours close.

My pride is quickly eclipsed by the guttural acknowledgement that my high school boyfriend’s youngest brother’s name is not really the thing that is shaking me awake this night. It’s Susanne. 

If I’m honest, I am not sure how to talk about Susanne with you, Dear Reader. And I wonder if this is because my fists are clenched and it’s hard to open them and be soft towards any of you sometimes because I have witnessed the ways in which so many of us hold on tight like a new religion to our ideologies around human beings like Susanne. And yet, here I am-yet again writing to make sense of all of this. Writing like my life, Susanne’s life and the others like her-like all our lives-depend on it. 

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think I am so important that I can resuscitate a whole city’s heart. But I do know that I have been impacted enough by the lives of some beautiful individuals, like Susanne, whose deaths I think are on our hands, so I must at least try and press down a bit and lower my ear to our heart to listen for a slight beat, because I do believe it’s there. 

Yes, Susanne was one of the many in a now rather large and growing chorus of individuals that have their own way of animating a lived-out decompensation in public. For Susanne, that meant, no shoes even in the coldest of weather. It meant an almost ritualistic meandering out into the highway, stopping traffic and causing a cacophony of beeps. In the hardest of times, it meant handing her plate after plate of food, only to have her throw them in the air. The plate throwing went on for months, winnowing her already slight frame down to the bone. 

On these days, what almost always worked was to say her name, to touch her face, or put your arms out wide for a hug and say, “Susanne”. She’d stop and look and for a moment in time there she was. With you. 

But there were plenty of times over the 14 years of sharing life with Susanne when it didn’t work; like that long month when we couldn’t get her to eat. And in those moments, it felt like we were standing on the shoreline, watching her slowly be swept out to sea, when all we wanted was to reach her and bring her back with us. 

Through the years, as I stood on this proverbial shoreline, with food from her plate on my clothes, or the chattering of horns in my ear, I would think about the way Susanne’s eyes sparkled as she danced at our Holiday party. I would recall the way she covered her mouth with her hands when she smiled and giggle a bit as I remember the mess she made in the kitchen when she cooked a steak on the stovetop. I’d then look at her perfectly tanned skin and beautiful brown eyes, in whatever form she was in, and call to mind her magical ability to make whatever clothes we helped put her in look effortless. 

During these times when Susanne was far out at sea-do you know what we did, reader? We called for an involuntary commitment. And do you know why we did this? 

Because we know her eyes sparkle when she dances. 

With every holy and heartbreaking attempt to have Susanne involuntarily committed, it never worked. She would look up just long enough to tell the Crisis Team that she didn’t want help. And despite our best efforts to provide historical knowledge, stories and data to any emergency crew that ever came, Susanne never met the standards of “harm to self or others”. 

And now she is gone. And my god, we miss her. 

Here’s what I beg of us moving forward: be open to a nuanced conversation on involuntary commitment. And be open to reimagining and investing in what care could and should look like for precious people like Susanne. Just be open. Or, Dear Reader, tell me what to do. Tell me what we should have done- those of us who loved Susanne.

At first we would lovingly say, “Richard, why don’t you let us heat that up for you?” to which he would reply, “no, no this will do.” Eventually, we resigned ourselves to simply handing him the can opener, seemingly the only assistance he would receive. 

He sleeps in his van; it is dark and dank and has a small hole that he drilled in just above the right wheel well so he can use the bathroom at night.  

Sometimes in the morning after he shuffles from the street through our door, he turns to greet us and we notice that the night didn’t go so well: his pants are soiled again and yet somehow, he manages a slight smile. Other times, he almost jogs in, leaning straight towards the bathroom but not able to make it before a substance begins to run down his leg. Sometimes he notices, sometimes not.  

We got in the habit of having a clean pair of sweats at the ready, but most often he refused them saying, “what difference does it make?” 

Cold Soup.  

Soiled Pants.  

This will do.  

What difference does it make.  

Years later, Richard shuffles in and asks for his mail… 

After two years of filing it away, the pile I hand him is thick and stacks high, up to his chin. He sits at a table and thumbs through the heap until he pulls out one. His hands shake as he fumbles to open the envelope and unfold the handwritten note within. Minutes pass until he proudly holds up a photograph and loudly proclaims, “This is my eldest son! He is studying Physics!”

He then looks down again saying, “I am going to read this note another time”, hands me his can of soup and asks, “would you mind heating this up?”

As if he had said it a million times before.

The new sensations of color and light were dazzling for these people, but at the same time, for many of them, also oppressive—it was the realization of “the tremendous size of the world,” Dillard suggests, “something they had previously conceived of as touchingly manageable.” 

My friend Tonia just moved into a supportive housing unit for unhoused folks after 30 years of living on the streets. It is in this apartment that she finds herself feeling more alone and depressed than ever. 

She tells me she just doesn’t know what to do now. She keeps finding herself back out on the street and says she prays every day that God would take the “like” out of the crack, heroin, and the hustle. I ask her to say more, and, together, we begin unearthing the role of crack and street-based sex work in Tonia’s life. 

When you live on the streets, you experience a social death, a dehumanization that excludes you from engaging the world in almost all the ways that you must witness the general population being a part of. So, a new world must be created and your fellow citizens become the ones among you whom the outside world calls un-human, too. In this world, there is a street economy, a class system, and an ethic or street code that the people in this particular place are sworn to live by, fight by, and die by. For better and worse, everyone is needed and everyone has a part to play. 

Because Tonia has long been exiled from the world, this new world is the only world she knows, it is where she has known citizenship. And because life on the streets is so cruel and unpredictable, the only thing that has offered Tonia a sense of orientation is the purposed nature of transactions—buying drugs, exchanging sex—that she must engage in to survive. 

READ: Hope, Homelessness, and COVID-19

Now that Tonia is off the streets, in a different neighborhood with no sense of orientation, no sense of place or purpose, she feels lost. 

As we embrace, Tonia tells me that she has not been home for days. 

Two days later my phone rings and a loud voice asks me if I know her Client, Tonia? We exchange pleasantries until she abruptly asks me if I know why Tonia has not been home for 5 days. I begin to share what I know of the bumpy road ahead for folks like Tonia: the unlearning and relearning of almost all of life, how non-linear this can all be, and how I believe we can best support Tonia in this transition… 

But, her response feels as if it’s scripted, read directly from Maslow’s hierarchy of needs but with a fill-in-the-blank client’s-name-here:

“Tonia has been given a roof over her head.

Tonia has been given a case manager.

Tonia has three meals.

Tonia can go see our in-house doctor if she makes an appointment”

The next day the Seattle Times was delivered to my door. The main headline reads, “When a homeless encampment was cleared, no one went to a shelter. The reasons are complicated”

There is an aspect of health and wholeness that cannot be defined by Maslow or medicine or psychology during transitions like Tonia’s. During these particularly thin moments, the ego-centric definitions of healing/becoming/success knock loudly at her apartment door but at the soul level, they are not alluring. The measurability of our ego-centric healing is but another non-possibility that taunts and teases, haunts, and heightens the divide from the world that she was exiled from in the first place. 

 It’s kind of like we make her take her boot off, throw it across her apartment, walk to get it, and then watch her miss it altogether. It just doesn’t work anymore.

Tears roll down Tonia’s face. . . new sensations of color and light were dazzling . . .but the possibility embodied in her apartment, she says, is almost more cruel and oppressive than the streets. 

To these fellow Christians and to you, dear reader, I say: before we can begin to roll up our sleeves, put our heads together or rally a response, we must first acknowledge that we are building on the wrong foundation and are in need of a paradigm shift.

As a society we refuse to look at, really look at, what this is all about. Our transactional, charity-driven, systematized attempts at care for our unhoused community are disconnected from our actual humanity and heart-based knowledge. And the tents that line our streets serve to make visible the death that has been here all along: our inability to think communally and remember that the very needs we have within us are kin to what our neighbor in the tent needs. 

In short: we continue to create, participate in, and demand models of care that we would never set foot in ourselves and we are, in real-time, contributing to the dehumanization of a people group in thought and action. 

Let me explain: I have spent the last 18 years with intention towards my unhoused neighbors, accompanying them in the day-to-day stuff of life. I’ve spent time in shelters, hospital rooms, on street corners, at appointments, and in the non-profit drop-in center and medical clinic that I co-founded. What I have learned in this world of mostly systemized charity is that we have neglected to include even the slightest trappings of the things that make us all human and upon which a human being’s mental health depends: the lived out questions of who am I and what am I. These questions can’t be answered by professionalized care, for it has to do with a sense of belonging, of counting, and of mattering.  It is the “stuff” of being human. The very fleshy, messy, particular to only you, hand-on-your-heart questions and birthright of every single one of us.

My experiences with this beautiful community convince me that the overall health of the human being is directly correlated with their sense of belonging and purpose in society. As they are, our policies and programs aimed at caring for our unhoused neighbors only serve to perpetuate a social death and lack of meaning that further isolates. This growing isolation and dehumanization then keep this population from feeling safe enough to access the social, health, and housing services that they desire and deserve and that we so desperately want them to utilize.

READ: Stewarding Our Privilege for the Kingdom of God

Until we begin to ascribe to the people we’re attempting to “serve” the same kinds of complexities, nuances, kindnesses, and curiosity that we ascribe and acknowledge in ourselves, we will continue to create models of care that simply do not work.

So, before we propose our solutions, may we close our computers and place our hand on our heart. We must begin here. And then we must create programs and services that take a person’s sense of place into account; programs and services that are restorative not retributive, wholeness enhancing not problem solving, subjective not objective, contextualized and not cauterized. Successful programs put a person’s inherent dignity and particular personhood front and center, just as you (my neighbor) and I would desire and demand.

Some may say that our cities are “dying” because of these tents, but I say that maybe, just maybe, the denial of our shared humanity has finally been made visible enough that it can give way to a fertile ground that is worthy of a humanizing harrow. And this is our work to do. We have the answers within ourselves more than we know.