Letter to the editor
Preparing for Homeless Day of Remembrance, always on the longest night of the year, December 21, I looked through the names of the 16 humans who died this year. I know many of them. It’s not about me any more than it is about all of us, but I want it to be known that those of us who work closely with people who are experiencing homelessness are not like most first responders. We are there for crises and emergencies, but we are also there for more. We know the stories and lives of the people we work with, often for years. It is often not vicarious trauma, where we just hear stories. It is direct; we are there in the moment when violence or an emergency happens.
There are several people on this list I could speak at length about. I started combing through my thousands of photos to pull up shots of people who passed and realized I would be here for days. Days. Today I am thinking about Cathy [her name has been changed out of respect for her family]. Cathy, I met around 2017, 2018. She was a small white woman who lived out in the old Dignity Village encampment. Dignity Village, at its max, had about 300 people. It was where people went who couldn’t or wouldn’t go into the shelter. Often, people would languish there after experiencing a snowball effect of trauma. I remember the first time my mom came to visit out there, she brought women’s underwear and some pretty soft knit hats and gloves. Cathy got a soft pink hat and matching pink gloves with fake pearls attached. She was so happy. I realized then that I didn’t know her style because I had only ever seen her in the context of homelessness. In that moment, I had a little window into what her world might look like, how she might express herself through material things, were she able…