When I don't look away

Sharing lunch, and sadness

It was hard not to look away, but I stayed with her as she told her story.

Her eyes carried the sadness of generations, past, present, and even future. Her granddaughter, who died before she reached one, would have been eight. She started the meditation sharing pictures with the intention that we honor this young soul who had been taken from her years ago. Then she morphed into the hardships she’s had trying to forgive.

Her infant granddaughter didn’t die of natural causes, though the parents were initially told it was SIDS, an unexplained death in her crib. The coroner had done an autopsy and found a tiny needle mark and morphine in her tiny stomach. She was killed. I chewed the inside of my lips and tried to soften my eyes not to show my shock. Then she explained that it was a relative who was crazily high on drugs and had taken the needle to their loved one. Maybe to spare her the life she was living.

“Mary”, not her real name says that she knew people who drank or did drugs to die, they didn’t want to wake up. She says she’s been sober for 17 years, and no longer wants to die that way, but she is ready if she does. “I love everyone,” she protests, and then her face clouds over, ‘but it’s so hard to forgive. They killed an innocent child, my granddaughter, how do you forgive that?” I can’t answer that. But she’s not really asking.

When she named the relative and their relationship to the infant, I bent my head down sharply toward my lap, an instinct, and drew in a sharp breath. I popped up again quickly, hoping no one noticed, and looked back at Mary, holding her in my eyes. She asked how people could look at that woman who had killed the baby and still say good things about her; it made her angry. She didn’t want to be angry. “But she took a life,” she said, her voice trailed off. “I don’t want to hold this anger. It’s not good for me.”

I think, how can you still be upright, Mary, let alone find forgiveness? How could anyone live through that tragedy, you, the parents who lost their only child this way, anyone connected to this trauma? The room, usually full of shuffling, mumbling, and disagreements over food, taking too much space, or other small annoyances, is unusually still. Not everyone here is homeless, but some are. After Mary’s talk is done, and the meditation is closed with a thank you prayer, they’ll share a meal. Some might talk to Mary later about what she said. Most won’t. That’s because they are all dealing with traumas, some as awful or heartbreaking as Mary’s loss, some just trying to survive the day. Some are here mostly for food, others for the connection, a quiet place out of the chaos that is likely their neighborhood. They come to be with people who not only don’t shun them but welcome them inside. Volunteer services are different depending on the day, today it’s someone who gives a healing hand massage and manicures to anyone who wants one, man or woman. Another volunteer cuts hair under the shade of a tree in the dirt patio area behind the large house. The results are professional; it’s a transformation mostly physical, but sometimes more.

I ask Mary to see the pictures of her granddaughter up close. She has spread them on the table. Somewhere in her talk, because it was a ‘talk’, really that covered a wide range of issues, all important, Mary had pointed to me, as I was sitting near her. Who’s the newcomer? She believed I’d come in from the streets too, and had a story to tell. Just a volunteer though. Not someone with lived experience like her. She was disappointed I think. Maybe my eyes are sad too and I looked like a kindred spirit. If they are, it’s because the needs I see when I walk in this door are so great. It’s like a gaping hole that can’t be filled and somehow, gets deeper overnight even when you think you are filling it with something. There are breaks in so many places . . .

Then there’s Joy, and that is her real name. Joy’s foot was run over by a truck last March when she was in her wheelchair and that slowed her down for a few months while she was in the hospital. But when she came back, she was still working on that bill in the legislature to get the curbs at a bus stop fixed on Franklin so wheelchairs or strollers wouldn’t capsize coming out of the bus. Joy lobbied at the capitol, in person. She’d be there day after day telling lawmakers why they had to support her bill. She wrote letters, she made calls, she harried a news reporter into doing a story, and she chased down council members where they lived - all in her wheelchair. She’ll tell you about it. Just ask her. And if you don’t ask her, she’ll tell you about it anyway. Joy would help anyone. But she needs someone to bring her some soup being served today, there’s not quite enough room for her chair.

After lunch, someone I met last week pulled up a chair and told me about his upcoming move across downtown. I can barely see his mouth for the whiskers all around it - it’s wide and he smiles often, laughing at his own jokes. He thinks most of what he says is kind of funny, and by the end of the conversation, so do I. He tells me he’s getting hassled too much by his neighbors. One thing he hates is them coming over as soon as he gets his monthly supply of tobacco, like clockwork, demanding some of it. He buys tobacco in bulk with the cylinders to roll it because that makes his disability payment go further He gets about $900 a month, he says and of course, rent takes most of it. It will be harder to get back here for this meal and to see friends here after he moves to the other side of downtown; the bus ride will be a dollar. And he’ll have to smoke outside in the new building. He screws up his mouth and cocks his head to one side. “That’s the way it is,” he says. He gives a wry smile with his gums; he doesn’t have teeth. “You do what you have to do,” he says and shrugs with one shoulder.

I nod, knowing I have absolutely no idea what he’s had to do to get by so far. No idea. We find out we’re the same age and he says he can’t believe it. Neither can I, but it’s true. We were born within a month of each other. I hold that fact in my brain as I look around me and think, there’s no one here who doesn’t look many years older than they are. Trauma marks you and ages you in a way that’s not natural. Not natural, but here, in this urban refuge a block from the freeway and downtown, it’s common. This is what I learned today. The knowledge sticks in my ribs.