A Gift of Hope: Helping the Homeless

F
or eleven years, I worked on the streets with the homeless, and without question it altered my life. It is life-changing to be there, to look into the eyes of people who are lost, suffering, sick in body and mind, most of whom have lost hope. They are the forgotten people, whom no one wants to think about or know. For most people it’s terrifying to acknowledge them, or see them—what if that could happen to us? It’s a horrifying thought. “There but for the grace of God …”

I’ve watched people quietly disintegrate on the streets, and seen some of them go from people without a place to live to people who have no life, no hope, no way out. Some have disappeared, some have died, some of the young ones have gone home, some have gotten help from the available programs and agencies, but most of them are still out there, their situation worsening day by day. And in our fragile economy, the number of people on the streets has increased exponentially.

My goals were never lofty. At first I had no goals at all. In
my own grief at having lost a son, I tried to help people who appeared to be in as much pain as I, even if for different reasons. I began to learn what they needed, practically, and to supply those needs. And eventually I realized that my “mission,” if you can call it that, was only to keep them alive until real help could address their broader needs. My focus was small and specific: to keep them alive on the streets, to keep them warm and dry and fed, to make them as comfortable as possible in a terrible situation. It was all I could do. I am not a political person, I have no influence on city government, I didn’t have enough money to save them all. I’m not a physician or a psychiatrist to address their medical problems. I was one person who wanted to do what I could, with the help of ten others who helped me form what became a very efficient team. We went out night after night, dealt with whatever we found, and served three hundred people a night, three or four thousand a year. We gave them clean, warm new clothing, tools they needed, hygiene supplies, a few practical things like umbrellas and flashlights, pens and pads, and safe, healthy packaged food. And I hope that along the way, we saved a life or two—or more.

Right from the beginning, it was essential to me to remain anonymous in this work, both to the people I served, and in the larger world. I remained convinced that it was completely unimportant who I was. We created something unique, helping
to keep the homeless alive on the streets, giving them what they needed most acutely. I felt that my identity was irrelevant and could only get in the way. It didn’t matter who I was. Talking about my work on the streets served no purpose either. I was sure that anyone who knew about it would view it with contempt or suspicion, or use it as a springboard to publicity that I didn’t want. I wanted to do the work as quietly and invisibly as possible, and I never deviated from that until finally, with what I had learned, I felt that speaking up for them would help them more than my silence.

I am lending the homeless my voice now, so that others will think about them and see their plight. If I, who have walked among them for eleven years and care about them, don’t speak for them, who will? Although I have always said that I would never do this, and have done everything I could to stay below the radar, I have finally realized that I need to speak up and share what I’ve learned. I can be the voice in the world they do not have. There are more people than ever on the streets, there is less and less money available to help them, and some of the laws regarding hospitalization of the mentally ill need to change. But before anything can change, people must be willing to see the homeless and not pretend they aren’t there. They so desperately need our help, in so many ways. And we cannot help or change what we refuse to see.

There is so much that needs to be done, and the smallest
effort matters and makes a difference: clothing, meals, medical treatment, psychiatric help, wound care, a ride to an emergency room, a blanket, a kind hand. There is much for even the uninitiated to do. And it takes many to do it.

So this book is a call for help. There are too few of us reaching out to those on the streets, in a silent, unseen war where too many lives are being lost, when in fact so many more could be saved if only people knew, or cared. There are in fact several groups in every city, working diligently to help the homeless in any way they can, and many of them privately organized and funded when city and state governments don’t do enough to help.

The homeless need so many things from us. In addition to housing, medical care, mental health care, and job training, they need a strong hand to help them up. And aside from what we can do practically, we need to share our strength and give them hope: the hope that things can change, and the courage to hang on.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but along with the supplies we handed out, we gave them hope. We stopped our vans, we jumped out, we walked up to people who had never seen us before and probably wouldn’t again, and we handed them bags filled with what they needed to survive for weeks or even months. And we wanted nothing in return. Nothing. They didn’t have to embrace our religion, our beliefs, our politics.
They didn’t need to know where we came from, or why. They didn’t even need to say thank you, although they always did, always. And for one shining instant, they knew with total certainty that someone cared, and fell out of the sky to help them, like an answer to their prayers. It led them to believe that good things could happen again. It showed that someone cared. It gave them hope, which was our most important gift to them.

T
he homeless outreach team that changed my life, and that of many others, began at a very dark time for me. My son Nick showed signs of suffering from bipolar disease from his earliest childhood. At eighteen months, I found him “different,” and precocious long before that (he walked at eight months and spoke in full sentences in two languages when he was a year old). At four, I was convinced that he was manic. When he was five, I sought advice from doctors and psychiatrists who brushed off my concerns, and assured me he was “fine.” And when he was seven, I alternated between panic and despair, convinced that he was sick, begging for help for him, while every doctor I consulted reassured me and insisted there was nothing wrong. I have a great fondness now for doctors who respect the bond that mothers have with
their children and acknowledge that we know them best of all. I knew my son was sick, but no professional would agree.

When Nick was a very young child, which is not so very long ago, the tradition adhered to by most psychiatrists was that manic depression (or bipolar disease as it is more frequently called now), could not be diagnosed until a patient was in his early twenties, and was staunchly never medicated before that age. The medication most commonly used for bipolar disease was lithium. And it was considered exceptional and almost revolutionary when I found a very respected expert on manic depression at UCLA, who gave Nick lithium at sixteen. And for a brief time, lithium was a miraculous wonder drug for him. For the first time in years he was able to lead what appeared to be a totally normal life because of the drugs, and his diagnosis was established: He was bipolar. To be diagnosed at that age was almost unheard of then. Today, they give lithium to children suspected of being bipolar at four or five. That was unthinkable when Nick was that age. And the belief now is that if you diagnose and medicate bipolar children, they have a much better chance of having a normal life later on.

I’ve written a whole book about Nick, his illness and his life, his victories and defeats, and our great love for him, so I won’t go into detail here. He had two very good years of productive, normal life once he was medicated. And at eighteen,
still on the appropriate drugs, he felt so normal that he insisted he wanted to stop taking them. Much to my chagrin (and terror), he spiraled down immediately once off them, and within five weeks he made his first suicide attempt, and very nearly succeeded. Miraculously, he survived, and assured me he wouldn’t do it again, but did so ten days later, and was saved again. He made three unsuccessful suicide attempts in three months, then got back on his medications and improved immediately, and with the naïveté of a loving parent, I thought we were home free. After those three suicide attempts, he seemed better, happier, more productive, and more functional than he had ever been, until fierce depression hit him again six months later. He made his final and tragically successful suicide attempt eleven months after the first one, and died at nineteen.