When a homeless person dies, who knows about it? Who remembers? Who grieves?
Vancouver’s Council for the Homeless and Friends of the Carpenter, a Vancouver Christian homeless ministry and drop-in center, had a memorial service for the homeless on Tuesday, the first day of winter — the shortest day and longest night of the year. It was part of National Homeless Persons’ Memorial Day, an observance that’s been gathering steam for a few years now. About 40 people turned up — everyone from local social service agency staffers and charity volunteers to homeless people themselves.
“It’s an opportunity to surround people with support when they have none. When their system of support has fractured or doesn’t exist,” said Duane Sich, executive director of Friends of the Carpenter, which owns a warehouse and wood shop on West 20th Street, along the railway tracks.
It felt appropriate that train whistles were crying in the background while people rose one by one in the chilly concrete-floored building to light candles and speak the names of the people they have lost.
“Willie. He was my cousin,” said Donald Prickett as he lit a candle. “And Richie. He was my other cousin.”
Prickett, 41, is a Coos Bay, Ore., native who said he’s been homeless since he was 13 years old. His cousins were homeless too, he said, but they stayed in Coos Bay — sleeping under tarps and trees, subsisting on berries and seafood they could scrounge up — while Prickett made his way to Tennessee and then back to the Pacific Northwest. He’s been in Vancouver for six years, he said, and sleeping in the back of his truck. He could sign up for shelter, he said, but he figures somebody else needs the shelter worse than he does.
Pickett’s hitchhiking cousins were both killed three days before Thanksgiving, he said, by a young drunk driver who gave them a lift and then rolled his truck on an unfamiliar coastal road.
“I think this is a good thing, to remember the homeless,” he said. “Of course, there’s one other name that never came up and that’s Jesus. He was homeless. He was one of us. He was just like the people living under bridges right now.”
Prickett added that Dec. 21 isn’t just the first day of winter and National Homeless Persons’ Memorial Day — it’s also his birthday.
“Kind of a happy-sad birthday this year, I guess,” he said. “One that I’ll always remember.”
Kate Budd, who works for Clark County’s Department of Community Services, came to the event to remember her grandfather, who recently died in Vermont. He’d been homeless at various times during his life, she said.
Hymns were sung and silence was maintained. The Rev. Jim Stender of St. Andrew Lutheran Church led those assembled through a call-and-response pattern each time a name was spoken.
“When we speak the name, we remember,” he said. “When we light a flame, we remember.”
Angela Nelson, an intern at St. Paul Lutheran Church, preached a sermon of sorrow and hope.
“It is a broken system. It is a terribly broken world,” Nelson said. “It is sin. We cannot close our eyes and look away.”
She added that it’s no accident that the first day of winter was chosen for this national memorial for the homeless.
“God is still among us in the dark and in the cold,” she said. “God comes down to walk and freeze and hunger beside us.”
Scott Hewitt: 360-735-4525 or scott.hewitt@columbian.com.
