I still think of him as Bob. Just Bob. And I suppose I am OK with that.
He was a homeless man I got to know hanging around downtown Vancouver, and I wrote about him a couple months ago. About how he shattered preconceptions of homeless people. About how he was obviously educated and intelligent and didn’t appear to have any substance problems.
Anyway, I wrote that I wondered what happened to Bob because I hadn’t seen him in awhile, and a short time after that column was published, I received a call from a woman named Jean. She had quite a story to tell.
Jean lives downtown and got to know Bob through her walks around the area. And after a while, she invited him to live with her. “God told me the day I made the offer, ‘Don’t worry about what other people think; do what’s right.’ Bob said, ‘I will be a courteous house guest, and he was.’ I felt compelled to help him, and he accepted.”
After a while, Jean got to the reason for her phone call — Bob had died in November, roughly five months after moving off the streets. An aneurysm, Jean said. But there was more to the tale.
“He was a wonderful, wonderful man,” she said. “I loved that man. I looked forward to seeing and visiting with him. Toward the end, it brought me great joy because his smile changed; it was a boyish grin. I would have been happy to have him here forever. Bob was a gift for me; he was a gift for a lot of people. I’ve met some people in the homeless community who knew him and spent time with him, and he was a voice of reason. Bob was a bright, engaging, caring, simplistic-lifestyle kind of person.”
Anyway, I have been thinking about all that as the issue of homelessness has come to the forefront in Vancouver. Be it because of financial strife, or evictions, or substance abuse, or mental problems, more and more of our fellow citizens are finding themselves unable to keep a roof over their heads. The causes are varied; the solutions are difficult. And because of that, The Columbian is launching an occasional editorial series to examine homelessness in our community.
We don’t have all the answers. We probably don’t have any of them; the issue is a jumbled mix involving economics and health care and social assistance that is far too complex to have “answers” or “solutions.” A decade ago, for example, Seattle launched a concerted effort to reduce homelessness in the city, and today it has what is estimated as the third-largest homeless population in the country. The lesson: Sometimes even the most well-intentioned plans can fail.
Symbol of the community
To be sure, most homeless people are not like Bob. Many have personal demons that prevent them from living in a confined space or from managing a household. And most people are not as generous as Jean. “I lost a friend over taking Bob in,” she said. “Most people hear ‘homeless’ and they can’t understand what I was doing. There are people who know me, and have known me for years, and they pulled back.”
But it seems that, in dealing with what has become a crisis in our community, the first task should be to treat people with some simple human compassion. The second should be to agree that it is not acceptable to have citizens forced to sleep on park benches or in cars when that is not their preference. The third should be to recognize that ignoring the problem now, especially when children are involved, will only increase the societal costs down the road.
And so, in pondering homelessness in our community, I am reminded of Bob. “I don’t really want to give his last name,” said Jean, who also would prefer that her last name not be used. “He was so private. I told him, ‘If anything happens to you while you’re staying here, I will do everything I can to protect your privacy.’ ”
And, in the end, I suppose I am OK with that. Because Bob was an individual, one deserving to be treated with dignity. But he also can serve as a symbol for hundreds upon hundreds of people in our community.
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