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MyspaceLast November, a 70-year-old homeless woman named Bernis Andrew predicted she wouldn’t make it through the winter. In the end, it was the spring she didn’t survive.
On April 24, at around 8 a.m., Andrew collapsed in the bathroom of the State Street McDonald’s. Another patron found her. Paramedics tried to resuscitate her but failed. We won’t know for a while what the immediate cause of death was, but being homeless, living outside, sleeping on a bench month after month, must have played a major role.
Andrew’s story is especially sad not just because she was an elderly woman who endured multiple injuries while pushing a walker through days with nowhere to go. But also because she did have opportunities to move inside. Hands had been extended to her but for reasons that are hard to understand, she would not, or could not, grab hold of them. Andrew was an enigma; smart, resilient, kind, grateful for kindnesses extended to her and nonjudgmental.
To read more, see homelessinsb.org.
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Comments
A sad end to anyone's life. So sad.
Draxor (anonymous profile)
May 2, 2011 at 10:11 a.m. (Suggest removal)
Riceman (anonymous profile)
May 6, 2011 at 5:17 p.m.
I'm with Draxor on this one. This is a sad passing.
I had spoken to this woman, as has Isabelle, and concur that helping hands had been extended to her from this community; nevertheless she spent quite a bit of time sunk into a cycle of negativity, sitting on a State Street bench.
Isn't that clinical depression? Do fatalistic preconceptions constitute delusions? Is that not "illness"? Is this a case of psychopathology leading to a premature mortality?
Or was she simply at the end of the road for natural/existential medical-health reasons?
In either case, the circumstances with which she completed the circle of life on this planet should not be exploited to push the agenda of forced mental lock downs. Francisco and Self call for re-instatement of centralized state mental hospitals and the archaic, totalitarian use of electroshock. But chains and shock torure "therapy" would only have made Benis less happy and miserable.
California State law does already, as written, state that a person who due to "mental" [or emotional] illness is unable to care for themself can be locked up in the PUFF.
Thus we don't need any new interventionist, totalitarian laws to prevent these kinds of mortalities- the laws are on the books, if we really and truly are willing to have them be enforced against our citizens.
Cognitive therapy such as Rational-Emotive Therapy might have helped Benis overcome her fatalism and motivate and demand the housing she clearly needed to be at peace with the autumn of life. Even a philosophy such as the stoicism of Buddhism. the optimism of a revitalized Christianity or a healthy rabbinic view would have helped her step up and find her groove.
Part of what the "Lock Em and Shock Em" faction on city council don't get is this: Ken Williams, Lynn Jahnke and others who express alarm over Death on the Streets are not in hubris against the fact of human mortality. What they are saying is that when folks are just really old, aged, and run down to the point they are required to reflect upon mortality hopefully at the least, at that stage of life, people can feel connected to society and civilization and not excluded and made renegade from the social (ie. built) environment. And perhaps, thanks to folks like Isabelle, Ken, and Dr J, Benis did feel at least some of the connection and the compassion and some quantum of hope.
Geof_Bard (anonymous profile)
May 6, 2011 at 6:24 p.m. (Suggest removal)