This I Believe

A Man I Did Not Know

When a street person like Jimmy dies, the saddest thing to see and accept is that there are no family members to mourn him, that like so many others abandoned in life, he has to meet death in the same isolation. I, along with other shelter volunteers, attended his wake service expecting to share only our stories of him. We would laugh as we recalled his storytelling and cry as we said goodbye to a friend we’d come to love, in spite of his frequent binges and absences due to alcoholism.

What we found, instead, was a family who knew him as Judson. They had read the obituary notice in the newspaper and came to see the man they hadn’t heard from in twenty-two years.

The service began with prayer and scripture, which led to the introduction of a man called Jimmy and a man called Judson.

Jimmy was a street person who’d spent many years at various shelters for the poor, as the cook who could make a grand meal out of next to nothing. He catered to children by saving them donuts, to those coming in late from jobs by keeping meals warm, and to hard-core alcoholics by finding an AA group just for them. When Jimmy would become agitated, I knew that he’d soon be gone on another binge.

Judson was a husband, a father of daughters, a grandfather; a man who had left his family long ago when the drinking got out of control; a man who had never contacted his family in all those years, yet knew everything they did. When I met his daughters, it seemed as though I already knew them, because Jimmy had talked so much about each one and the times he’d traveled from Nebraska to California to visit them.

As Jimmy/Judson lay in his coffin, I cried tears of regret for him, and for his family who had actually lived a short distance from here; tears of guilt for his friendship and love of us that rightfully belonged to his family. I shared his daughters’ tears of anger at a father’s deceit. Then I cried tears of hope for a man who had tried to help me understand my own alcoholic father, tears that might begin some healing and forgiveness within us all.

Each of us left the wake service that night having met a man we did not know, and we all came to the funeral the next day to mourn and to comfort each other.

There are many homeless in our city who die like Jimmy, after having wandered through alcoholic binges, in and out of shelters, making and breaking family ties. They all had homes at one time, having left for reasons unknown perhaps even to them. Some are loved and some are rejected in this life, but this I believe, that Jimmy/Judson, and others like him, have finally found a home they will not have to leave.