deeply saddened, but not surprised HL. and knowing you as I do, I know it tore, it tears, at you. for someone who gives so much as you do, it's another pain to bear when someone dies such as this. we don't know if her own poor choices brought her to this, or if she was mentally handicapped in a way that her own choices couldn't resolve what were good choices. I know you make a difference in your corner of the world, perhaps a little more civic vigilance might help those in need in the community. best wishes.

Your title lured me here.

Your sentient. Human.

Your a human Being.
Love your daughter.
No sleep on DC grate.

Thanks for being you.
CEO remind me of a`
`
SARS ill`epidemic.
CEO sleep in tutu.
They croak one day.

No hoard stolen loot.
Teach benevolence.
No stuff pocket with:
dessert ice cream, pie,
nor steal KKC pepper.
CEO's steal anything.
When they gasp? Oy!
`
What a pleasant post.
Take spouse to bed.
Go under mistletoe.
Love who you with.
Be so very grateful.

Thanks, bbd. In this case, I don't know that vigilance would have helped. She had tucked herself out of the wind and therefore out of sight of anyone driving by or even walking on the park sidewalks. It just seems that no matter how much we do, there's always so much more we don't manage to get done.

An Art James poem! Thank you.

Civic vigilance Barry? Sorry.. finding myself frustrated and angry here after reading.

HL, Suzi, you sweet soul, crying now for this young woman. For her mother and father and others related or that she knew. To die that way and on Christmas, cold and alone. Also crying for you, or.. more accurately I'm sure, with you.
I'm sorry. That's all I can say right now.

So sad yet happening all around us you did right by her sharing her story with us. Even if we can't help everyone we can help those we see. I pray with you she was to drunk to realize what was happening to her.

So true.

Winter is the most dangerous time for those people on the street, especially those who are drunk.

Years ago when I was in India someone who was showing me around was apologetic about the people living on the street. I said we had homeless people in Canada - and it was cold here. Cold this guy could hardly imagine - cold like in the (rare) fridges and freezers. People here died from being homeless on the streets. He found it hard to believe... I find it hard to believe myself.

~nodding~ Yep, what a world!! :(

Rated!

Sigh...just so sad.

Trig, thank you. I don't have any right to claim this as my personal tragedy, but it diminishes an entire community.

Thank you, lunchlady. You are still in my prayers.

Tai, thanks to you as well.

Myriad, the transients go to Arizona for the winter, but the tribal members stay here. We aren't so far north, but we're high and the nights are bitterly cold, even though this has been a very warm, dry winter so far.

Tink, "yep" is as good as anything I have to say.

Smithery, yes, sad and unnecessary, but human nature being what it is, it's probably inevitable.

Sad and well told. It's such a shame that stories like this can be written and that there are many more that are overlooked and unnoticed.

And the saddest thing of all is that what can and could have been prevented will still go on.

R♥

It seem that this lady was another one for whom there was "no room at the inn."

There are so many thing that go on that we don't know about, sometimes in our own towns. A few years ago I was with a group of volunteers holding mobile medical clinics at migrant labor camps. One camp was located just a few miles from where I live. While there, I saw at a distance a young fellow who looked like he had an unusual smile on his face.

When I got closer I saw that he didn't have an unusual smile after all. He had a cleft palate, a condition that here would have been corrected in infancy. But he came from a poor area of Mexico, and there was no surgery available. I thought about what it must be like to go through life with that. Most of the migrant workers rarely came into town, especially the single men, so he was largely unnoticed by those of us who are permanent residents.

One Christmas a number of years ago Garrison Keeler read "the Little Match Girl" on air. I was driving to work and sat in the parking lot until the story was over. It was sometime before I could compose myself enough to go into the warm Hospital where I worked.
This is a very apt story for the season. Somehow, there are hopeless people every season who succumb to their despair. R

jlsathre and fusun, thank you for sharing the burden.

Mishima, yes and no. Very concerted attempts have been made here to prevent such deaths and provide safety and warmth for everyone who needs it. People still opt out, either because they want to continue behaving in ways that are prohibited by the shelter because of safety concerns, or because they are simply too impaired to know they need to go. There is a patrol every night that looks in all the hangouts, but we'll never be able to look under every bush and behind every building, and those who don't want to be found simply come back in behind the patrol. Alcoholism wins nearly every time.

Rodney, yes. That story always touches me, and there will always be people who can't go on, for far too many reasons.

This is such a shame. When I hear stories of people dying on the street, I always wonder why no one misses them. I imagine that at some point, this woman was loved. She was once someone's precious baby. How could she end up alone? I'm not naive enough to not understand the consequences of alcoholism, but still...no one should die unnoticed.

You are such a good person, Suzi. I hope that you and your family do not feel guilty for having had an abundant Christmas while this woman had nothing. We can never be poor enough ourselves that we make others rich because of it. We can never be sick enough ourselves to make others well from it. I guess I'm just trying to say that you're not wrong for being blessed. Hopefully that woman is now in a much better place. Thanks for giving her a voice here.

You make me laugh with your cheesy garland, then weep with frustration and regret for one more frozen soul. Poor dear.

I heard that death from hypothermia is preceded by a deep sleep, that she wouldn't have woken. I hope to die in my sleep when I go.

My cat left home and found a secluded place to die when her time came. Maybe there is some solace in the natural world?

Maybe I am searching for ways to absolve, maybe that is worse.

We recently had a story in the news of a man who died of hypothermia while trying to warm himself on a grate in the sidewalk in Burlington. And I thought to myself, "sure, they're reducing the amount of funding to our Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which means there may be a lot of people who won't be able to heat their homes. Those bastards in Congress are going to let the unemployment benefits expire, which probably means that more families will be taking to the streets because they have no where else to go. And we call ourselves the greatest nation?"

The real problem, HL, is you can't save everyone and if you fail to save ONE it eats you up. That's what caring about your fellow humans is all about, after all. Not rejoicing in those you've helped, but agonizing over the ones you couldn't.

We've gone from a communal society, where everyone knew their neighbors, to an insular one where we feel we need to mind our own business. I don't see how, as a society, we can call that progress.

Best to you, as I take comfort in the knowledge that you do what you can for those you can reach. It makes me feel better, knowing there are folks like you still around.

Nothing I can add to what's been said. So very sad indeed. Rated.

HL, Was here earlier and rated this but didn't leave a word. I was thinking ... thinking about these stories. Myriad is right, here in the big cities (small ones too) people live and sleep outside and sometimes freeze to death. The hardest story was one I read a few years back. On one of the coldest nights of the year an infant was abandoned outside Toronto City Hall. Thankfully she was found and survived. That story has stayed with me. Talk about a tough beginning...

A terrible percentage of the chronically homeless are alcoholics. It's a problem for them and for the society we are all a part of. There aren't any fixes that always work for every alcoholic. I'm very sad that the woman was an alcoholic, that she had no one to care for her, care about her, and that she died. I wish something someone or some group had done would have saved her, but I have to say: we don't know that a few people or perhaps many people didn't try. It's a tragic ending, no matter what preceded it.

Sometimes there's simply nothing to say. It's almost impossible to think about anyone's life coming to this kind of tragic ending. You can't help but wonder what circumstances in life brought her there. You wonder if there was a time when she was a happy little girl like your daughter, full of spirit and promise and loved by her family. I don't know if everything really does happen for a reason but when I hear stories like this - and I've heard lots of them over the years, I'm sure we all have - you have to wonder, what kind of reason could possibly suffice.

You describe a world without a future. Soon, we'll all be that woman. Nobody wins unless everybody wins.

I understand your feelings about those who have not a dry, warm place to sleep, and our middle class lives, free of the kind of worry, heartache and physical danger you talk about. As humanitarians, we can do only what stretches us to our limits. We cannot fix every issue of the pathetically suffering, even if we were possessed of super powers. What we can do is help those in our immediate vicinity, teaching our children and students the nature of
compassion and reason, blending the two and helping all we are able to touch.

We humans know that we are our brothers' keepers; we know that everyone is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. We want and cherish this responsibility, and suffer the more in an era of seven billion lives interconnected through media and technology on a very small planet.

Thank you for writing about the incongruity of two very different Christmases, and for offering therapeutic cognitive dissonance as we go about our mostly-secure lives. What would Jesus do? Or Buddha? Or Jim Wallis? What should we do?

"What a world in which a woman can freeze to death in a public park and no one notices until it's too late."
or maybe its such a free country that people are free to die on their own if they seem to choose to [intentionally or unintentionally]

This is incredibly touching. The contrasts, the way you wrote it. Hard to read, but gift in and of itself. Thank you.

Glad I read through the other comments before posting.

I agree wholeheartedly with what Bill S. said.

r/

Makes you wonder what her last thoughts were. Even if she was befuddled by the booze, she must have been thinking of something or someone she valued. That makes HER of value and worthy of being mourned if only by us.

Thank you for acknowleding that fact and acknowleging HER, HL.

You've written about a reality no television show could, or would, tackle. The invisible ones, hiding and freezing, really painfully expose the wrongful direction of our attentions all year round, not just during the winter holidays.

Thanks tr ig and Tink for sending me here. This is
important.

Awful/Incredible. One person matters.
r.

I had a friend/mentor named Ruth who gave me this advice: "all you can do is all you can do." I know that sounds like a cop out unless one considers the fact that Ruth was quite well to do, she was a psychologist and her husband a dentist. She died when a blood vessel broke in her head. She didn't die immediately, in fact, she drove herself to the hospital ER. While it is tempting to wallow in our middle-class guilt, I fear that at times the sad truth is that all we can do is all we can do.

Perhaps we need to change the question: rather than asking why people freeze to death alone in a park, a more helpful question might be "am I doing all I can do in my little corner of the world?"

This was an excellent thought provoking post. It certainly hit a chord with me. It also reminded me of the post I wrote last June.
http://open.salon.com/blog/i_love_life/2011/06/29/celebrating_and_suffering_in_one_day
Thank you for the reminder.

What a world. Indeed. And @ Bill S., since I don't get the paper or watch television, I hadn't heard about the guy freezing to death in Burlington. One of my worst memories of an office I worked at for years, on Maple Street, was that we had a side exit onto an alley, next to the coffee machine space. There were concrete steps down to the alley, and a homeless man slept under them for months. He never did a thing to harm us, but one day the upper-middle-class owners of the office decided to install a grate over the back of the stairs, so the guy couldn't sleep there anymore. Personally, despite the good bits that do exist (like High Lonesome), I think this world sucks.

Wow, you all were busy while I was sleeping. I'm going to try to respond on in order, and no doubt will skip someone because OS doesn't make this easy, so thank you, everyone.

Diana, in this case it's possible no one missed her because she's chosen to disassociate herself from her family and spend her life with (loosely speaking) a group of people who are no better off than she.

Lisa, you've alluded to a balance that's so hard to find and maintain: How much do I keep to use and how much do I give away, knowing that I probably have a better idea what will help (if only because I have a little better perspective), but that people who have been dealt a very poor hand by genetics and society deserve to have choices too. (I didn't state that very clearly; I'm not quite awake yet.)

Bill S., it's so true that our government has poked big holes in the safety net, and has both increased the burden on private-sector agencies and decreased their sources of funding. As the recession has dragged on, everyone's budget is stretched ever thinner.

Painting the Stars, thank you.

Scarlet, what a horrifying near-miss! Years ago, when we lived in Gallup, NM, a woman died in an alley and her two toddlers were found sitting by her body, waiting for her to wake up. That story still haunts me. You have also raised an interesting issue: We are still appalled at the circumstances of children but we've grown accustomed to losing adults.

Candace, that's true — we don't know how many people tried to help, or in this case, I should say, I know that many people have, if not her specifically at least the at-risk group to which she belongs. What I should have stated more clearly is that I know no one saw her that night, because she would have been taken to the shelter, to the hospital or possibly to the jail if no other warm place was available. It is nearly impossible to save those who do not participate in their own rescue. Whatever led up to her death, she died alone.

Margaret (and Lisa, above), I hope that she was, at least as a child, greatly loved by someone. Unfortunately, genetics and the lack of jobs on the rez play a huge role in this.

Harry, amen.

Gary, that's a hard lesson to learn. I know we can only do so much; I know our resources are limited, and yet it's very difficult for me to concede that no one (aside, perhaps, from the victim) could have prevented this. We keep trying, even though we know we'll only be partially successful.

Cindy, that's a hard question and I really don't know the answer. Jesus often imparted healing and then instructions, Buddha tried to teach a better way, and Jim Wallis would do much the same things that have been done here — a combination of both. When Jesus said, "The poor will always be with you," this may be what he meant: We can't save them all, which is no excuse for not trying.

vzn, people will always have that freedom. They should have other choices as well.

Mary and V.Corso, thank you for reading and for hearing.

Amy, I do wonder.

Linnnn, our attentions do seem to be directed incorrectly, don't they?

Jonathan, yes. Each person does. Some just matter more, I'm afraid.

John, what a wonderful motto: All we can do is all we can do. We just have to keep asking ourselves if what we're doing really is all we can or should.

There are so many truths here, in your post and in these thoughtful comments. Another truth is that life is not fair. Acceptance of this reality might be one of the hardest things, after acceptance of our inevitable deaths.

Homelessness is complex issue with many factors, even though it tends to be generalized. Not every homeless person is a doomed human. Stories of those who re-enter society are few in the media, and I'm not sure why.

One of my most memorable students was a 51 year old homeless man, who took six years to go through a four year academic program, homeless for five of the six years. I asked him once what made him apply to college while homeless, and he replied that since his entire life was already being lived upside down, he could handle a little more chaos. He received total financial aid for his tuition, faculty and students funneled him art supplies, and he maintained a B average. He's an art teacher now in the Boston public school system. When you mourn the lady who froze, maybe you can also think about those who dig out. While they don't erase her or her experience, they offer hope.

I always take comfort that Jesus told us pointedly: the poor will always be with you and said, so go out and help them; You're not going to solve the problem but you can give them a coat or visit them in prison. So this is ageless and an archetype. I'm sorry for her.

The photo of your daughter is precious. What a pretty girl, and what a cozy holiday backdrop for such a tragic story. Rated, of course.

greenheron, what a good reminder! I wish I had more of those stories to tell.

Deborah Y, so true. The problem will never completely go away, and I hope it never stops hurting either.

Deborah M-W, thank you. I've got great kids and a comfortable home, and I'm mindful of my tremendous good fortune.

Beautiful, poignant post - excellent, insightful comments. OS at its very best!

I wrote something similar last year; I think I titled it "Who Can Stand Against This Cold?" I live in a very small town, and a man known to many froze to death on a bench pretty much right in the middle of town. Yes, alcoholism played a part. He froze sitting upright, so of course the creepy part was: how long until someone noticed he wasn't moving?
I really believe that churches (sorry to burden you further, i know you work hard!) need to keep their doors open to the needy especially in the bleak midwinter, and that we have to have a policy of "no judgement" in helping those in need. Obviously, "no weapons" is a sanity clause in terms of offering shelter, and people should leave the booze and drugs outside. But many shelters deny access to people who are intoxicated...which is passing judegement on those most in need.
I can't speculate on whether your person or my person died peacefully. I can say they both died needlessly.

There is an old man who makes a tent at night in a corner near my school. I've seen him dismantle the odd bits and pieces into his carry bags around 7:30, before the shop opens, but I often pass around 7:15 and he is still sleeping. It's been -15C here for 10 days. Mandarin oranges are in season and everywhere, so I've been leaving small bags of fruit and all my change left over from the day before a few mornings a week. Just drop it near the edge of his tent and walk on, he has no idea, but I feel better going to school at least given someone a small breakfast. Small acts add up.

You bring reality crashing and side winding into the recent past of pretty lights, lovely food and comfort. Comfort. Who does comfort belong to? Not everyone? Only some? Why? WHY.

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♥╚═══╝╚╝╚╝╚═══╩═══╝─╚Keep on keeping on.