How We Fade

A poem born from a struggling client, a dead bird, and the confluence of varying roles making meaning of a life

I wrote the poem you will find below in cold, dark February. For 2.5 years now, I have been working in case management as a direct service provider to clients experiencing homelessness, SUD’s, and mental health diagnoses. The particular client base I work with currently consists of individuals who suffer from severe mental illness. These clients are being discharged from Eastern State Psychiatric Hospital and most would end up on the street had it not been for a program created early in Jay Inslee’s tenure as governor to provide supportive housing services to these individuals. The program is called GOSH and you can learn more about it HERE if you’re interested!

The level of need my clients have ranges. But a fair amount live in a reality largely disassociated from ours. The below poem highlights an experience I had with an older woman I work with. She had decided to leave her apartment and live on the street in the freezing cold. Sleeping in bushes, lingering at the bus station during the day. Spokane Police Department’s BHU and I coordinated to take her to the hospital and now she is likely heading back to Eastern State, where last time, she spent over a year.

This poem tries to capture the swirl of feelings I can find myself in from this work. Some of you may know that I am also a pastor at a spiritual community passionate about integrating person with place — an eco-based spirituality. The way I am wired, I can’t help but try and make confluence of the varying occupations and roles in my life (in my own time, of course; I keep the pastor role and case manager role very separate). This confluence is explored here via dead birds, hospitalized clients, and wondering what becomes of us as we slip from our categorical self into the themes beyond. That eco-spirituality cant help but surface in its own way here.

I hope the poem serves as a reminder of the connectedness we share with any stranger, the uncertainty of being here, but the persistent beauty all the same.

How We Fade

At the corner of my street
in front of the blind man’s house
is a dead quail.

It’s been there now for nearly a month
I don’t feel like I can be the one to move it
but he cannot see
and it is cold
there is no smell
no other signifier to alert of the death inhabiting his space. 

I visited a client on the psych hold floor of the hospital
she was not alive in her way
her laughter was washed 
gone by way of medication she had resisted for months
having been forcibly injected since she arrived.
You’d know this laugh if you heard it even only once
piercing and witchy
disembodiment born from embodied joy.
Now the slightly heavyset 70 year old woman 
who ends every interaction we have by saying, “god bless you, dear”
has a shroud of numb that cloaks her
along with those brutal blue clothes
constructed so that the wearer can not make a noose from them. 
There are no windows in the room
no color
fluorescent light illuminating beige walls.
A gurney bed, not even a hospital one, her only furniture. 
A television encased in a see-through, break-resistant container on the wall
making it clear that there will be no breaking to find means to kill
making it clear that she’s a problem.
She’d rather die outside, she tells me.
I placed the call to get her here.

“You’re not getting out,” the nurse jokes with me as I leave my clients room
she is withholding the keycard needed to exit the ward.
She ends her joke, scans the card, and I head back to the cold but alive air
The place my client would rather lay dying.
Somewhere and in some way her laughter is still wafting and living in the breeze out here
I want to believe that at least magic like that can exist.

I walk the dog by the dead quail for what may be the 47th time
I say hi to the blind man as he stands on his porch
and he says hi, looking slightly the wrong direction.
Returning from the walk, I see the quail again 
its body lay in an unfortunate spot on the sidewalk, 
so close to the curb
another couple inches and it would have been lain to rest on the dirt road
on earth rather than the sterility of the concrete pavement
a surface yielding easier fading 
from one to another.

I often wonder
where I will fade away
both physically and emotionally.
What will be the landscape or setting that sees my last appreciation imparted
What will be the last space I see?
Where will my body go when I don’t do the “going” any longer?