I Lost a Friend To Poverty
Her name was Lori
I found out I lost a friend to poverty yesterday.
She wasn’t actually a friend but she was more than an acquaintance. We had a shared history of homelessness. What do you call those people? The ones that can relate to you even though you barely know each other?
She didn’t die on the street.
She had recently started to rebuild her life. She became housed with the help of a program after living in shelters, sleeping on park benches, being jailed and held in psych wards for two years.
Her name was Lori. You can read her story here.
We met on Facebook in 2013.
Her life was on the verge of collapse. Mine was already in despair.
I was homeless at the time and had been traveling the country on what I called “Robin’s Road Trip to Freedom” - a nine month road trip from Virginia to California that I documented on a Facebook group page. I’d post where I was headed and ask if anyone wanted to host me. Over the nine months, I traveled to nearly every state and stayed with countless “strangers” who graciously opened their homes to me. I have friends from the road trip that I still connect with to this day. While it was harsh, it was a genuinely beautiful and human experience. I even wrote a really terrible self-published book about it.
You couldn’t pay me to do that in 2023.
I wanted to be a writer. Lori was a writer.
She was a talented journalist before her spiral into homelessness.
This is one of my favorite pieces she wrote: I Escaped the Trauma of Homelessness - Only to Face Your White Savior Complex.
When I made my way to Oregon, she invited me to meet for coffee. She couldn’t offer me a place to stay as she only lived in a small carpentry shed on property that her late mother owned.
Neither of us knew that in the months ahead, I’d meet my future wife or, that she’d be sleeping on a park bench.
Capitalism can burn.
We kept in touch when we had the capacity.
Homelessness takes up so much damn energy, even after you become housed. The trauma doesn’t simply stop. That’s one of the numerous reasons why my marriage ended. I needed to recover - I wasn’t ready to be wife.
As for Lori, she struggled on the streets for two years before she found support from a housing program. One of the people there also helped her find her way back to an acclaimed and highly respected career in journalism.
She did it. She made her way out.
Or, that’s how it appeared from the outside. But, no. I remember the look in her eyes that day in the coffee shop. She was weary, desperate and broken.
People don’t understand what that does to the heart.
People don’t understand what that does to the spirit.
People don’t understand what that does to the body.
It wears you down and leaves you vulnerable.
My mother died at 49. Her death certificate says pneumonia. However, I have no doubt that a lifetime of financial stress and housing insecurity helped to end her life early.
The chronic stress that Black women face is deadly.
Lori died from ovarian cancer. She was 57. SHE WAS 57.
With every bit of my own impoverished being, I believe that her experience with poverty left her susceptible to illness.
FUCK POVERTY.
All that to say, she made it out but at what cost?
I am sad at how hard she struggled only for her story to end that way.
I am enraged at how complacent this country is when it comes to homelessness.
I am terrified for my own physical health from decades of trauma.
Poverty is not a failure of the individual. Please understand that it is systemic and on purpose. The systems aren’t broken - they work perfectly as planned.
Burn all this shit down.
Lori, I hope you are at peace. I hope you are home.
I’ll continue to scream at the world to ‘do better’ by us for as long as I can.
I'm sorry you lost your friend, and especially that her death was more or less a direct result of poverty. If she'd been able to hold a job, she would have had health insurance, which meant her cancer may have been diagnosed earlier. But when you live on the streets, doctors don't give a shit about anything but getting you out of their emergency room.
I think my mother could have lived another 10+ years if she'd had access to good healthcare. Her health downward spiral began with an untreated dental infection that went systemic and damaged the valves of her heart. She was in the hospital, on strong IV antibiotics, for days. The traumas of her life, and the poverty she and my brothers and I endured, took their toll on her, and I know if she'd had access to appropriate care (including mental health care) while she was living in poverty, she'd probably still be alive today.
I remember where I came from, and I know that one stroke of bad luck could tear my life apart and leave me on the streets. I'll stand right next to you screaming at the powers that be to do better by our country's most vulnerable people.
Dang. I should have known from the title that this will hurt, but I didn't expect it to hurt this much. I firmly believe that stress contributes to cancer A LOT (yes, I know a lot of studies say otherwise, but also the coping with stress can be very unhealthy so you are already at the point where you can state that yes, it does), and the stress she had been through... Another person we shouldn't have lots, but because this world suck, she died. I'm so sorry. I wish I had better words or was able to do more.