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Susan’s isn’t the usual story of the unhoused — but there is plenty of hard luck to it, just the same
Published Jan 02, 2024 • 4 minute read
Susan and her kitten Meech outside the HOPE Mission in Edmonton. Photo by Jackie Carmichael /Postmedia
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Clean, new socks. Long underwear. The clear bags are full of items of good will towards men and women. The volunteers rewarded by warm, surprised “Thank you’s!” from Edmontonians living rough in the vicinity of Hope Mission’s Herb Jamieson Centre.
The slight woman in the hooded jacket spies a pair of hand-knit mittens. She’s grateful for the extra layer, even though it’s an unseasonably warm -2 degrees.
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Her next stop is for a cup of coffee from the volunteers. It warms her hands — like yet another layer.
Susan’s isn’t the usual story of the unhoused — but there is plenty of hard luck to it, just the same.
She’s 66.
She holds an MBA from an Ontario university.
And she found herself newly unhoused on the eve of New Year’s eve.
Susan and her partner recently came to Edmonton from Vancouver in expectation of a heavy equipment operator job for him. He found himself sitting around, waiting for work, she said.
Their savings ran out; they couldn’t afford to stay in the hotel.
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The couples’ shelter at the Hope Mission, at 99 Street and 106 Avenue, where the staff were great, is less than ideal, she said.
They sleep in a larger room, not side-by-side but head-to-head.
Living close to the street leaves them feeling like second-class citizens sometimes, but that pales in comparison to a past Susan can’t forget.
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“It blew my mind”
“My son took his life, and it blew my mind,” said Susan, who admits she can’t remember a lot of things.
She hasn’t worked for 17 years.
She wishes now that her family would have understood that her son wasn’t bound for hell.
And that his death wasn’t her fault.
But mostly — with 20-20 hindsight — she knows she should have had some good counselling, back when it all went to hell in a handbasket.
“I didn’t get the care I needed when my son died … It shattered me.”
That, she said, is how she got here, the street.
Susan started life with many advantages, hailing from an educated family in Toronto — a family she no longer is in touch with.
One final blow made a deep rift between them — more like a chasm.
“I became a drug addict,” she recalls, brown eyes misty as she looks out across the street corner, where volunteers and unhoused persons mill about, and a tiny black kitten is getting rapturous attention — a soft distraction on a characteristically difficult morning.
Meech outside the Hope Mission in Edmonton Photo by Jackie Carmichael/Postmedia /edm
The smallest encampment evacuee of the morning, Meech is a glossy black shorthair. When it’s owner was admitted to Hope Mission, she had to choose between a place to sleep and keeping the pet. One encampment resident offered to take Meech into his tent on the corner.
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“But now he’s got to move, and kitty’s going to be displaced,” said a volunteer, mastering understatement as she hoisted Meech in gloved hands, asking if other volunteers “need” a cat.
Surely somebody will take the adorable Meech in. “It’s kind of sad,” concludes the volunteer.
Instantly addicted
Susan continues, chronicling her path to here, recognizing her psychic pain went unaddressed until she was promised 15 minutes of pain relief.
She grasped the straw, quite literally.
“The person that introduced me to cocaine told me it would make my pain go away. I was instantly addicted, at 59, and it really destroyed my life,” she said.
“That’s the real reason my family don’t want to have anything to do with me.”
Now, she said, she’s clean.
But she sees those living rough in cobbled-together tents across from the mission, dismantled calmly but surely over a single morning on Saturday, part of a larger strategy to address the highest risk homeless encampments.
The dismantling of the encampment may be as temporary as the shambles of mismatched tents pulled together over aging and repurposed grocery carts.
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By New Year’s Day, another unhoused person will stake their claim at the corner, once again.
The things that led to that unhoused state have stakes that are driven far deeper into the street.
Susan sees those who have clearly been living rough a long time.
And she sees what she has in common with them.
“That’s the hardest for me to look at,” she said, noting a man without a shirt on in minus-degrees weather, and a woman who brings him long underwear from the volunteers.
“They hit the bottle, or something happened … nobody here wants to do drugs. If they’re addicted, it’s an illness.
“All these people are suffering from emotional losses. Their hearts are broken,” she said, clutching her cooling coffee cup even closer .
After a night of sleeping head-to-head with her partner in a shelter, she also sees the enticing appeal of the encampment.
“It’s warm in those tents. (Vermin) live in them, people live in them. But it’s warm inside,” she said, pushing a wisp of long silver hair back under her black hood, drifting away from the crowded corner.
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