I’ve been thinking about isolation.
Hi, I’m Rick Thyne and I’m grateful that you found your way to these pages. Perhaps in these conversations we’ll find our way to more of the common good that is - for me - our best hope for a future in which all of us thrive. If you've found this column and would like to get my latest column delivered, free, to your inbox every two weeks, you can subscribe at the bottom of this page.
I’ve been thinking about the first time the calamity of being poor, elderly, and alone slammed into me like a runaway train. I read in a newspaper article in 1995 that a summer heat wave in Chicago took the lives of 739 people, most of them elderly and living alone. I was stunned. What possible sane explanation could there be for such a tragedy? How could so many people go unattended until their bodies were discovered?
These deaths were very different from my mother’s a few years later, though she too was elderly and lived alone. Where I live in Pasadena, California, the same disparities exist that distinguished my mother’s death from those who died in the Chicago heat.
Although she grew up poor and worked her whole life, my mother always leaned in to her love of beautiful things - one week, when she was about to retire, she came home with an alligator handbag. The next week, she brought home a pair of matching shoes.
After our father died when she was sixty-two, Mom worked until she was seventy, then retired to help us raise her grandchildren. She spent her final seven years in a bi-coastal romantic fling with a retired New York City chef, an older Frenchman with glasses as thick as his accent, who reminded us of the animated character, Mr. Magoo. Having long since exhausted her savings, her only income through her final fifteen years was her monthly Social Security check and what my three sisters, their husbands, and Becky and I provided to supplement that small amount. We occasionally covered her monthly rent payment and paid her car insurance until we no longer dared to let her drive. After that, my brother-in-law sent drivers to take her to Gelson's and Neiman Marcus.
My mother’s circumstances differed markedly from those who died in Chicago. Their deaths so gripped the city - as that newspaper story gripped me - that several public and private studies were launched to examine the causes of the tragedy and suggest possible remedies to keep it from happening again. Among the most thoughtful is Eric Klineberg’s book about the disaster, Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago.
These studies describe the Chicago victims not only as poor themselves; most of them lived in neighborhoods rife with poverty. Many of their apartments were dilapidated and lacked functioning air conditioning; many residents were afraid to open their windows in the summer heat for fear of neighborhood crime. In contrast, Mom lived in a small but comfortable one-bedroom Hollywood apartment; her children and grandchildren visited often, usually bringing a bag of groceries, libations, flowers, or some girly gift one of my sisters found in a boutique. The Chicagoans lived in food deserts where healthy groceries were too expensive or unavailable. Restaurants were well beyond their means. They couldn’t afford private doctors, and public health services were inadequate and often too complex to navigate. When Mom was eighty-two she had surgery, the first time she’d been in a hospital since our youngest sister’s birth nearly forty years earlier. Through our connections, we got her admitted to Cedars Sinai Hospital.
A 101-year-old woman gets help after being overcome by the heat Aug. 13, 1995, after an electrical fire knocked out power in her apartment building. (Walter Kale, Chicago Tribune) Read More
Our brother died too young, when Mom was in her mid-seventies, which prompted my sisters to call her every day to talk her through her grief. Their daily calls and regular visits continued for the rest of her life. If I missed my weekly call (I was not as faithful as my sisters), when I finally called she’d answer, Oh, there you are! as if she’d been waiting forlornly beside her phone since my last call. As she recovered from her surgery, our three by-then adult children clustered on her queen-size bed to listen to stories they’d heard dozens of times, cuddled against her like pups engorging mother’s milk. When she died two years later, she was surrounded by love; at her memorial service we lauded her with gratitude for the life she lived that even now, twenty-five years later, provides so much nurture and moral guidance to each of us.
The Chicago elderly died alone. Many were from families too poor to help them, or they had no family, or had been abandoned by their families. Poor health and a dangerous outside world made it difficult or impossible to access community resources that might have sustained them: social service agencies, congregations, neighborhood organizations. When they died, most of these mothers and brothers and sisters and fathers were buried in a common grave because no relative or friend could be found to identify and claim them, or what family they had could not afford the cost of a private gravesite. This breakdown of supportive community left them alone and bereft at the end.
The mass burial of 68 unclaimed bodies, including 41 people who died in the heat wave according to officials, in Homewood on Aug. 25, 1995. (John Smierciak, Chicago Tribune)
When I think about my mother’s final years, these inequities tug my thoughts beyond my lingering sadness at losing her toward poor, elderly people who continue to suffer alone. Since her death, frustrated rage has become a constant if muffled companion to my sadness. How dare we allow this ongoing injustice? What discomfort are we willing to endure to change it?
Surely my response to this injustice is influenced by living (as I do) in an affluent neighborhood far from those sections of town where poor people live; by the local leaders and propositions I vote for; by decisions I and these community leaders make regarding property values and low-income housing; by where in Pasadena I choose to spend my money.
Los Angeles property values are doing just fine - for those who already own homes - and rates seem likely to continue rising.
Like most of my friends, I’ve spent a lifetime supporting programs of social service, responding to whomever needs groceries, or an air conditioning repairman, or a phone call. But against the injustices loosed upon the poor in Pasadena, like those suffered by the poor in Chicago, social services are not equal to the task.
It’s one thing to support charities or sit on the board of nonprofits, and certainly they do important work. But it’s more difficult and personally more costly to be an active and outspoken supporter of social reforms that require the transformation of the economic and political structures that perpetuate injustice.
Victims of the 1995 heat wave were buried in a mass grave at the Homewood Memorial Cemetery in Homewood on Aug. 25, 1995. Of 68 unclaimed bodies, 41 died of heat-related causes. (John Smierciak, Chicago Tribune)
Which of my neighbors would join me and which would resist supporting policies and programs that might raise our taxes or compromise our property values to fund necessary structural changes? What would it mean to challenge community leaders who consistently defend the status quo? What would happen if I bore witness on behalf of Pasadena’s elderly poor with the same passion with which I supported my aging mother?
If I and enough of my friends and neighbors risk it, will it make a difference? Or are the structures of injustice so tenacious that we’re bound to experience another Chicago-like disaster, and another, and another? What level of human tragedy will it take to make us change things?
That's just what I've been thinking - what do you think we need to do?
Blessings,
– Rick