Bob. That was what she preferred to be called. Amy was the person from before her head injury, before she fell down the stairs and lost part of her brain and skull. Bob couldn’t relate to that person anymore.

I first met Bob through the Reentry program at the jail. I was doing housing assessments with folks that were homeless prior to incarceration, seeing what they were eligible for, and trying to get them connected to the housing system. Bob had worked with us before, but she didn’t remember. Due to her brain injury, she had almost no short term memory. Every time I talked with her, she would apologize for not remembering, for maybe telling me things she had already told me before. I would assure her that it was fine, would tell her what we had previously discussed, and ask her if she had any updates or changes to her situation since we last talked. She couldn’t remember. She struggled to track time. Years and months seemed like months and weeks to her. She just didn’t know.

It’s at this point in her story that people usually ask me why she wasn’t in a care facility, an adult family home. I don’t know. I don’t have the answer to that. I suspect that it had a lot to do with how she coped with her inability to remember – she drank. What she did remember is that vodka made her feel less sad about her situation, numbed her to all that she had lost. That before Bob, there was an Amy who had a much different life.

I didn’t know Amy. I met Bob years after her injury. I never did find out how many years, as her perception of it varied every time I spoke with her. Bob had been experiencing homelessness for a while. She slept in local parks. She drank, often sharing her bottle with those nearby, usually as a bid to keep herself safe. Much of the time it worked. Sometimes it didn’t. She would wake up with injuries and not know how she got them. Sometimes they were from her seizures – her head injury also resulted in a seizure disorder, and she frequently woke up in the hospital unsure of how she got there; usually it was because a good Samaritan found her unconscious and called an ambulance. But sometimes, they weren’t. She tried not to think about those injuries – her black eye, her missing tooth. Although she couldn’t quite remember, you could tell that she sensed those injures weren’t the same.

When she wasn’t in the hospital or in jail, it was hard to keep track of her. She wouldn’t remember to contact anyone, couldn’t remember that we were trying to work with her to get her into housing. The assessments we conduct are designed to gauge vulnerability. As I often tell people when explaining our work, vulnerability is, in a nutshell, how likely someone is to die living on the streets. It’s a brutal way of putting it, but also true. Homelessness can be brutal.

Bob was one of the most vulnerable clients I ever worked with. She was referred to a housing program in late 2020, but for various reasons, she never made it inside. Paperwork, inspections, red tape, documentation, federal requirements, finding her, keeping track of her… all of these were contributing factors. For Bob, it was all ultimately too much. She was found deceased yesterday in one of the many parks that she frequents. It took too long.

We need to continue to break down the barriers to housing for the most vulnerable among us. Communicate. Work together as a community. Find ways to cut through the tape. Advocate for person over paperwork, at local, state and federal levels. Move faster. Because time is a luxury that people like Bob just don’t have.