Search Results for: cancer

Who Benefits from Homeless Relocation Programs?

AP Photo/David Goldman

Sending our problems elsewhere is an American tradition. We sell our recyclables to China. We try to bury our nuclear waste in the Nevada desert. For thirty years, American cities have run “homeless relocation programs,” where taxpayers provide homeless people bus and airplane tickets to move somewhere else.

For The Guardian, a team of researchers named Outside in America spent 18 months examining where exactly these homeless people go, and what happens after they arrive. This 16-city analysis is the first comprehensive investigation into these expensive, contentious programs, intended to see who, if anyone, benefits and how. At the heart of this analysis are the stories of some of the people who took a ticket.

The underlying assumption of the relocation programs, which have names such as “Homeward Bound” and “Family Reunification,” is that returning to a hometown or relative will lead to a process of rehabilitation. But for some, homelessness is driven by domestic conflicts and broken relationships, issues that may be rooted in the places they are returning to.

Last year Fort Lauderdale sent Fran Luciano, 49, back to her native New York to stay with her ex-husband, according to program records. A home health aide who cared for patients with cancer before she ended up homeless, Luciano had been sleeping in bus shelters and at the airport in the Florida city and desperately wanted to leave.

When Fort Lauderdale offered her a bus ticket back to New York, she said her instant reaction was: “Yeah, of course I want to go home.” The city asked for a contact there, and Luciano could only think to provide her ex-husband’s details, although she said she stressed she could not stay with him given their divorce was acrimonious.

When she arrived at the Greyhound station in New York, Luciano sat on her luggage and wondered where to go. For around six months she shuttled between shelters, eventually ending up in the small town of Nanuet, where she spent nights in McDonald’s and was assaulted. She is now back in Fort Lauderdale.

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This is How You Say Goodbye

Photo by Kelly Sikkema

Lillian Slugocki | Longreads | December 2017 | 8 minutes (1,863 words)

 

December 2016.

There is a stain in the shape of a human body on the hardwood floor. This is where he died; this is where the tree — his body — fell and lay for a week. I laid down on top of it, my head where his head lay, my torso and legs with his torso and legs. His blood-stained glasses, upright, in the bathroom sink. A constellation of blood droplets on the walls. A small lock of his hair, blonde and gray, congealed in the shape of a quarter moon. When I lay down on top of this shadow, it was like I was a socket, and the lights were turned back on, briefly. I could feel him, smell him, hear his laugh, his manic charm, his singing voice. It was hard work cleaning the bathroom. I bought bleach and steel wool from the corner bodega. I wore a paper mask and gloves. I reconstructed his final moments in the bathroom; in front of the mirror, getting ready to go out, glasses on, and then the arrhythmia. And like a tree, he fell backwards into the earth.

***

The body is composed of carbon molecules. The heart pumps blood to the brain and keeps us breathing. And we are alive. We are at home. Until the body says, I’m done. Until the body says, Get out, goodbye, it’s over. And we are cast out; the heart stops, the blood pools. Before we are born, inside the womb, the body gathers itself together and moves from a state of chaos to a state of atomic perfection. The exact opposite is true when we die. The body disintegrates, feeds upon itself. But where do we go? This is the central mystery of life. The body, without us, is inanimate. Silent, still. It collapses, like trees that have fallen in the forest. They are just as quiet. They, too, have nothing to say. Their root beds are exposed, vulnerable to the elements. They are also composed of carbon molecules. Nearby a small patch of lilacs is just beginning to bloom, and so it goes.

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Finding My Identity By the Light of My Mother’s Menorah

motimeiri/Getty, Mahmoud Maghraby/EyeEm/Getty

Santi Elijah Holley | Longreads | December 2017 | 10 minutes (2,481 words)

 

Every year it was the same thing. My mother and brother and I would trim the Christmas tree, place our presents underneath, and then gather around the kitchen table to light the menorah. My mother was Jewish, but non-practicing and certainly not Orthodox. She didn’t care much for the faith, either as a religion or a culture, but she’d been raised by two Jewish parents and she wanted to instill in my brother and me some modicum of respect for the tradition. But she also didn’t want to deprive us of Christmas. My mother may not have believed in ancient scripture, but she did believe in family.

On each of the eight nights of Hanukkah, the three of us spun the dreidel and read stories recounting the triumph of the Maccabees and the miracle of the lights. We ate latkes and applesauce and gave each other chocolate gelt, while our Christmas tree blinked in the living room behind us.

Another tradition of ours — at least of mine and my brother’s — was making a mockery of the menorah-lighting blessing. Neither of us spoke Hebrew, but the lighting ceremony involves a nightly recitation of blessings and praise to the Lord. My mother would light the shamash candle, then begin to recite the Hebrew aloud, urging my brother and me to follow along. Rather than mimic these unfamiliar and strange words, we made up our own words, routinely replacing “kidshanu” with “kitty condo,” in tribute to the elaborate piece of furniture frequently occupied by our two cats. My mother glared at us every time and told us to knock it off, though she knew we would do the same thing the next night, and the night after that, and each and every one of the eight nights.

Our menorah was a cheap and simple one. It hadn’t been passed down through generations; it wasn’t forged by a Hasidic blacksmith, nor smuggled through continents and across oceans into the New World. It was plated a gold color, but it didn’t have the heft of solid gold. In all likelihood, my mother bought it at a discount at Kmart during the one and only week they sold Hanukkah items. After the holiday she would put the menorah back in storage, along with the dreidel and books, and we’d then direct our attention exclusively to Christmas. My brother and I knew ours was an atypical holiday tradition, but that knowledge only bound us closer as a family and provided a temporary adhesive to our otherwise fractured family.

My brother, Nathaniel, is eight years older and has a different father. His father is white; mine is black. That makes me two halves — a half-brother and half-black. Since my mother is Jewish, I’m a full-Jew, in accordance with the centuries-old law. (According to another old law, from 19th and early-20th century racial classifications, one drop of African blood makes me full-black, but I’ve never been able to discern which side — the black side or the Jew side — prevails.)

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How We Got There from Here

Michael Stipe and Peter Buck of R.E.M., 1985. (Paul Natkin/Getty Images)

Anna Armstrong | Longreads | December 2017 | 12 minutes (2,903 words)

 

“Jefferson, I think we’re lost.” — Little America, R.E.M.

The distance between Rodeo and Santa Cruz is just over 90 miles. For the most part the drive is unremarkable — urban, industrial cities and rural, unincorporated towns along the Eastshore Freeway, shaping the wasteland east of San Francisco Bay. But then the interstate gives way to Highway 17 and you begin the ascent to another world. The road is a thin, curlicue curved by the green Santa Cruz Mountains.

As a child I made this trip many times with my parents in our wood-paneled station wagon packed tightly with my five siblings and me — my gaze resting out the window, tracking the miles by the three-minute pop songs on the radio while an endless imaginary flat-panel saw tethered to my slight wrist sliced through the redwoods. Our destination? The historic Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk.

The winding highway was a signal that we were close to the magical unworldliness of rickety wooden roller coasters, salty ocean breezes, barefoot children, bikinied girls, sun-kissed boys, a symphony of voices, crashing waves, tinny arcade bells, the smells and tastes of corn dogs and candied apples — and far, far away from the broke-down, shuttered place of stillness, silence, and late-to-bloom fondness in the rearview mirror. What separated Santa Cruz from Rodeo was not just miles but a tangible joy you could hold in your hands. Coming home sunburned, exhausted, happy — sleeping through the curves of the highway, waking abruptly in time to see the straight line to home.

June 1985. I was 17 years old and newly licensed. I was preparing to make the trek from home to Santa Cruz in my very first car, a 1972 Chevy Malibu that braved a Black Flag bumper sticker in a town that just didn’t get it. The destination? A very different type of spectacle: A rock ‘n’ roll show. The Athens, GA band R.E.M were scheduled to play the Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium.

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A Lonely Death: The Extreme Isolation of Japan’s Elderly

Takashimadaira housing complex in Tokyo. (AP Photo/Katsumi Kasahara)

With a population of 127 million, Japan has the most rapidly aging society on the planet. As Norimitsu Onishi reports at The New York Times, elderly individuals often live in extreme isolation, albeit only a few feet from neighbors on all sides, “trapped in a demographic crucible of increasing age and declining births.” Their fate? A “lonely death” where their body may remain undiscovered in their small government apartment for days (or even years) because family is distant both physically and emotionally, and friends have all long since passed away.

The first time it happened, or at least the first time it drew national attention, the corpse of a 69-year-old man living near Mrs. Ito had been lying on the floor for three years, without anyone noticing his absence. His monthly rent and utilities had been withdrawn automatically from his bank account. Finally, after his savings were depleted in 2000, the authorities came to the apartment and found his skeleton near the kitchen, its flesh picked clean by maggots and beetles, just a few feet away from his next-door neighbors.

Mrs. Ito, age 91, lives alone in a small government apartment built back in the 1960s for up-and-coming salary men.

She had been lonely every day for the past quarter of a century, she said, ever since her daughter and husband had died of cancer, three months apart. Mrs. Ito still had a stepdaughter, but they had grown apart over the decades, exchanging New Year’s cards or occasional greetings on holidays.

So Mrs. Ito asked a neighbor in the opposite building for a favor. Could she, once a day, look across the greenery separating their apartments and gaze up at Mrs. Ito’s window?

Every evening around 6 p.m., before retiring for the night, Mrs. Ito closed the paper screen in the window. Then in the morning, after her alarm woke her at 5:40 a.m., she slid the screen back open.

“If it’s closed,” Mrs. Ito told her neighbor, “it means I’ve died.”

Mrs. Ito felt reassured when the neighbor agreed, so she began sending the woman gifts of pears every summer to occasionally glance her way.

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Ushering My Father to a (Mostly) Good Death

Photo courtesy of Karen Brown

Karen Brown | Longreads | November 2017 | 14 minutes (3,613 words)

 

“How about Tuesday?”

My father is propped up on three pillows in bed, talking logistics with my sister and me. We’ve just brought him his Ovaltine and insulin.

“Or would Thursday be better? That’s a couple days after the kids are done with camp.”

“Ok, let’s plan on Thursday.”

My father is scheduling his death. Sort of. He’s deciding when to stop going to dialysis. That starts the bodily clock that will lead to his falling into sleep more and more often, and then into a coma, and eventually nothingness.

He is remarkably sanguine about the prospect, which we’ve all had a long time to consider. A master of the understatement, he promises it’s not a terribly hard decision, to stop treatment and let nature takes its course, “but it is a bit irreversible.”

If I’m honest, he’s ready now to stop dialysis. It’s a brutal routine for someone in his condition, incredibly weak and fragile from living with end-stage pancreatic cancer, kidney disease, and diabetes. It’s painful for him to hold his head and neck up, which he has to do to get to the dialysis center. During the procedure, he must be closely watched so his blood pressure doesn’t plummet.

But he’s always been a generous man. He’s willing to sacrifice his own comfort in his dying days for the convenience of his family, since we all want to be present at the end. If he pushes his last day of dialysis to Tuesday, then my sister can still go on the California vacation she’d been planning with her family. If he pushes it to Thursday, I can still take the journalism fellowship I’d accepted. It will also give his grandchildren time to finish up their summer jobs and fly down.
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Harshing the Internet Poet’s Mellow

(Michael Gottschalk/dapd)

At The Outline, Laura Yan narrates the saga of a beleaguered poet recently piled on by the internet. A marine scientist by trade, Collin Andrew Yost is tattooed, has a beard and lives in Portland, Oregon, none of which worked in his favor. Neither did the fact that he posted his poems on Instagram in a typeset font, accompanied by images of cigarettes and frequent references to coffee. Yost had a lot of fans on Instagram, but when a writer tweeted critiques about what she viewed as misogynistic and clichéd aspects of his poems, others began to bash him personally. Electric Literature called him “Brobert Frost.” Another said cruelly, “Wow. I think I got cancer reading this.”

After piling on herself, Yan looked more closely at the person who had become the literary internet’s punching bag. She saw her young self, who wrote personal essays and self-published poems on Tumblr. Behind the pile-on is a simple fact: The internet changes the way people behave. Emboldened by anonymity, we align ourselves according to what we love or hate, creating a place that can be as hostile as high school.  Bur if one of literature’s gifts is its ability to create empathy for readers, then maybe Yost’s experience can teach us something about the value of empathy online.

Collin frames his brush with Twitter infamy with uplifting platitudes: love eventually conquered hate, and hate eventually backfired … But it was clear that the incident changed him. “I went from [being in] a close-knit Instagram family to being a woman hater and this ‘bro’ to all these strangers,” Collin said. “I mean, it sucked.” Now, some mornings, he wakes up a little afraid to look at his phone. But then again, his friends told him, maybe that was a sign that he was getting it right, on the road to making it. Collin enjoyed his work as a scientist, but his dream — like almost everyone who writes, he said — was to inspire people, give “people an emotion when they can’t find it themselves.”

I asked Collin if he thought there might have been any validity to the criticisms leveled against him. “No,” he said immediately. “I’m completely fine with criticism when it is actually criticism. But saying “you’re a pretentious dick and your writing is trash. please stop. hope you die” isn’t criticism. That has been 99.9 percent of the comments and messages.”

And so Collin, with his cigarettes and typewriter and goofy smile, continues to share poems on Instagram (at least when you were with me, you were an artist/now you’re just someone’s girlfriend/I’m not sure who that hurt more, goes a recent poem). “It shouldn’t matter if your ‘poetry’ sucks,” he said. “You wrote it. You created something, you molded words together and it means something personal to you… to me, poetry is simply being pure and honest with yourself.”

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The Third Life of Richard Miles

Richard Miles at home in Duncanville, Texas, on Sep. 16, 2017. (Laura Buckman)

Shawn Shinneman | Longreads | November 2017 | 23 minutes (5,753 words)

Richard Miles has no preternatural pull toward stuff, but after he received his compensation from the state of Texas for a wrongful conviction, he did make one purchase of minor extravagance: a majestic-looking chess set, which he had installed at the entryway to his Duncanville, Texas, home. This is what greets his guests: a wooden board checkered in alternating shades of stain, fit with a hand-chiseled animal kingdom (a few bishop-giraffes now missing ears), sitting in a floodlit display case. The base of the display is solid wood, painted a soft white and about the size of an oven. Atop that, the board rests on a circular platform, about six inches tall and fitted with a small motor. In theory, it rotates. In actuality, the function remains turned off. When it’s engaged, the board spins too swiftly, and kings and their men veer off and collapse.

To Miles, the game of chess is the game of life: You have to be on the move while thinking ahead. A chess player should be simultaneously offensive and defensive, productive while defending what’s theirs. Miles developed a taste for the game in prison. “It was either checkers, chess, dominoes — or you’re talking about somebody,” he says.

More than a dozen years into Miles’ sentence, he learned the prosecution had been playing cards with a trick deck. He was freed in 2009. Three years later, when he was fully exonerated of the murder and aggravated assault for which he’d been put away, the state of Texas’ apology came in the form of a $1.2 million check. Now come monthly annuity payments totaling $71,000 a year. As of this writing, the state has paid Miles about $1.5 million.

Those numbers, however, tell a slanted tale. Like most prisoners who do substantial time, exonerees depart life behind bars for an intimidating new world. Things like completing menial tasks and finding and keeping a job — not to mention the prospects of building a  fulfilling career and life — prove difficult. But unlike most prisoners who do substantial time, exonerees often don’t have access to the various re-entry resources that await convicts. That can make the process seem a bit like receiving a good luck slap on the back and a check to take home.

People who have been wrongfully imprisoned experience a unique type of mental fallout. A few years ago, when a dozen Dallas exonerees agreed to check in with a psychiatrist, all 12, including Miles, were diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. Not one was found mentally healthy, and not one has since received serious treatment. Various family members have expressed differing levels of concern about Miles’ state of mind, and his mother’s assessment has been painfully blunt: “A part of him is still dead,” she says one afternoon, “still incarcerated.”

For some of Miles’ exoneree brethren in other states, financial reparations and even the detached sense of regret that accompanies them remain a pipe dream. Texas — Red Texas — has one of the most progressive compensation laws in America, and yet it’s difficult to tell whether the money is spurring mental or emotional recovery. Even a king can topple from a spinning foundation. At different moments, in different lights, the compensation granted to Miles can seem either extraordinarily beneficial or, given the enduring impact of wrongful incarceration, remarkably futile. Read more…

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Heart drawing on the pavement
atosan / Getty Images

This week, we’re sharing stories from C.J. Chivers, Sheelah Kolhatkar, Libby Copeland, Amanda Petrusich, and Bryan Menegus.

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Kate’s Still Here

Longreads Pick

In an incredibly moving feature, journalist Libby Copeland spends time with a couple in their 60s, Kate and Deloy Oberlin, as they very consciously prepare for Kate’s death from metastatic breast cancer, and again in the aftermath of her passing. Deloy honors his wife’s wishes that once she’s gone, for three days while her body is chilled with dry ice and frozen water bottles, a gathering his held where family and friends can visit with her body. Afterward, also per her wishes, he delivers her body to a site where it is composted as part of a study in “green” burial.

Source: Esquire
Published: Nov 14, 2017
Length: 18 minutes (4,723 words)